The booming Chinese Beauty market

Chinese Brand Footprint rankings and new insights on the Health and Beauty market in China published by Kantar Worldpanel highlight strong growth across the sector, with the skincare and makeup categories outperforming total FMCG, growing 13% and 17% respectively, during 2018.

The Top 10 Health and Beauty brands

Pechoin, which is the only local brand that is chosen more than 10 million times, maintained its leadership position in the Chinese skincare market for the third consecutive year. Maybelline New York remained the number one brand in the makeup market. Many well-known classic brands have maintained their appeal to consumers through constant innovation in their products and new technologies. Examples of these innovations included L’Oréal Paris’ Ampoule Mask and Maybelline New York’s Lemonade Craze Eye Shadow. Upgrading the product and brand image has also helped many local brands like Pechoin and Inoherb to find further growth opportunities. Another way in which brands have grown is by leveraging online and offline channels to build product popularity and extend their reach. Olay, for example, gained wide popularity among young consumers via their White Radiance Essence product.

Kantar Worldpanel has identified three key factors amongst the most chosen brands which has enabled them to achieve strong growth while maintaining their current market dominance:

• Innovating: Continually developing new products with different concepts and technologies to improve the product efficacy.
• Upgrading: Consistently upgrading the products and brand image in response to market trends.
• Youth-orientation: Leveraging online and offline channels to create hot items and make the brand appeal more to young consumers.

2019 China Beauty Brand Footprint: Top 10 most chosen skincare and makeup brands

© 2019 CTR Co.Ltd
Source: Kantar Worldpanel Beauty, 2019
Skin Care definition: facial care and eye care, exclude hand & body, lip balm
Make up definition: face, eye, lip exclude lip balm, nail

 The fastest-growing brands

The disruptive growth of emerging beauty brands is one of the most remarkable achievements of 2018. Many of these brands have been investing heavily to demonstrate their product efficacy through ingredient-level communications which is allowing them to build an expert image and generate trust from consumers. Brands which achieved significant growth through their expertise in one particular area include Legend Age which is known for its lipsticks while both JM Solution Ray and Anne Bella focused on face masks.

Leveraging social media to reach more consumers can also be a way to achieve growth. Sealuxe and iLife are great examples of brands who have successfully utilised the WeChat channel and the awareness of Chioture was spread by promotion from a key opinion leader. Reacting fast to trends through launching lots of new products can effectively enhance brands’ attractiveness as well, evident by the popularity of local makeup brands such as Perfect Diary and Meiking.

In Brand Footprint this year we see that Chinese-born brands are in strong growth with massive potential for the future. Consumers have changed their perception of Chinese brands due to good products, strong word-of-mouth endorsement and because they offer real value. A recent joint report by Kantar and Tencent revealed that 42% of consumers are willing to choose Chinese beauty products and 60% of consumers will consider a repeat purchase.

China’s beauty market is fast-emerging and holds multiple ways to achieve growth. Kantar Worldpanel has identified three key ways for brands to win in such a promising but challenging market environment:

• Demonstrate expertise: Leverage resources to build strong products with an expert image and adopt ingredient-level communications to gain trust.
• Invest in social media: Develop a strong presence in multi-media channels, especially social media to break the limitations of traditional channels and reach more consumers.
• Disrupt fast: React fast to the latest trend through accelerating the speed of launching new products to meet consumer’s constantly evolving needs.

2019 China Beauty Brand Footprint: Top 20 fast growing brands in skin care and makeup

© 2019 CTR Co.Ltd
Source: Kantar Worldpanel Beauty, 2019
Skin Care definition: facial care and eye care, exclude hand & body, lip balm
Make up definition: face, eye, lip exclude lip balm, nail

About the Brand Footprint ranking

The rankings were generated by using the CRP (Consumer Reach Point) index developed by Kantar. This combines the number of buyers for a certain brand in one year (penetration) and the number of times (frequency) that the brand is chosen along with the number of households in the country.