“Liby 立白” enters cosmetic market

On November 10, Liby Group announced that the company has cultivated a cosmetics brand called "Ban Yue Fu Sheng". The brand is positioned as a personalised national make-up pioneer brand, and the brand mission is to “create make-up truly commensurate with oriental women." Its design is inspired by the confident smile of women.

Liby is a leading brand in the laundry care industry. Its products include eight categories of soap, toothpaste, washing powder, detergent and disinfectant. From laundry to beauty, this is a huge change for Liby.

In recent years, it is very common for brands to implement cross-category marketing. For example, Ma Yinglong is famous for hemorrhoid ointment. They established a production line to produce eye cream. There is no doubt that this is a strategy to reach out and attract more users in different fields and expand profits. Liby’s cosmetics do have a strong reason to join the cosmetic industry because China has the world’s second-largest cosmetics market.

Will Liby achieve its goals? Within a week after launch, the number of fans was only 200. The best-selling "Moonlight Box Twelve Colour Eyeshadow" sold only 46. We believe Liby may not be satisfied with this result. To implement cross-category marketing, we believe that brands should be careful enough to balance relevancy and creativity to avoid consuming brand value and loyalty.

Food industry gets greener

Beyond Meat, an American artificial meat producer, announced on Tuesday that it will launch plant-based meats in the Chinese market. Beyond Meat will enter the retail market and cooperate with Alibaba to sell its products at FreshHema. It has also established cooperation with some popular food brands such as Starbucks, KFC, and Pizza Hut.

In the past two years, the growth trend of plant-based meats has become more and more familiar to ordinary people. More and more artificial meat companies are rising, which reminds us that Chinese consumers' demand for healthy food is growing. China’s vegan food market is forecast to be worth nearly US$12 billion by 2023, up from just under US$10 billion in 2018.

In 2019, KFC released a meatless burger in China. The product is vegetarian and not vegan. We can see that more and more young people are aware of the various problems caused by meat, and the Chinese food market is evolving in new ways. "Eating less meat" is an indispensable trend and deserves our attention.

Silver Hair is the new drive in E-Commerce

The internet penetration amongst middle-aged and elderly population has been growing in China. According to CNNIC data, as of June 2020, Internet users aged 60 and above accounted for 10.3% of the total number of Internet users in China, compared with 6.9% a year ago. From July 2019 to June 2020, China’s Internet users increased by 86 million, including 37.9 million people aged 60 and over. The consumption power of the elderly in e-commerce is undoubtedly increasing.

Contrasting to the conventional notion that the silver-haired group is conservative when it comes to buying, in fact, more elderly people like to spend time on the Internet, travel, photography, and dance. Due to COVID-19, more senior citizens bought dance, yoga, and cooking classes online. They have developed the habit of exercising at home. In addition, the expenditure of the elderly is mainly used for grandchildren, health care, medical treatment, food, and living space quality improvement.

The consumption behaviour of the elderly has changed from "saving" to "enjoying." With today’s market skewed towards Gen Z, and brands are competing for the ‘young’ money, perhaps brands should start contemplating the blue sea strategy and pay more attention to the silver hair group.

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