Benefit Cosmetics, Jurlique and Other International Beauty Brands Struggling in China
In recent months, many international brands have either exited the China market or were reported to have backward growth. At the beginning of March, South Korean beauty company Amorepacific Corporation was 300 million RMB in debt and one of its sub-brands Etude House no longer has offline stores in China. In the middle of March, Australian skincare brand Jurlique shut down most of its stores in China. LVMH brand Benefit Cosmetics was also reported to withdraw its stores to only 7 in China.
Etude House, Innisfree, LANEIGE, FANCL, The Body Shop and Benefit were household names in the China market, which makes it surprising to hear that they are scaling down and being forgotten by Chinese consumers.
What led to the decline of these brands?
Solely relying on hero products
Let’s take Benefit Cosmetics as an example. At first, Benefit smartly positioned itself as a master in eyebrow products. Its hero products include eyebrow pencils, eyebrow powder, eyebrow gel etc. Its offline stores used to provide shaping-eyebrow service.
But the thing is, Benefit seemed to stop making the effort to create and promote other products, and it is solely relying on its eyebrow products. Without new products, it becomes really hard to capture consumers’ attention, especially in China where consumers love trying out new things and local brands are churning out new products every week.
Threats from the fast development of Chinese beauty brands
What makes things worse is that, while Benefit Cosmetics’ eyebrow products maintain a slightly higher price, many Chinese brands are taking over the market with better cost performance. Florasis, Colorkey and Little Ondine have all launched eyebrow-related products. Their quality is not bad, yet their prices are very threatening for Benefit.
The rise of domestic brands also threatens the survival of many South Korean beauty brands. Those brands were popular about 7-8 years ago when Korean dramas were prevalent in China. They had large range of SKUs and frequent launching pace, and they were fashionable and affordable.
But after the downturn in Korea-China relations, Korean dramas were no longer able to air on Chinese streaming platforms, and these brands lost their main point of influence. What’s more, with the improving quality of domestic beauty brands’ products and their down-to-earth prices, South Korean beauty brands have been gradually losing their advantage.
Pointing out ingredients is not enough
Chinese consumers are becoming really picky. When they are buying skincare products, they not only want to know the ingredients but also know what skin issues those ingredients are tackling and what effects will they bring.
A bad example here is Jurlique. It promotes itself as a natural and organic brand, and most of its ingredients are coming from plants. The point is good which appeals to Clean Beauty, a prevalent beauty concept in the industry. However, without telling consumers what those plant based ingredients do, how exactly they benefit the skin, Jurlique is making useless communication. People want to know what problem those ingredients will solve.
According to Tmall’s statistics in 2019, most searched skincare keywords were moisturizing, brightening, acne removing, recovering and anti-aging. These are directions that skincare brands can consider focusing on.
Celebrities might not be able to save those brands
Though Benefit and Innisfree once worked with celebrities to boost their attention, the results were weak. Indeed, collaborations with celebrities can drive sales but that’s not a persuasive reason for consumers nowadays. Consumers want to see the effect of those products and celebrities can only act as a platform to tell brands’ stories.
Read more: 这些曾经风靡中国市场的美妆品牌，怎么都走到了关店自救这一步？
