WenShu Shaohuan
Once the national style beauty is solidified into the "change the soup without changing the medicine" copywriting, making up the concept, and fighting the value, how long can consumers buy a single for this?
Forbidden City lipstick. Photo/Visual China
Even if you haven't bought national style makeup, you must have heard of the Forbidden City makeup, Hua Xizi carved lipstick, Mao Geping national style series...
Following the "national tide" fever, domestic beauty brands have continued to rise in recent years.
According to the cbndata report, in 2020, the growth rate of domestic brands in the beauty and care industry is much higher than that of foreign brands. At the same time, during the "Double Eleven" period of Tmall in 2020, the number of domestic beauty products going overseas increased by more than 10 times.
Many domestic beauty brands make good use of Chinese elements to create product differentiation. Among them, the Forbidden City makeup has made the "national style beauty" fire out of the circle.
Even the international big names are so red that they want to join in the fun, L'Oréal, Chanel, Estée Lauder, Givenchy, ysl and so on in the Chinese market to play the national style of beauty.
However, the routine is played a lot, and aesthetic fatigue is inevitable. Following the makeup of the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, netizens ridiculed "the lipstick of the Temple of Heaven is ready to go", "the Great Wall eye shadow is rubbing hands", "Xiangshan socks are stepping up production" and so on.
Once the national style beauty is solidified into a marketing model of changing soup and not changing medicine, how long can consumers buy orders for this? /unsplash
Once the national style beauty is solidified into a change of copywriting, concept, and face value of the soup without changing the medicine, how long can consumers buy a single for this?
Beauty has rubbed the national style
The Forbidden City cultural creation, which is out of the surrounding fire, once it entered the beauty industry, set off a wave of national style marketing.
Taking the Forbidden City Taobao as an example, it launched the "Floating Sky Canghai • Forbidden City Crane Series" and "Dark Night Streamer • Forbidden City Screw Series" (hereinafter referred to as "Crane Series" and "Screw Series") in 2018.
In terms of design elements, the pieces of these two series include their exterior designs, which are from different collections of cultural relics in the Forbidden City. For example, the exterior design inspiration of the screw series comes from the "black lacquer inlaid screw flower and bird pattern bed" in the Forbidden City.
In terms of name, the lipstick of the Xianhe series adds three major "slashing king colors": "palace wall red", "Lang kiln red" and "carmine". Taobao sales data in 2018 shows that this new game made the Xianhe series lipstick sell 80,000 on the day of "Double Twelve".
Such a good selling idea quickly attracted a follower.
In 2020, Mac and the Forbidden City jointly named the Spirit Snake Lip Glaze. /Weibo @Eich icey
M.a.c, who is good at "copying homework", immediately launched the "New Year Limited Series" with the Forbidden City. Not only international brands, as one of the originators of national style beauty brands, Xie Fuchun is also not satisfied with the old, and jointly launched the "ancient style balm" with the Forbidden City.
Other "students" also can't sit still, and shunshi joins hands with other cultural and creative IP. The most representative is the joint makeup of Ka Ting and the Summer Palace, named "Hundred Birds and Phoenix". The Summer Palace co-brand makeup also once rubbed the hot spot of the Forbidden City makeup: Bibi who is the main palace lipstick?
Kazilan looked for a joint makeup from the Dunhuang Museum, and L'Oréal looked for a joint lipstick from the National Museum of China. Looking for a museum to jointly name, for a time became the standard of rubbing the national wind hot spot.
Hua Xizi, who does not engage in joint names, took the opportunity to bring out "carved lipstick", that is, the ancient relief process of reproduction presents ancient elements on lipstick.
Other brands that do not engage in co-branding are also racking their brains to find Chinese elements to launch their own national style beauty series. The new domestic brand flower knows, so it gave the new series of 6 blush numbers "slow sound", "Qingping Le", "Tianxian Zi", "remember the youth", "Sauvignon Blanc", "meet and greet" and other names.
Most of the lipsticks of Huaxizi use the process of relief. / Taobao @ Huaxizi flagship store
European and American brands have also matched the Chinese style: Armani has a simple and rough year of the dog limited highlight powder, Givenchy has a monkey age limited edition cosmetics, and Chanel has once again launched an oriental screen series of makeup.
In fact, playing with national style makeup is not new. Playing with the national style of beauty, the master is here - Dai Chunlin, who has continued from the Ming Dynasty to the present, and Xie Fuchun, who inherited the tradition of Yangzhou incense powder in the Ming and Qing dynasties, are the two originators of the national style of beauty.
The duck egg incense powder that famous women must compete for in ancient times has always been the top brand product of Dai Chunlin and Xie Fuchun. Rouge, the overlord of ancient makeup, and the thrush tool preferred by the ancient nobility, "Luo Zi Dai", are also the star products of these two families.
The classical four-piece set of Xie Fuchun Town store is rouge, incense powder, head oil and incense pieces. Dai Chunlin's imperial makeup series, which became famous in the Ming and Qing dynasties, continues to this day; Dai Chunlin also launched the "Dream of the Red Chamber" Jinling Twelve Chao series.
Things must be reversed
Not long after the national style beauty was lively, the problem came.
The landmark event is that the Palace Museum makeup fell into a production suspension crisis - in January 2019, the Palace Museum Taobao issued an official statement: the Palace Museum Taobao original series of makeup, from the appearance to the inner quality, there is still a lot of room for improvement, decided to stop the production of the whole line.
In 2019, the official micro-post of the Cultural Service Center of the Forbidden City in Beijing announced that the entire line would be discontinued.
At this time, it is less than a month since the Forbidden City Taobao launched makeup.
The hasty suspension of production is directly related to the lack of production capacity. According to the "Daily Economic News", within a few days of the Forbidden City Taobao online makeup, some consumers reported that the products that had been purchased before were refunded. Customer service responded that the number of pre-sales of makeup has reached the saturation of production, so the pre-sale is suspended.
However, the most fundamental reason is the poor quality of the product. When the official Weibo of the Forbidden City Taobao responded to the suspension of production, it said that "the feedback on the appearance of lipstick is not high enough, and the smoothness and color of the paste have room for improvement." The pearlescent particles of the eyeshadow are not fine enough, and some colors have the phenomenon of flying powder. Blush pink picky, orange is acceptable. The dot emerald blue is not very practical."
To put it bluntly, although the creativity of national style beauty is good, it is not easy to cooperate with the production end.
The "2020 Domestic Makeup Market Research Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "2020 Domestic Makeup Report") released by Yiou Think Tank and Tmall Beauty pointed out that low-price competition and high marketing costs restrict the investment of domestic makeup in product research and development. In order to quickly enter the market, most domestic makeup brands rely on OEM production. This has led to a situation where a foundry is working for multiple brands at the same time, and products of different brands are converging.
The report also pointed out that due to the low entry threshold of the beauty industry, brands without independent product design capabilities and innovation capabilities are keen to copy or imitate popular categories and styles, and then sell them at lower prices, further intensifying competition in the same category and depressing overall industry profits.
The "2020 Domestic Makeup Market Research Report" pointed out that low-price competition and high marketing costs restrict the investment of domestic makeup in product research and development. /unsplash
The Daily Economic News reported that Hua Xizi officially released the recruitment information of "high-paid recruitment of anti-counterfeiting officials" to the outside world in March 2020. In only one month (June), the anti-counterfeiting officer complained about nearly 2,000 pieces of counterfeit information on various e-commerce platforms and prosecuted more than 300 cases.
From the perspective of consumption, the "Chinese style limitation" of many European and American big brands has been repeatedly ridiculed by the group. Armani's Year of the Dog limited to highlight powders has been derided as "the number one killer in the beauty industry". Givenchy's limited makeup for the Year of the Monkey also caused netizens to ask: "Do European and American big names have any misunderstandings about Chinese style?" ”
Moreover, common routines such as changing copywriting, making up concepts, and spelling out appearances are played a lot, and it is easy to cause aesthetic fatigue. Without more core product innovation, consumer enthusiasm may not be sustained.
In contrast, the century-old brand of neighboring Japan, excellent product strength is fundamental.
Shiseido in Japan, the brand name comes from the "I Ching". Shiseido's brand logo, "Hana Tsubaki", is a gorgeous and elegant camellia flower that symbolizes the Japanese cultural tradition of appreciating nature. The treasure of its town store is a product that has a real century-old vitality, such as the eudermine red honeydew lotion (commonly known as Shiseido "red loin") developed in 1890 based on Western pharmacy prescriptions.
The difficulty lies in high-end
"Big-name flat replacement", that is, the affordable alternative of big brands, is the key for some domestic beauty brands to rely on the national style element to go out of the circle.
Just imagine, if the price of the Forbidden City Crane series lipstick is not within 150 yuan, but 300-500 yuan, will it still be so easy to sell? In the long run, if you want to be stable and strong in the entire market, the impact on the high-end is almost a consensus of domestic beauty brands.
"Big-name flat replacement" is the key for some domestic beauty brands to rely on the elements of national style to go out of the circle. /unsplash
This is because the "1 billion curse" is common to new consumer brands, that is, when the brand grows to 1 billion yuan in annual sales, it will encounter a growth bottleneck. If you do not transform at this time, once the traffic dividend is invalid, the profit model of the entire enterprise will collapse. Perfect Diary is at this stage to vigorously promote the brand to "high-end" transformation.
On the one hand, Perfect Diary invited two stars, Zhou Xun and Poke Ye (Troye Xiwen), as brand spokespersons; on the other hand, Perfect Diary quickly laid offline stores. As of September 2020, Perfect Diary has opened 200 stores in just 20 months.
Yiou 2020 domestic makeup report also pointed out: some insiders believe that domestic makeup does not do high-end because "do not dare to try, do not dare to invest, afraid of failure, afraid of gain than loss." On the one hand, domestic cosmetics that lack brand accumulation have to maintain sales at low prices; on the other hand, weak profits and lack of talents have led to the inability of domestic cosmetics to develop and innovate in depth and achieve product and brand differentiation.
However, even if the burning power is well-known in the industry, what kind of answer can Perfect Diary deliver in terms of impacting the high-end? Perhaps, it's just getting started.
Mao Geping, another representative of high-end domestic products, was positioned in the middle and high-end domestic makeup at the beginning. In addition to the big IP of founder Mao Geping, it also cooperated with the Forbidden City to produce a three-season makeup series. Even if it is praised by netizens as "achieving the subversion of the appearance of national style beauty", from the sales data, the joint makeup of the Forbidden City is far less than before.
In April 2020, In Hangzhou, Zhejiang, Wang Yifan, who "restored" ancient Chinese makeup products. Photo/Visual China
After all, the price of the third season of Mao Geping's Forbidden City joint edition "Phoenix Crown Gilded Brilliant Lipstick" reached 560 yuan. To fight with the European and American big names in this price range, relying solely on the Forbidden City IP and the beautiful appearance, Mao Geping's forbidden city joint model seems to be not enough to play.
In the high-end development of the brand, Japan's Shiseido provides another example.
According to the research report of Guojin Securities, Shiseido adheres to the "high-end priority" strategy, gathering resources to high-end brands at the brand end; creating many research results of "whitening", "sunscreen" and "anti-wrinkle" at the research and development end; letting its high-end brands seize the most luxurious locations at the channel end; at the marketing end, Shiseido has also been leading the Japanese advertising design industry; and at the supply chain end, Shiseido's global layout has achieved efficient production.
To this day, Shiseido continues to update its marketing strategy to keep pace with changes in the consumer market.
For growing domestic beauty brands, there is still a long way to go to high-end and even globalization.