Chinese Electric Toothbrush Brand Usmile Taking Over the Oral Care Market
Over the past two years, Chinese electric toothbrush brand usmile has become a top runner in China’s oral care industry. The brand was founded in 2015 and finally hit its stride during the Double 11 shopping festival in 2020. During 11.11, its sales amount surpassed Oral B and chased closely after Philips, becoming the first Chinese electric toothbrush brand to break 100 million RMB in sales.
China’s Oral Care Market Less Developed
In recent years, China’s oral care market has started to take off. For a long time, China’s electric toothbrush market has been less developed than western countries. Compared with a 42% penetration rate in European and American markets, China’s electric toothbrush penetration rate is not even 10%.
If a Chinese consumer spends 100 RMB on oral care products, nearly 90 RMB will be spent on toothpaste and traditional toothbrushes. However, in western countries, 50% of oral care spending is on electric toothbrushes, mouth wash and dental floss.
With such tremendous room for growth, let’s dig into usmile’s marketing strategy and see what it has done to conquer the Chinese market.
Usmile’s Social Media Channels
Though usmile didn’t start to take off until the recent two years, the first few years weren’t wasted. In fact, those years of promotion helped build the foundation and widespread awareness that helped the brand finally gain momentum.
WeChat Official Account
In China, if a new-born brand with no awareness solely relies on Tmall, it will find it very hard to grow unless it has a huge budget for promotion. This is because Tmall’s search engine prioritizes stores that have high sales volume. With little budget, usmile had to figure another way to promote its brand.
That was back in 2015, which also happened to be the time when lots of WeChat KOLs were growing quickly. Usmile’s team found that at that stage, KOLs were cautious when choosing brands to work with and they tend to have close relationship with followers. usmile sent its toothbrushes to WeChat KOLs and let them have a try. If they approve of the quality of the product, KOLs would recommend usmile to their followers. In total, usmile worked with over 100 KOLs and that’s how the brand created its first group of followers.
Xiaohongshu
As the traffic on WeChat started becoming hard to obtain, usmile marched to a new platform: Xiaohongshu. That was 2017 which was very early days for the platform and the majority of posts were real customer experiences and not sponsored.
In its Xiaohongshu content, usmile promoted two key features: its toothbrush’s design and its lower price compared with Oral B and Philips. These two points turned out to be appealing for Xiaohongshu’s female users, and it made usmile’s marble pillar toothbrush become its hero product. In 2018, this single product achieved over 100M RMB in sales and on last year’s 618, one marble pillar toothbrush was sold in every 2 seconds.
TV Show Sponsorship
Last year usmile sponsored a popular Chinese drama Go Ahead (以家人之名). But it didn’t do a simple product placement. Instead, it had one of the main leads, male idol Song Weilong, grow up to become a dentist and work at a usmile dentist’s office. Consequently, all the main characters also start to use usmile products throughout the show.
Usmile Solved Customers’ Electronic Toothbrush Complaints
Better battery
The majority of plugin electronic toothbrushes have poor batteries that lose their charge easily. I charged mine (not from usmile) every three days and it is kind of annoying when I’m in the middle of burshing my teeth and the toothbrush goes silent and stops vibrating.
Spotting this issue, usmile updated its battery to increase the amount of time it can last. From comments that I read on social media, some people can even go half a year without charging it and this impresses lots of customers.
Replace traditional charger with USB charger
Another issue that bothers consumers about electronic toothbrushes is how it charges. For mine, I have to take its charger everywhere. Since I am in China, that’s okay. But back when I was an international student in Australia and in UK, I had to get a new charger every time I went back to China during summer break because the outlet sizes are different, and the charger could not fit. And then I would buy one for China, but by the time I got back the next year I couldn’t find it.
Many young Chinese people had this issue when traveling abroad. To fix this issue, usmile replaced the traditional charger with a USB charger. In this way, the usmile toothbrush shares the same charging line with everyone’s phones. It’s easy to find USB charging ports everywhere and it also plugs into charging banks. This makes it convenient for customers to charge their toothbrushes.
Source: Xiaohongshu.
Prevent the handle from moulding
When we brush our teeth, it is unavoidable that the toothbrush will be exposed to water. If we dry it right after brushing teeth and the environment is not wet, the handle stays fine. But on most occasions, we are in a rush to go to work or go to school and over the long run, the handle gets mouldy. usmile improved the materials used for the outer layer of the handle to make sure that it won’t get mouldy easily.
Usmile Developed a Wide Range of Oral Care Products Beyond Toothbrushes
Usmile noticed that, in the Chinese market, no brands prodivided a full range of oral care products. usmile saw this market opportunity and started developing other products such as and oral irrigator, toothpaste, mouth wash, dental floss and other products.
Usmile’s goal is to cover customers’ entire oral care routine and its hero product, electronic toothbrushes, are just a window for customers to learn about the brand.
Issues That Usmile Needs to Deal With
There are comments saying the noise that usmiles’ electronic toothbrush generates is too loud and they will only recommend people who live alone to buy it. Otherwise, using it will wake your family up. This seems a bit exaggerated though.
But still, with the growing post-90s and post-95s, who understand better of the importance of mouth care and are willing to spend more on it, the mouth care business will have its golden age coming up.
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