Female consumers, the eternal growth of brands

Female consumers account for the vast majority of spending in the market. Capturing female consumers has become the key for brands to capture new growth. But do brands really understand female consumers? How can they capture this part of users? Let's take a look at the summary of this article.

An Accenture report shows that Chinese female consumers control up to 10 trillion yuan in consumer spending each year.

This is a new opportunity in the eyes of many entrepreneurs. In 2021, the number of newly registered she-economy-related enterprises in my country exceeded 1.3 million, a year-on-year increase of 21.8%. Looking back at the past five years, this number was nearly 3.7 million, accounting for 75% of the national stock.

Among Tmall’s top new brands, 80% focus on female consumer needs; and 70% of the population susceptible to new brands are women.

Capturing female consumers has become the key for brands to gain new sales.

1. Do you really understand female consumers?

Li Jiaoshou, former vice president of Baidu, once said that an effective market must meet at least the following four conditions:

① Have a group of actual customers;

②These customers generally have certain needs;

③ Have a range of products and services to meet their needs;

④ When making purchasing decisions, consumers in the market refer to each other.

When it comes to the female consumer market, we can see the actual existence of 400 million female consumers. Their actual demands for maternal and child care, personal care, household cleaning, etc. have also spawned a number of cutting-edge brands such as bebebus, Bananain, and ubras.

The most important is the fourth point, that consumers in the market refer to each other. This is the key to the successful launch of most new product companies.

Young women are the most representative of this. For example, on the Xiaohongshu App, where popular beauty products were posted, young ladies would either ask for recommendations for exquisite products or show off their exquisite lifestyles by posting pictures of buyers.

By referring to each other, they also help promote the brand's word-of-mouth fission and rapid rise.

Perfect Diary has grabbed the bonus. As early as September 2019, Perfect Diary launched a batch of new products. In this month, it vigorously promoted 1-2 of these products on Xiaohongshu.

In a short period of time, Perfect Diary had more than 1 million fans on Xiaohongshu, and the number of notes from the girls reached more than 100,000. This helped Perfect Diary become the first cosmetics brand on Tmall to exceed 100 million in sales that year, and the full-day performance became the first domestic brand to top the Tmall Double 11 cosmetics list.

Among the numerous notes, three behavioral characteristics of female consumers are roughly presented:

The first thing is to focus on the refinement and practicality of the product.

In Xiaohongshu, there are more than 8.74 million notes about "exquisiteness", including exquisite women's daily, exquisite food, exquisite camping, exquisite things...

Ai Media Consulting, through data analysis in the fields of underwear, maternal and child care, health care, passenger cars, sports shoes and clothing, low-alcohol beverages, etc., concluded that women are more willing to pay for "practical and exquisite" products.

The second is the rise of women’s self-pleasure consumption.

The "2022 Women's Consumption Trend Report" shows that the proportion of women's self-pleasure consumption increased significantly in 2021, and the amount of self-pleasure consumption exceeded family consumption, accounting for 54%, and the transaction amount increased by nearly 30% year-on-year.

This has become a widely acknowledged fact. Compared with the e-commerce sales on Women's Day over the years, women's clothing consumption accounted for only 15.17% in 2012. However, in recent years, self-pleasing products such as underwire-free bras, sports bras, and neutral loose boyfriend-style women's clothing have all experienced explosive growth.

In this market, more self-satisfaction comes from social interaction. They are more willing to share their lives, and they want to show off their products and have people like them when they post them on WeChat Moments.

Among them, appearance has become a necessary factor. On Xiaohongshu, many girls posted their unboxing experience of ubras. This comfortable and unrestrained underwear is always regarded as a representative of appearance because of its high-end colors, Japanese style, and minimalism.

Finally, brand trust influences the final purchasing decision.

The "China Social Newcomer Consumption Report" shows that more than 60% of post-90s consumers pay attention to the price-performance ratio of products when shopping. But in reality, most of the new generation of consumers will consider whether the product is good, whether the price is fair, whether the purchase channel is convenient, and even whether the promotion activities and even the communication are in line with their own personality?

The four issues ultimately fall into the 4Ps of marketing, which are combined into brand image. The trust brought by the brand still affects the public's purchasing decisions.

A long time ago, NetEase conducted a survey and found that women are more loyal to brands.

This means that you can use novelty and uniqueness to attract men; but women need more brand penetration - there are too many mutual references among them, and they will eventually reach a consensus on a certain brand.

2. Seize 400 million female consumers

In view of the consumption behavior characteristics of female consumers, brands that want to play with the "her" economy should also work hard on products, self-pleasing scenarios, and building brand trust.

In terms of products, for example, the maternal and infant brand bebebus, the reason why this domestic brand can stand out among a number of foreign maternal and infant brands is that the exquisiteness and practicality of its products are the key.

In the traditional baby stroller field, brands generally design the backrest to be supported by tubes. Generally, there are two tubes in parallel, and the better ones have three tubes.

The biggest advantage of doing this is that it can reduce product costs, ultimately lower sales prices, and gain more potential users in the market.

However, in order to improve the safety of the stroller, Bebebus abandoned the traditional approach and chose to use a large injection-molded backrest. Of course, this ultimately increased the sales price of the product, even 2-3 times more expensive than its peers.

Surprisingly, bebebus also sold well.

Surveys have long shown that when purchasing maternal and infant products, families with mothers and babies attach 74.8% and 39.5% importance to product quality and materials, respectively, while only 33.0% attach importance to price.

This means that most families with mothers and babies would rather spend more money to buy high-quality mother and baby products with guaranteed quality.

Most of the maternal and infant consumers are female consumers. In terms of price, they pay more attention to the exquisiteness and practicality of the product.

In addition to self-pleasing, there is self-pleasingness - in other words, whether your product, or the solution provided by your product, enhances the experience of female consumers.

As mentioned above, apart from their own self-identity, women's self-satisfaction comes more from socializing. They are more willing to share their lives, and they want to show off their products and have people like them when they post them on WeChat Moments.

Former Alibaba CEO Wei Zhe also mentioned before that your product must be shareable and should encourage users to actively post it on their Moments.

Then, good looks become the key. A female friend of mine said that "good looks" is one of the most wonderful experiences. If you don't believe it, try it yourself if you are good-looking.

On the basis of ensuring the functionality of the product, appearance and experience are also desired by female consumers.

Let’s take bebebus as an example. How to design the experience? We need to trust the less complicated part of human nature. For this generation of new mothers, “parenting” provides them with new topics and scenarios to share on social media.

Young mothers born in the 1990s and 1995s are more willing to share their new identities and lives as “new mothers” rather than just “showing off their babies in a more attractive way.” Moreover, most of them have received a good education, have a high level of aesthetic awareness, and have higher requirements for product design, appearance, and packaging.

Pregnancy and childbirth do not seem to affect the quality of life of this group of people. They still pursue shopping and afternoon tea, pay attention to product quality and pursue aesthetics in exquisite social activities.

Take a baby stroller as an example. It must meet the mothers’ needs for taking photos and dressing up, “it will make you look good when you promote it, and you will get likes when you post it on WeChat Moments.”

To this end, bebebus's product design and development team accounts for nearly 50% of the company's total employees, and pays more attention to the appearance of the product. In terms of the overall design concept, bebebus chose a multi-color LOGO with extremely high control.

Fashion based on safety is a necessity.

In terms of brand trust, from the perspective of the foundation of business, whether users trust the brand and continue to pay for you is the key to the survival of all products.

All along, we have neglected the understanding and recognition of the market. Many managers have not really tried to understand the market, nor have they really cared about users.

The purpose of a brand is to attract and retain users. If a company cannot attract a certain number of users with purchasing power, it will not be able to survive. Users always have many choices to solve their own problems. What they actually buy is not the product, but the solution to the problem.

Only by working tirelessly to help users solve problems better, that is, by providing them with better functions, higher value and more convenient services, can brands survive and prosper.

To this end, brands must first understand what users think of as "better". Babycare, another maternal and infant brand, can serve as a reference for this.

The brand's life cycle management of a single user is mainly focused on the AIPL model, namely awareness, interest, purchase and loyalty. We can break it down in detail:

From a cognitive perspective, Babycare mainly focuses on brand breakthrough marketing.

In addition to the earliest foreign brand genes sweeping Chinese mothers, BabyCare is still outstanding in social communication. For example, during Mother's Day last year, BabyCare established public welfare maternity and baby rooms in various shopping malls, hospitals, and railway stations, and launched the #Love2Square# topic on Weibo to call for the establishment of more maternity and baby rooms.

It is said that this topic triggered a discussion across the Internet at the time and was even forwarded by official media such as CCTV.com. This marketing event made hundreds of millions of users begin to recognize the Babycare brand.

From the perspective of interests, Babycare mainly focuses on content planting.

Guoji Data once counted the distribution of Babycare's social media-related content and found that its main distribution channels are on the three major platforms of Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, and all of them are in the order of tens of thousands.

Data shows that the number of its associated Weibo accounts accounts for more than 50% of the total promotional content, while the number of Douyin-associated videos accounts for more than 30%, and the number of Xiaohongshu-associated notes accounts for more than 15%.

In terms of the proportion of platform interactions, Douyin has the highest interaction volume, followed by Xiaohongshu, accounting for 67% and 21% respectively. The activity of Weibo users is relatively low.

On Douyin, mother and baby KOLs such as @隔壁柯妈, @花生爸爸冰糖妈, @小石妈妈, @兔子妈妈说育儿, etc., all recommend Babycare products to their fans. In the comments under these short videos, the keywords that appear more frequently are: "It looks so good", "I'm tempted", "I've got it", "I really want to buy one"...

From the perspective of purchase and loyalty, more attention should be paid to Babycare’s community operations.

User loyalty is reflected in purchases, repeat purchases, cross-category purchases, recommendations to new users, etc. The foundation of these is the product itself, but the added bonus is also in user community operations.

Babycare's community is not just a centralized processing point for issuing coupons and promoting new products as people traditionally think. After accumulating more than 2.5 million members, the key to gaining user loyalty is to truly serve users and reflect their value.

For example, Babycare's popular brand video "For the Only You in This World" shows the real appearance of each other from the perspectives of mother and baby. These video clips are actually real stories collected by Babycare from community users, allowing users to participate in the brand's dissemination and create valuable content for the mother and baby community.

For example, a mother approached Babycare and said that her baby had been using a toy of the brand, which had even become one of the important roles in his growth, but now the toy was lost.

At that time, this product had been off the shelves for a long time and could not be purchased. Therefore, Babycare customer service staff found the raw materials and remade a product for the baby who lost the toy.

These services to users in the community are the key to truly achieving brand loyalty.

Final Thoughts

Why do you keep using mother and baby as examples?

In fact, the 10 trillion female consumer market involves many industries, such as beauty, medical beauty, gold jewelry, maternal and child care, and women's clothing in the consumer industry, nursing, pregnancy, fitness, and underwear in the health field, and confinement nanny services, confinement centers, and other postpartum recovery services in the pregnancy and childbirth field.

However, according to Qichacha data, among these consumer sectors, the hottest sectors are beauty products and maternal and infant products, based on the number of registered companies. Among them, maternal and infant products have become the leading sector in the female consumer market in 2023.

However, this track is not easy. The "2022 Maternal and Infant Industry Observation Mid-Year Report" shows that in the first half of 2022, 46,000 companies went bankrupt, 30,000 maternal and infant stores closed, and 48.5% of companies had cash flow of less than 6 months.

When maternal and infant brands are able to rise from the industry's own bleak situation and become the representatives of the entire female consumer market, all the efforts they have made are worthy of being studied layer by layer by later generations.

Author: Huang Xiaojun; Official Account: Jingyan Brand Lab (ID: JingyanLab)