According to data from Ai Media Consulting: China's baby diaper market is expanding and has reached 62.4 billion yuan in 2020. Although the development of the diaper industry is still high speed from the figures, but in fact it has long been a red sea.

At present, the performance of some foreign diaper brands in the Chinese market has begun to slow down or even decline, while domestic diaper brands, despite the increase in market share, are still in the multi-brand melee period, and no leading enterprise has emerged yet.

Foreign diaper brands fall into weak growth dilemma

With the 2020 National Name Report issued by the public security department, we clearly see the continuous reduction of the number of newborns and the aging population is deepening.This makes the whole maternal and infant industry, especially the FMCG categories such as milk powder and diapers, face the pain of the transition from incremental competition to stock competition.

Source: Kao 2021 Q3 financial report

Financial data disclosed by Japan Kao (Kao Corporation) also show that in the first three quarters of 2021, sales in the company's health and life care business sector were about 357.2 billion yen, down 2.7% year on year. Also in weak growth, there are American HUGGIES diapers, Pampers, and Japan's Moony.

Will adult diapers become a new opportunity for foreign brands?

At present, the attention and action of foreign diaper brands are focused on two aspects: one is to increase the investment in the emerging markets such as "middle-aged and elderly"; the other is to tap the consumption potential of the third-tier cities below.

When it comes to middle and elderly, we have to mention the current wave of "silver economy".The huge number of middle-aged and elderly population is brewing a huge potential market demand. The analysis report released by the Forward-looking Industry Research Institute also pointed out that compared with women using sanitary napkins and children's diapers, China's adult incontinence products industry started late, but the overall market has developed rapidly in recent years.

Foreign brands are optimizing, and domestic brands are catching up.

By packaging and promoting products through flow thinking, domestic brands can make consumers feel the emotional added value, youthfulness and high class on domestic products. At the same time, it will also rely on digitization to refine the operation of members and improve user stickiness and repurchase rate.

In addition, we have also noticed that in addition to these brands that rely on marketing, the sales of low-end diapers are also gradually rising. Due to the little gap in various technical indicators, many consumers pay more attention to cost performance and experience when buying.

In summary, it is certain that the rapid establishment of brand awareness with the traffic bonus of content economy and social platform will be the key for the new brand to take off, but to establish the moat of the brand, it is still necessary to rely on the whole planning around user needs, product differentiation, service system, brand tone, membership refinement operation, etc.