From March 29 to March 30, China Cosmetic Innovation Exhibition was held in Hangzhou. Besides attracting over 500 brands and 20000+ visitors, the exhibition also invited representatives from main-stream e-commerce and social media platforms to share their latest policies and support for brands. Here is what beauty brands may need to know.
Tmall Global
Tmall Global is the most popular cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) platform in China, with a 38% market share.
In 2020, it started its imported beauty brands nurturing plan, INS Beauty. This plan is expected to introduce 800 overseas beauty brands into China and nurture 50 new beauty brands to satisfy Gen Z’s need for cutting-edge beauty products.
INS Beauty picks new brands from four sectors: high-tech skincare, natural ingredient, exquisite makeup, and elegant fragrance. Tmall Global seeks to explore “niche but premium” beauty brands and works with them to nurture super brands and hit products.
Pinduoduo
Pinduoduo, as an e-commerce platform that came from behind, has accumulated 788.4 million active users, surpassing Alibaba’s 779 million and JD.com’s 472 million.
Pinduoduo is known for the cost performance of its products, which means that most of the products on Pinduoduo are low priced and usually not from big brands. Therefore, most high-end brands do not usually choose Pinduoduo as their distribution channel, including beauty brands. However, Pinduoduo is planning to upgrade its brand position by applying three strategies: supporting high-quality product lines, nurturing small brands, and developing differentiated hot products. In the meantime, Pinduoduo will promote a beauty fashionable product festival to further propel its beauty sector.
Pinduoduo has also provided cold-start tools for brands to boost sales, including limited-time sales, tens of billions of subsidies, and a coupon center. Pinduoduo plans to use preferential policies to improve the brand's exposure and then entice younger users and users from lower-tier cities.
As the largest communication platform in China, WeChat is an alluring traffic pool for brands. WeChat has built a comprehensive eco-system covering both public and private traffic domains for brands now.
The public traffic on WeChat comes from channels such as advertising (朋友圈广告), live-streaming, search (搜一搜), vlog, etc. For example, the search function has become an essential traffic channel for the beauty sector.
WeChat also provided three functions to help brands save traffic that they have driven from the public traffic domains, including WeChat Group, brand Official WeChat account, and Enterprise WeChat. WeChat Group is an important hub for managing customer relationship; WeChat Official Account focuses on information and brand communication. It has upgraded its services to allow brands to send personalized and accurate contents to followers; the Enterprise WeChat facilitates brands’ overall operation efficiency.
The final step of this eco-system on WeChat is that all traffic led from public and private domains can be directly transferred to sales through brands’ WeChat mini program.
WeChat also provides other tools to support brands better operate their mini programs, such as the AR makeup tool and the data analysis tool.
Douyin
Douyin (Chinese version of Tik Tok), starting as a vlogging platform, has now upgraded to a content e-commerce platform.
Recently, Douyin launched its “Brand Flagship Store” function, which allows brands to connect their Douyin official accounts with their flagship stores to showcase their brand image, recent campaigns, selected products, coupons, and offline stores’ pictures. Until now, more than 220 brands have opened this function.
Douyin also emphasizes the importance of live-streaming. And now Brands can engage in the live-streaming through two approaches: one is the endorsement of famous live-streamers such as 陈婷mm and 罗永浩 and the other is to do brand self-running live-streaming by training BAs or employing full-time live-steamers.. Douyin suggests that the latter will be a better choice for brands in 2021. Douyin propose six suggestions for brand self-live-streaming:
l Optimize live-streaming scene and live-streamers;
l Do self-live-streaming every day;
l Every day’s live-streaming needs to last at least 10 hours;
l Invest at least 10000 yuan on traffic every day;
l Allow 14 to 20 days for a cold-start (A period when there is no obvious improvement but brands need to insist);
l Focus on one figure, the number of viewers who stay in the live-streaming for more than one minute.
Kuaishou
Kuaishou is another vlog platform in China. Like Douyin, it also has started its e-commerce business. In 2020, Kuaishou e-commerce’s GMV exceeded 380 billion yuan. Among them, the consumption on the beauty sector increased by 160%.
Brands can register their official accounts and open brand stores on Kuaishou. After this, brands can establish its Kuaishou distribution library, allowing stores/channels/kuaishou celebrities and other entities to select brand products from this library, promote sales through short videos/live streaming, and earn commissions, contributing to brands’ exposure and ROI in the end.
Also, Kuaishou released the "Business Full Cycle Bonus Plan" in 2021. Kuaishou will empower brands and creators through a variety of marketing campaigns, including 100 billion stream incentives, vlog contests, creator growth support, and brand growth services. The plan is poised to facilitate the rapid rise of new and avant-grade brands.
Disclaimer: images are from Exhibition Official
