效率不是战略！战略缺失 才是中国美妆品牌最大的危机

This article examines shifting rankings between foreign and domestic Chinese beauty brands on Douyin, and puts forward a core argument: the biggest crisis facing domestic Chinese beauty brands today is a lack of strategy, not insufficient operational efficiency. Key takeaways are as follows:

1. Current competitive landscape: Foreign brands have claimed the top spot in Douyin's beauty category for three consecutive months, holding six of the top 10 rankings. However, Hana remains first in Douyin's personal care overall ranking for the first half of 2024, marking a fundamental shift in industry competitive logic.

2. Core industry pattern: The industry has shifted from high-growth expansion to low-growth, market saturation. Amid weak consumer demand, oversaturated information and excess product supply, consumers increasingly gravitate toward familiar, established leading brands. This makes brand recognition efficiency far more important than operational efficiency.

3. Future industry direction: Operational efficiency is only a necessary condition for success, not a sufficient one. Domestic beauty brands must escape the "efficiency trap", refocus on the core goal of satisfying consumers' demand for beauty and health, and rebuild their brand strategies to navigate the current industry cycle.

Drawing on shifting competition in Douyin's beauty category, this article outlines industry trends, existing challenges and strategic directions for beauty brand owners. Key insights are as follows:

Current consumer and competitive trends: The industry has entered a low-growth, saturated phase amid generally weak consumer spending. Consumers now prefer brands with high, established recognition and are less willing to try new brands, and competition has shifted from a battle for operational efficiency back to a battle for brand recognition efficiency.

Common pitfalls for domestic brands to watch for: First, over-marketing has triggered negative public sentiment, steadily eroding consumer trust and undermining long-term brand growth. Second, brands that focus solely on harvesting short-term traffic rather than investing in product innovation and organic brand building exhaust their growth potential early and hit cyclical bottlenecks. Third, brands that stop innovating their marketing strategies fail to align with Douyin's algorithm, which prioritizes innovators, and gradually lose access to traffic support.

Core strategic takeaway: Operational efficiency can be easily copied by competitors and ultimately leads to homogenization. Brands should not prioritize operational efficiency alone; they must address their strategic gaps, build clear positioning and aligned supporting activities, and cultivate long-term brand mindshare among consumers.

Against the backdrop of shifting competition in Douyin's beauty category, this article outlines the competitive landscape, risk warnings and growth opportunities for beauty sellers. Key insights are as follows:

Current competitive landscape: Douyin has become the core growth engine for the omnichannel beauty market. Foreign brands have now mastered Douyin's marketing rules and are staging a comeback relying on their long-established brand mindshare. The traditional operational efficiency advantage of domestic brands is steadily shrinking, and competition has intensified significantly.

Risk warnings: Most domestic beauty sellers face three common risks: first, over-marketing triggers negative public sentiment and erodes brand trust; second, focusing solely on short-term revenue harvesting rather than long-term product innovation and brand building leads to growth plateaus quickly; third, remaining stuck in early-stage operational routines and stopping marketing innovation means failing to align with Douyin's traffic rules that favor innovative players, making it easy to lose traffic support.

Opportunities and actionable priorities: Domestic brands still retain three core advantages: overall channel advantage on Douyin, advantage in filling gaps in the low-to-mid-end market, and faster response to emerging category innovation. Sellers need to move beyond the trap of prioritizing operational efficiency above all else, prioritize brand strategy building, and continue investing in product and marketing innovation to sustain growth.

Drawing on shifting competition in the beauty industry, this article outlines changing demand, new business opportunities and transformation directions for beauty manufacturers. Key insights are as follows:

Changing product design and production demand: The beauty industry is currently stuck in low-level competition focused on price cuts and promotional discounts. Amid weak consumer spending, consumers increasingly favor innovative brands with strong recognition. On one hand, manufacturers need to retain their existing supply chain advantages—small-batch production, multiple product lines and fast iteration—to meet the needs of the Douyin channel. On the other hand, they need to partner with brand owners to develop experience-focused, innovative products, and escape the trap of low-level price competition.

Business opportunities: Domestic brands still hold clear competitive advantages in low-to-mid-end niche markets and emerging innovative categories, and the entire industry is in a period of strategic transformation. A large number of brands need to launch new innovative products to complete their upgrades, bringing more cooperation opportunities for manufacturers to produce innovative products.

Digital transformation takeaways: Douyin e-commerce requires supply chains to have fast response capabilities. Manufacturers need to further adapt to the needs of digital e-commerce, improve their ability to adjust flexibly and deliver quickly. At the same time, they should not focus solely on production efficiency; they should proactively build production capacity for innovative products to capture the dividends of industry transformation.

This article analyzes the current competitive landscape and core pain points of China's beauty industry, and provides references on industry trends and business directions for beauty industry service providers. Key insights are as follows:

Industry development trends: The beauty industry has shifted from the wild growth of the expansion era to low-growth saturated competition. The core of competition has shifted from operational efficiency to brand recognition efficiency. A large number of domestic beauty brands lack clear strategy, and the entire industry is at a critical juncture of transformation and upgrading.

Core client pain points: The most common pain point for brand owners is that they are overly focused on operational efficiency and neglect brand strategy building, leaving them stuck in low-level homogenized competition with stagnant product innovation and stalled growth. At the same time, most brands lack marketing innovation capabilities adapted to the new platform environment, making it hard to align with platform traffic rules and achieve stable growth.

Solution directions: Service providers can build targeted solutions around brand strategic planning, long-term brand mindshare building, product innovation empowerment and new marketing method development. This helps brand owners escape the efficiency trap, complete strategic upgrading, and allows service providers to capture demand during the industry transition and expand their own business space.

Drawing on shifting competition in Douyin's beauty category, this article outlines core brand demands and platform operation priorities for beauty e-commerce platforms. Key insights are as follows:

Core brand demands to platforms: Brands have shifted from prioritizing short-term traffic operational efficiency in the early days to pursuing long-term brand growth. They need platforms to establish supporting rules that guide and support brands in long-term brand building and product innovation, rather than only encouraging short-term traffic harvesting.

Impact of current platform mechanisms: Douyin's existing traffic allocation mechanism favors innovative players and does not support incumbent "set-it-and-forget-it" brands. This mechanism has driven industry competition upgrades, but it has also to some extent encouraged the industry to overprioritize short-term efficiency and become stuck in low-level homogenized competition.

Platform operation and risk mitigation: Platforms need to mitigate the risk of slowing overall industry growth caused by long-term low-level competition. They can adjust the orientation of traffic allocation, increase support for product innovation and long-term brand building, while accommodating the development of different types of brands: retaining traffic space for established foreign brands, while also providing growth opportunities for innovative domestic brands. This enriches the platform's product category structure and sustains the long-term vitality of the beauty category.

Against the backdrop of the latest competitive shifts in China's beauty industry, this article puts forward new industry trends, new challenges and new insights, offering high reference value for industrial research. Key takeaways are as follows:

New industry trends: Douyin has become the core engine for omnichannel beauty growth. The competitive landscape has shifted from domestic brand leadership to a comeback by foreign brands, with clear changes in top brand rankings. The industry has moved from the wild expansion of the high-growth era to low-growth saturation, and competition logic has shifted from operational efficiency to brand recognition efficiency.

New industry challenges: Domestic beauty brands are broadly stuck in the "efficiency trap", with the core problem being a lack of strategy. Brands use extreme pursuit of operational efficiency to cover up strategic deficiencies, leading to stagnant product innovation across the industry, widespread low-level homogenized competition, and a sharp decline in overall industry valuation. If brands do not transform in time, the industry could repeat the decline of China's apparel sector.

Research insights: Drawing on Michael Porter's strategic theory and the concept of marketing myopia, this article analyzes the core problems of the beauty industry and proposes that the sector must refocus on the fundamental goal of satisfying consumers' demand for beauty and health, and restructure brand strategy. This offers a new perspective and direction for beauty industry research.