L2 Report Examines the Rise of Digital Investment Among Beauty Brands in China

NEW YORK, Jan. 26, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital benchmarking firm L2 Inc. releases its 4th annual Digital IQ Index ®: Beauty China 2017

The L2 report benchmarks the digital performance of 98 Beauty brands operating in China across the Fragrance, Skincare, and Color Cosmetics categories. The report features data-driven insights and analyses of key search, social, and e-commerce platforms including Tmall, JD.com, Jumei, VIP.com, Weibo, WeChat, Baidu, and Miaopai. Index brands are ranked using L2's proprietary Digital IQ Index® methodology classifying each of the 98 brands as either Genius, Gifted, Average, Challenged, or Feeble.

"China is expected to become the world's largest Beauty market by 2020," according to Danielle Bailey, head of APAC research at L2. "In the last five years, online Beauty sales channels have rapidly expanded, cross border e-commerce and makeup are increasingly popular categories, and consumer preference is shifting to higher-end goods."

Key findings from L2's report include:

Chinese Consumers Are Trading Up: Premium Beauty brands received five times the search volume and 16.5 times the growth in brand term searches as mass brands in 2016. The average Digital IQ percentile rank is up nine percent for prestige brands year-over-year, while mass brands are falling behind, dropping more than 15 percent.

Increased Adoption of E-tailers: Since 2014, Tmall Store adoption rates have grown 57 percent, with 86 percent of Index brands now on the platform. In the same period, brand adoption of JD.com has grown 240 percent across Index brands, and adoption for beauty-specific e-commerce platform Jumei has increased by 87 percent.

WeChat Lacks Scale: Even with 100 percent of Beauty brands actively present on WeChat, post views have remained static. Only five percent of all Beauty posts were seen by more than 75,000 WeChat users, and 84 percent of all posts accumulated less than 25,000 views. In response, post frequency has declined from an average of 2.78 brand posts a week in Q4 2015 to just 1.73 posts a week in Q3 2016.

Livestreaming Rises in Popularity: Eighty percent of Index brands engaged in livestreaming in 2016. In June 2016, only 10 percent of Beauty brands hosted Tmall livestreaming, but by October 2016, that number more than tripled to 35 percent. The average interactions per livestream jumped from 61,974 in June 2016 to 5,259,462 in October 2016.

The report features case studies on brands including but not limited to: Maybelline, Olay, Nivea, Guerlain, Chanel, Estée Lauder, and SK-II.

To access a complete media-only copy of L2's Digital IQ Index ®: Beauty China 2017, contact [email protected]

About L2

L2 benchmarks the digital performance of over 2,200 brands across 12 industries globally. Our proprietary Digital IQ Index® is the global standard for measuring digital competence. We analyze 1,250 data points across site & ecommerce, digital marketing, social media and mobile to provide brands with actionable, data driven insights on their digital performance. For more information, visit: http://www.l2inc.com.

CONTACT: 
Johanna Azis, 917-865-3038, [email protected]

SOURCE L2 Inc.

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