Sentence |
Edited by Chen Meixi
2024，美妆界再无新"顶流"。
The golden age of beauty and skincare seems to be over.
The idea of streamlining skin care has become popular, and consumers continue to tell Hedgehog Commune that after cutting down skin care without makeup, the skin condition is even better than when they were serious about skin care in the past.
In the past April, two 50-year-old international skincare brands have gone bankrupt and sold out. One is The Body Shop, the originator of pure beauty, and the other is L'Occitane, the favorite skincare brand of "county ladies".
And this is just the tip of the iceberg, in 2024, the performance of international beauty giants will decline collectively, Shiseido's profits will be cut in half, Estee Lauder will lay off employees around the world, and international beauty prices will dive, close stores, delist, and sell rumors continue.
At the same time, domestic beauty products continued to maintain growth and maintained a strong performance, and in 2023, the market share of domestic beauty products in China exceeded that of foreign brands for the first time.
Proya and other domestic brands staged the myth of grassroots counterattack, replacing L'Oreal to win the Tmall sales crown, and also surpassed Shanghai Jahwa in all aspects of market value, revenue and profit, becoming the top 1 domestic beauty fault.
But if you think about it carefully, in the context of the overall slowdown in growth, no new explosive models have been born in the domestic beauty track. Compared to five years ago, it is not the product that has changed, but the sales channel, the marketing model, the focus of the communication, and the situation and mood of the consumer.
01 The disappearing beauty head influencer
In 2024, the beauty track will still be crowded, but there will be no new top streams.
The top bloggers and anchors in the track have shown fatigue and encountered various turmoil or crises.
On May 4, 2023, Cheng Shi'an, a beauty blogger with tens of millions of followers, stopped updating without warning after posting the last nude makeup teaching video on Douyin.
Over the past year, fans have been asking the reason in the comment area, but in the end they have not received a reply. Some people speculate that Cheng Shi'an had an economic dispute with the contracted MCN agency, and the management of the account is not in his hands.
Cheng Shi'an's Little Red Book also stopped in May 2023 and experienced a brief ban. On May 17, Cheng Shi'an posted on Moments: "There is no violation of laws and regulations, it is a dispute with the former company." ...... It will be solved soon, it's not a big deal~"
It's a pity that nearly a year has passed, and Cheng Shi'an's full-platform account has not been restored and updated. , the head Internet celebrity of the beauty track, suddenly disappeared from the public eye, making a kind of cut from the Internet.
Source: Cheng Shi'an Douyin
Another beauty brother is also having a hard time. At the end of February this year, Luo Wangyu experienced a crisis of public opinion about trust. The representative of the evaluation blogger @大虎课 sent a certain brand of olive extract brought by Luo Wangyu to the quality inspection, but the olive component was not detected.
Not only that, @大虎课代表还在质疑视频中将护肤圈的怪象捅破: "Recommend products with strong efficacy - lead to a bad face - resell repair products, and then let the same wave of consumers buy repair products, a good logical closed loop." ”
This is not the first time Luo Wangyu has overturned, and many dermatologists have questioned the efficacy of good night powder when he brought "good night powder" before, and there is even no lack of verbal criticism of good night powder as an IQ tax, and these doubts and attacks on the product are unsurprisingly blamed on the blogger.
It can be seen that the beauty track requires strong professionalism and sobriety that is not afraid of clouds and clouds, and it is necessary to have medical knowledge as a barrier and choose products seriously, speak carefully, and if you are careless, the personality and the trust of fans accumulated over the years will be ruined.
While having excellent professional ability and cherishing feathers in the selection of products, they also have to survive the catastrophe of "disputes with brokerage companies". If you want to become popular and not overturn, it is not an easy task for top beauty bloggers.
In 2024, the beauty track has been lonely for a long time, and with Cheng Shi'an stopping and Luo Wangyu overturning, there has been no new head anchor in the beauty industry for a long time. The other side of the story is that the new head anchors are no longer good at broadcasting beauty.
Whether it is Dong Yuhui, Xiao Yang or Luo Yonghao, they are all incompatible with the tone of beauty and skin care products. Dong Yuhui's embarrassment when bringing women's underwear, and Xiao Yang's spoofs when bringing beauty makeup, all made them uncomfortable in the beauty and skin care track, and it seems that the hope of beauty and skin care products is tied to Li Jiaqi alone.
However, after the Huaxizi incident, domestic beauty brands are also afraid of the backlash of traffic after strong binding with personal IP, and begin to quit over-the-top dependence and learn to walk independently.
After the label of the lowest price on the whole network was removed, the live broadcast room of the head anchor is no longer a matter of life and death for the head domestic beauty brand with gradually plump wings.
The beauty track is the same as ever, but no one has come ashore on the Red Sea.
02 A typical sample of miracles
Not only is there a lack of new head beauty bloggers, but there are also no new popular products in the domestic beauty industry.
In 2024, the double antibody series and the ruby series are still Proya's most capable products, with short drama implantation, elevator advertising, and Han Shuhong's waist can be seen everywhere online and offline, while the double-antibody series was released in 2017, and the red waist was released earlier, in 2016.
Bispecific antibodies and rubies have taken the express train of the "morning C and evening A" skin care concept, Proya is not the proposer of the concept, but it is the biggest beneficiary, and the concept of morning C and evening A is enough to make Proya once and for all.
"Morning C and evening A" refers to the use of vitamin C derivative substances for antioxidation during the day, and anti-aging with products containing vitamin A ingredients at night, this concept was proposed by British pharmacologist Eliot Isaacs in 2009, and became popular in China 10 years later, and also unexpectedly contributed to the attack of Proya, the leader of domestic beauty.
Several dermatologists and medical doctors have pointed out that this idea is not suitable for everyone, it is easy to destroy the skin barrier, and it has a risk of "bad face" for Asians with sensitive skin and thin stratum corneum. Not long ago, the European Union banned the use of retinol (A-alcohol) in beauty products, and even body lotions need to be strictly controlled in dose.
Despite this, vitamin C and vitamin A are rare inexpensive and non-patented functional ingredients, which are naturally favored by brands.
Screenshot of Taobao
In addition to the ultimate large-scale single product strategy, Proya's investment in e-commerce channels is in full bloom, which can be called a typical sample of miracles. According to data from China Business Towers, Proya's online sales ratio will increase to 92% in 2023.
There is also a set of even more shocking figures that are enough to prove Proya's determination to bring goods in all in live broadcasts - Proya has as many as 1943 anchors with goods in Douyin's layout, taking into account vertical anchors and pan-categories, amateur anchors and celebrities bringing goods, among which Jia Nailiang, Cao Ying, and Zhu Zixiao are often Proya's recommendation officers.
At the same time as Douyin implements "casting a wide net", Proya is also carrying out "key fishing" on Taobao, 618, Double 11 and even 3.8 Women's Day, Proya has never been absent from any shopping-related festivals, and is also a frequent visitor to Li Jiaqi's Super Beauty Festival.
"Money ability" will not disappoint anyone, whether it is the Tmall ranking or the Douyin beauty ranking, Proya has won the top1-2. Industry insiders told the Hedgehog Commune that the exposure of a battle report or report card is equivalent to tens of millions worth of publicity expenses.
The B side of the proud results is the sharp increase in sales expenses, and it is the payment of real money.
According to the financial report data, in 2023, Proya's annual sales expenses will be 3.972 billion yuan, an increase of 42.59% compared with 2022. The R&D expenses were 174 million yuan, accounting for only 1.95% of the operating income, far lower than the industry average of 3%.
It is not difficult to understand why there is no new explosion of domestic beauty. In the case that the old products can be sold, no one wants to gamble on a new product, at least not in the overall growth of the industry slows down, and consumers turn to the pursuit of cost performance.
03 No longer gambling on "overtaking", but new dependencies have emerged
In the domestic beauty industry, the cost of sales has increased sharply not only the new beauty boss Proya, but also another beauty brand that has been on the Douyin list for a long time - Han Shu.
According to the financial report data, in 2023, Han Shu's total revenue will be 3.09 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 143.8%, and its parent company Shangmei believes that this is related to the strategic abandonment of other platforms, all in Douyin channels, and all in red waist gift boxes.
In terms of strategic choice, Han Shu resolutely went against the mainstream style of play, and chose the form of "skin care suit" abandoned by industry insiders, which improved the cost performance and unexpectedly fit the appetite of Han Shu's customer group, and found another way out of a "old is new" product path.
The form of product sales is important, but more important is how to make it visible to a wider range of users.
In order to more accurately locate the customer group, and in order to make every sales expense worth the money, Han Shu took the lead in cooperating with MCN institutions to find beauty experts to customize brand short dramas, and tasted the dividends of the first wave of short dramas.
Han Shu customized short drama丨Image source Douyin
Taking Han Shu's customized short drama "You Will Be Popular" on Douyin as an example, this drama has achieved exquisite pictures and tight rhythm, and is a qualified heroine cool drama, and the final broadcast volume has also reached 1.01 billion times, and it has also successfully built Han Shu's "Red Waist" series, an old product sold in 2016, into a new explosive product. According to Qingyan intelligence data, Han Shu's GMV on Douyin exceeded 700 million in January, a year-on-year increase of more than 7 times.
After tasting the sweetness, Han Shu took advantage of the victory and chased after him, and customized 40 short dramas to dominate the Douyin Short Drama Theater in one go, and at the same time, Han Shu's sales cost is also soaring, and the sales expenses have doubled from 850 million yuan in 2022 to 1.746 billion yuan in 2023.
These new marketing expenses no longer fall into the pockets of super-head bloggers and anchors, but are scattered everywhere and flow to various short drama crews that have not been formed for a long time.
As analyzed by the Hedgehog Commune in the article "E-commerce "Soup" Short Drama", the quotation of well-known talents' customized short dramas is about 500,000 episodes, and each drama has 16 episodes, so it is estimated that the input cost of Han Shu's 40 short dramas is about 320 million yuan. According to the data of Ebang Power, Han Shu relied on 40 short dramas to get more than 300 million exposures during this year's New Year Festival.
It is undeniable that Han Shu has seized the first-mover advantage in short drama marketing, but this channel and model itself has no brand barriers. What Han Shu did in 2023 and the first quarter of 2024, other brands such as Marubeni and Proya can also do it again.
The high sales expenses will directly lead to a decline in profit margins, and the lack of hematopoietic capacity of enterprises will affect the new way out after the diminishing marginal benefits of marketing. Relying on the growth brought by marketing is explosive enough, and there are new high-quality products to resist the long river of time.
Today, domestic beauty products rely on channels, marketing, and large single products, and have achieved rapid growth in the cycle when users turn to cost-effectiveness. However, a closer look reveals the lack of core self-research capabilities.
Domestic beauty has gone through the era of "big bowl replacement", but if you hold a concept once and for all, sell old products in a new way, sooner or later you will face a new crisis.
The era of cost performance is not about competing for cheap samples that are large in quantity and used for unknown years and months, but to match the most effective skin care ideas at the most appropriate price.
Be prepared for danger in times of peace, the biggest "danger" of domestic beauty and skin care brands, may not be that they can't find a new head anchor to bring goods, but that after another five years, the same product is still recommended in the elevator advertisement.
Resources:
1. Huashang Taolu "Two Wenzhou People Sell Cosmetics, with an Annual Income of 8.9 Billion"
This article is from the WeChat public account "Hedgehog Commune" (ID: ciweigongshe), author: Hedgehog Commune Editorial Department, 36 Krypton is authorized to publish.