How to win the Chinese market with perfect diary brand strategy？
Founded in 2016, Perfect Diary has become a disrupter in the beauty industry and one of China’s shining success stories in a relatively short period of time. This young brand aims at millennial and z generation consumers with higher disposable income, who are famous for their enthusiasm for advanced skin care programs.
The success of the brand is not established through large-scale marketing activities, but through smart digital marketing strategies to improve brand awareness, resulting in high viscosity, flow and conversion. Perfect Diary has only 40 physical stores, which are mainly used to attract consumers to e-commerce portals. It maintains momentum mainly through its digital footprint. At present, it has a strong influence on Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, Weibo, WeChat, Tmall, Tiktok and other platforms.
The company’s recent digital marketing campaign invited Li Jiaqi, the top beauty website in China, and his dog “Forever”. These advertisements promote a palette with the theme of animals, which has quickly become a hot trend among young netizens. This is not the first time that the independent beauty brand has achieved its marketing goals through KOL or online celebrity cooperation, nor is it the first time to improve brand awareness and traffic through wonderful content. In the past, it has cooperated with the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to launch beauty products.
According to the university consultant, during the 2018 Alibaba Double 11 Shopping Festival, the eye shadow plate “Perfect Diary” produced in cooperation with the British Museum can sell a set of makeup set every 11.5 seconds. In addition, during the Double 11 Shopping Festival, Perfect Dairy became China’s top cosmetics brand with a turnover of 141 million dollars (1 billion yuan) within 13 minutes.
The success of perfect diary brand strategy lies in building relationships with consumers and generating excitement through the release of each new product. It is no surprise that Perfect Diary ranked No. 6 among the most dynamic enterprises in the third quarter of 2019 of the Hurun Unicorn Index in Greater China with a valuation of $985 million (7 billion yuan).
Let’s see how Perfect Diary successfully built itself into a challenger brand and competed with industry giants such as L’Or é al and Est é e Lauder:
Unleashing the potential of content marketing
In the digital era, it is easier to establish brand value and communicate with buyers through various online marketing communication methods. From podcasts to blogs, there are many effective ways to convey the company’s information. However, because there are many communication methods and social media channels, each of which aims at the same audience, it is difficult to capture the interests of today’s modern, highly connected consumers. Only the brand that produces high-quality content can truly attract the audience.
Perfect Diary is a master of digital narrative and content marketing. It uses social media content to communicate product launches, behind the scenes footage, and partnerships with celebrities and kol, while also responding to queries about products and ingredients. This highly targeted approach has greatly improved its social marketing performance.
For example, Christy Sun, vice president of marketing of Perfect Diary, said that the 16 color eye shadow designed by the brand in cooperation with the British Museum has become a hot topic for beauty product lovers and cultural creatives.
In an interview with China International Television in 2018, Ms. Sun said: “According to the latest FAST ranking released by Tmall, the B2C platform of Alibaba Group, Perfect Diary is ahead of the cosmetics industry in terms of member participation. The average number of headline posts posted by the company on its WeChat account has exceeded 100000 times. This extraordinary participation is far ahead of our domestic and foreign competitors, ensuring the connection between brands and fans.”
Influence marketing
According to the data of China Marketing, the total retail sales of skin care products in China reached 36.87 billion US dollars (255 billion yuan) in 2018. Euromonitor International expects that the sales of beauty and personal care products in the Asia Pacific region will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7% from 2018 to 2023, while China alone is expected to grow by 9%.
Considering the potential of this market, it is not surprising that there is fierce competition between international brands and domestic brands in China. International brands still dominate the market, but independent beauty brands like Perfect Diary are gaining momentum – digital marketing has contributed to this change.
Celebrity endorsements and partnerships with local idols are still influencing young consumers’ purchase decisions. Therefore, Perfect Diary cooperated with Zhu Zhengting, the lead singer of the Chinese band NEX7, to make Zhu Zhengting the image ambassador of the brand’s lipstick series, thus increasing the participation of fans and creating topics. There is no doubt that perfect diary brand strategy in all aspects has made significant breakthroughs.
