Deconstructing the underlying logic behind the growth of new domestic beauty brands!

In the cosmetics category, there are two phenomenal brands, one is Perfect Diary that rose from Xiaohongshu, and the other is Huaxizi that emerged from the Tmall platform.

Three years ago, Perfect Diary became the number one cosmetics brand on Tmall’s Double 12 in just 18 months, and its current valuation exceeds 14 billion. Online brand Hua Xizi’s lipstick set a record of monthly sales of tens of millions, and surpassed KISS ME in just three years. Its current reputation is as high as 43.6%.

During the 618 shopping festival after the epidemic, Huaxizi achieved impressive results, ranking first in the cosmetics category with a turnover of 150 million yuan, and Perfect Diary ranked third.

Perfect Diary and Huaxizi have created a miracle of growth in the emerging beauty industry and have been the pride of domestically produced brands that people have paid attention to in recent years. What everyone is curious about is, what is the underlying logic behind the growth of these new domestic beauty brands ?

Understand the industry development trend and target young user groups

For a long time, international brands have been occupying the beauty market, while the new consumer force of Generation Z has emerged. They pursue individual aesthetics and are not obsessed with big brands. Usability, novelty and high appearance have become new consumption concepts. This change in industry market trends and consumer characteristics provides development opportunities for domestic beauty brands.

For new brands, conquering young people means conquering the future main consumer force in the market.

From a business perspective, Perfect Diary and Huaxizi are both committed to creating new domestic brands and targeting young women. However, apart from the similarities, the two brands also have different business strategies.

Perfect Diary: Positioning itself as the most cost-effective brand and competing in different markets

Perfect Diary focuses on the ultimate cost-effective strategy, relying on the "big brand same factory" supply chain to compress profits as much as possible and ensure high quality and low prices. Most of its products are priced below 100 yuan.

In addition to its ultimate value for money, Perfect Diary frequently launches new products on a daily basis. It is also good at IP collaborations, such as the eye shadow collaboration with Discovery, the lipstick collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the eye shadow collaboration with National Geographic China.

This approach has identified the weaknesses in the advantages of international beauty brands, namely, high cost-effectiveness of products, novelty of products and quick launch to the market, thereby building its own differentiated competitiveness.

At the same time, Perfect Diary's positioning is largely based on Generation Z, who have relatively high requirements for "high-value" craftsmanship, their own fashion concepts, ideological resonance, and pursuit of individuality. Perfect Diary has created a series of beautiful, exquisite and trendy cosmetics products that are very suitable for the preferences and personality traits of Generation Z.

Huaxizi: Positioning vertical ancient makeup to form market segmentation

Different from Perfect Diary's simple focus on high appearance and fashion, Hua Xizi's style is vertical ancient makeup. Its products have very obvious oriental makeup characteristics. This feature is not only reflected in the appearance design, but also in the product ingredients. Most of Hua Xizi's beauty products are made of natural flower and plant ingredients and are gentle on the skin.

For example, Hua Xizi eyebrow pencil is made of honeysuckle and Polygonum multiflorum essence; the carved lipstick is made with the ancient lip care recipe "Hua Lu Rouge" and the finest flower petals as raw materials; the air cushion uses the Empress Dowager Cixi's secret recipe "Yurongsan" plus white water lily, peony, camellia essence, etc.

It is worth mentioning that Hua Xizi emphasizes that all its products do not contain fragrances, alcohol, hormones, fluorescent powder and ingredients that should be used with caution by pregnant women. In this way, pregnant women can also break the curse of not being able to use cosmetics.

Moreover, classical elements have become the brand symbol of Huaxizi, and have been fully integrated into Huaxizi's products, services, and marketing strategies.

Focus on social media, circle strategy and KOL marketing matrix

When Perfect Diary was first established, Xiaohongshu was its main channel. It mainly adopted the form of co-creating content with beauty bloggers to achieve rapid social fission, and quickly rose to prominence through this strategy.

In the marketing communication on Xiaohongshu, Perfect Diary built a matrix of celebrities, top and mid-level KOLs, and amateur notes. "Little Black Diamond Lipstick" and "Animal Eyeshadow Palette" became popular products under this marketing combination matrix.

Hua Xizi has also been deeply involved in Xiaohongshu, mainly using the celebrity + KOC model.

At the same time, Perfect Diary and Huaxizi also have different marketing strategies in places where young groups often appear, such as Weibo, Douyin, and Bilibili.

1. Vertical staged circle strategy

At different stages of brand development, Perfect Diary will target different user circles to achieve phased marketing goals. In other words, Perfect Diary has a constantly iterating and evolving traffic marketing strategy.

For example, in the brand exploration stage, Perfect Diary entered the fashion circle from the catwalk to acquire core seed users; in the brand growth stage, it sought circles with a certain degree of relevance, such as traffic fan circles and art circles, to expand its circle position; in the brand explosion stage, it mainly considered circles with clear themes and large user scales.

2. Horizontal KOL placement rules

During the promotion period of vigorously promoting celebrity products, look for KOLs in highly relevant circles, such as fashion experts, brand accounts, comedy bloggers, and entertainment gossip, in order to achieve a high level of exposure on the entire network in a short period of time and trigger massive topic discussions.

When a new product has sufficient market awareness, we will give up investing in KOLs from other circles and continue to focus on the long-term advantageous "beauty expert" KOLs. These small and beautiful vertical KOLs have a strong influence on purchase conversions and have lower investment costs.

3. Customization of content marketing production

It means customizing different content according to different stages of product promotion.

Taking Perfect Diary’s Explorer 12-color animal eyeshadow promotion as an example, the initial content disseminated was in the form of product recommendations based mainly on bloggers’ color tests and experience descriptions. One month after the exposure, the content output shifted to "makeup tutorials", which maintained a stable output of brand voice while safeguarding the brand's reputation.

4. Different strategies for different social platforms

Huaxizi outputs customized content based on the different attributes of social platforms.

For example, on the short video platform Douyin, a #RemoveMakeupWithFaceMakeup# challenge was launched; on Kuaishou, KOL anchors were sought to try out lipsticks; on Taobao Live, tutorials on imitating various classical makeup looks were launched; and on Bilibili, content such as Chinese costume displays, traditional Chinese songs and dances, and ancient food recipes were also launched.

5. The brand tone and spokesperson are in line

Hua Xizi takes great pains in celebrity endorsements. The invited brand spokesperson Ju Jingyi and image spokesperson Du Juan perfectly fit the main theme of Chinese style and oriental culture, and are very consistent with the brand tone of Hua Xizi.

In addition, Hua Xizi also cooperated with celebrities such as Zhang Jiani, Zheng Hehuizi, Bai Lu, etc., and simultaneously promoted Hua Xizi on new media such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo to increase exposure opportunities.

Create a private traffic pool and refined user operations

Compared with the increasingly expensive and scarce public domain traffic, private domain traffic has the advantages of low cost, high stickiness, and free reach. For brands, private domain traffic is undoubtedly a cost-effective marketing method.

Perfect Diary acquires new users and transactions through public domain traffic (Xiaohongshu + Weibo + Bilibili), and then uses private domain traffic (WeChat ecosystem) to increase the user's life cycle value.

On the WeChat ecological platform, Perfect Diary has accumulated loyal users through "WeChat personal account + WeChat community + live broadcast + WeChat mini program".

First, through the cards in the physical products, users are guided to add the personal WeChat account of "Xiao Wanzi", which attracts users to join the community. High-quality beauty content, new product releases, and discounts are sent to the group on a daily basis to enhance user stickiness and repeat purchase rate.

Moreover, Perfect Diary owns hundreds of "Xiao Wanzi" accounts, building a traffic pool of hundreds of thousands of WeChat friends for refined operations. Huaxizi’s main user operation model is “user co-creation and participatory development”.

Huaxizi officially launched the Experience Officer mini program on WeChat. At the same time, there is an "Experience Officer" entrance at the bottom of the Tmall flagship store homepage and the store membership interface.

Every time a new product is launched, we invite experience officers to try out and test the new product. Enhance users' sense of participation and enable brands to establish high-trust user relationships in this social media era where "word of mouth is king."

Such an approach can retain a group of loyal brand fans and reduce dependence on traffic to a certain extent.

In addition to product co-creation, Huaxizi also co-creates content and brands with users at the center.

The experience officer’s trial report also produces UGC content for the brand. For example, Huaxizi’s official Weibo account released an anti-counterfeiting “recruitment order”, claiming to “recruit anti-counterfeiting officers with an annual salary of 300,000 yuan”, cracking down on counterfeit and imitation products in the market, strengthening the brand’s positive image.

In addition, Hua Xizi pays great attention to user operations. It invites users to join the "Imperial Garden" by stuffing "Oriental Love Letters" in users' express boxes; if users repurchase brand products during their birthday month, they will receive a birthday gift - a "Green Silk Flowing Cloud Sandalwood Comb".

Play with social e-commerce and open up the chain of traffic and conversion

The social e-commerce world is flourishing, and brands are competing on strong social attributes to enhance consumers' continued purchasing power.

Perfect Diary’s main social e-commerce platform is WeChat, which forms an ecological closed loop of private domain traffic and social e-commerce to maximize traffic purchase conversion.

For example, the three WeChat mini-programs of Perfect Diary Member Mall, Perfect Diary Selection and Perfect Diary Flagship Store respectively carry the functions of offline user repurchase, product red envelope user repurchase and service account user repurchase.

Not only will a closed loop of traffic and conversion be formed on WeChat, but traffic diversion or purchase from other public domain platforms will also be imported into the WeChat traffic pool, opening up the traffic and conversion chain.

For example, after Perfect Diary guided the conversion of its Tmall store through Xiaohongshu, it will subsequently use its personal WeChat account and community to maintain contact with users, and then use community operations to capture the user's mind and continue to convert, forming an infinite cycle relationship between users and the brand.

The greatest success of Huaxizi's social e-commerce is its choice to work closely with Li Jiaqi and invite him to serve as Huaxizi's "Chief Recommender". His ability to bring goods cannot be underestimated.

It was also with Li Jiaqi's recommendation that Hua Xizi loose powder and carved lipstick began to gradually become popular products, and these products became regular guests in live broadcasts.

According to data, from January to mid-February 2020, 40% of the sales in Huaxizi flagship store came from Li Jiaqi's live broadcast room. And, it was listed by Li Jiaqi as a must-buy product of 2019.

If celebrity endorsements and KOK recommendations helped Huaxizi increase its brand visibility, then Li Jiaqi's Taobao live streaming directly brought sales to Huaxizi.

Live streaming e-commerce is now extremely important for every e-commerce person, and finding a KOL anchor that suits you to help sell goods is even more important.

Conclusion

For new brands that excel in marketing, people always tend to attribute their success simply to their marketing strategies and advertising copy. In fact, every new brand’s breakthrough has a mature and feasible business model, which is the underlying growth logic of the brand, and the marketing power lies above it.

It can be said that the reason why the business models of Huaxizi and Perfect Diary are successful is mainly due to their insights into industry market trends and their accurate grasp of the demands of the target consumer groups.

The logic of methods such as social e-commerce and marketing strategies have pushed these two brands to the forefront, expanding the brand's voice and influence.

From a marketing perspective, if a brand wants to truly and effectively delve into content, it needs to customize content in a targeted manner according to different circles, platforms, and user attributes, and continuously optimize it, and build and delve into private traffic pools, reduce dependence on traffic, and enhance the brand's future core competitiveness, so that it can go further and more steadily!

Author: Internet Brand Officer

Source: Internet Brand Officer (szwanba)