As women care more and more about being beautiful, the beauty industry has become the fourth biggest industry, right after tourism, automobile and real estate. I want to discuss a few things of the beauty market in China.

During the Mao time, Chinese women are forbidden to care much about beauty. Everyone was wearing the same color of the clothes, same hair style and same shoes. Thus beauty industry has not been developed in the last thirty years. In contrast, in the western world where the beauty industry has been growing for around a century, consumers usually follow their mothers’ choice when choosing the cosmetic and skin care brands. Young ladies in China today have to find the brand on their own.

Considering the purpose of being beautiful, consumers in China is also different from the western. In western countries, being beautiful is usually a desire related to one’s emotion. For example, a girl may want to change a hair style when losing a boyfriend or she wants to do some make up to attract someone she loves. Nevertheless, in China, due to the one child policy, women today are taught to be independent, strong and having a desire to be as successful as men in career. Thus, Chinese women today usually pursue beauty to get a good job or the addition in salary. This evident difference in buying purpose would lead marketers to implement different marketing strategy when promoting products to Chinese consumers.

In the Chinese beauty market today, there are myriads of brands from western world, Korea and Japan. However, we barely see strong Chinese brands. Consumers in China believe in the effectiveness of the product, so they don’t have the strong loyalty when choosing brands. L’Oreal has bought Yue Sai (a Chinese cosmetic and skin care brand), in the purpose of developing a line serves particular to the Chinese market. We are looking forward to seeing more strong Chinese brands in the beauty industry in the future.