In Thailand, one of the things you notice quickly if you don’t walk with your head down in your phone, is the incredible number of cosmetic surgery clinics. In fact, if you are looking for a local doctor and google the word ‘clinic’, you get mostly plastic surgery shops instead of medical offices.
Statista Market Insights reports that, even in 2020, when far fewer people were worried about their appearance because they were wearing masks and weren’t going out, there were more than 63,000 ‘face and head procedures’ and 48,000 ‘injectable’ procedures performed in the Land of Smiles. This clues you in immediately to one of the most conspicuous traits of modern Thai culture: appearances are so important that they are just about everything.
So it follows that, along with all the face re-arrangements and botoxing (which, by the way, is also turning Thailand into a medical tourism hub) is a post-Covid boom in the retail beauty product sector. There is still white space in the market, for example, there is still a relative scarcity of multibrand retailers, and a posse of hopefuls is rushing to fill it. Mass brands like Ponds and Nivea are very popular and are sold everywhere in small sizes to meet budget constraints. The availability of small packages extends beyond the sachets of skincare products sold in the local 7-Eleven, to include fragrances in tiny glass cylinders in Moshi Moshi, easy to drop into a handbag.
More premium products are growing in popularity. For Thais, this is a segment of accessible luxury, perfect for projecting the right image and appearance, particularly with social media providing an easy way of showing it off and a merciless way of exposing those who fail to play the game. One of the important and most explicitly marketed characteristics on product labels is whitening agents: white skin is highly valued in Thailand and it is common for Thai girls and boys to walk around in heavy, long-sleeved hoodies in boiling hot temperatures, not because they are cold when it’s 30 degrees, but rather to protect their skin from browning in the sun. Lotions, serums, sunscreens and other skincare products typically advertise whitening on the label.
Researcher Kantar Retail states that e-commerce is the leading channel for Thai beauty purchases, accounting for 27 per cent of market share. Among the leading platforms in a highly fragmented online market are Facebook, Lazada, Shopee and TikTok, but there are a plethora of others snapping at their heels. The in-store scene is also crowded with players, from mass marketers like supermarkets, 7-Eleven, Watsons and Boots to the growing mall and streetfront retailers like Beautrium and Beauty Buffet. Since consumers buy beauty products in so many different formats, it means beauty brands can’t afford to concentrate on just one or two platforms.
This also creates a big opportunity for multibrand retailers like Beautrium, which has been around since 2012 but until now has expanded only slowly, to about 35 stores. It offers a whole range of local, national and international brands. Its stores include a 1500sqm, four-level flagship in Siam Square in downtown Bangkok that houses around 1000 brands. The company has announced plans to expand its store fleet to 100 over the next four years and has allocated more than US$50 million to the expansion, along with renovations and upgrades at existing stores. According to company projections, this would generate revenues on the order of US$5 billion by 2027. Part of the strategy is to expand its reach beyond the everyday mid-market Thai consumer by offering more prestige department-store brands. It is also studying the viability of expansion across the ASEAN belt of countries from Myanmar across to Vietnam.
Influencers are a key driver of sales in the beauty market. Leading influencers on social media include Archita Siri, Lukmee, JaiLamer and Mossster, who advise their followers on makeup, hairstyles and other elements of beauty through online tutorials and product reviews on YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. Saira Mirror has found a niche advising her followers on hijabi beauty.
Apart from the YouTubers, there are Instagram specialists and bloggers. Archita Siri’s YouTube channel – Archita Station – has nearly 1.5 million subscribers and her Instagram site has just as many.
Euromonitor data shows the Thai personal care and beauty market was worth US$7.2 billion last year. Skincare products accounted for US$2.6 billion of that, and hair care US$1.2 billion. Makeup products, and bath and shower, each accounted for nearly US$800 million. The colour cosmetics category has been experiencing galloping growth rates – in excess of 30 per cent last year. This, of course, was the category Covid most affected, when the country was locked down for long periods and people stopped going out. The growth is not just a fluke of post-Covid recovery, it is expected to be sustained, at least for the next few years. Statista Market Insights projects that growth will be just under 10 per cent this year and accelerate above 15 per cent both next year and in 2026, before moderating.
A message from the Board of Directors in the 2023 annual report of Beauty Community PCL, another leading Thai beauty retailer that operates the popular Beauty Buffet chain, states that Thailand already ranks 19th in the world as a market for beauty and skincare products. That’s pretty good for a country that is still developing and whose GDP per capita is barely above US$7000.
The desire to keep up appearances doesn’t drive sales growth in just the beauty market. It is also important in other sectors; for example, athleisure. Thais pay an awful lot of attention to what they wear in the gym and will often sacrifice functionality in the interest of style and colour.
All of this is grist for retailers’ mills, but it doesn’t mean that Thais don’t care about how products actually work. They know what works for them and what doesn’t and, for beauty products at least, they will pay more for things that they find genuinely effective. Even in appearance-obsessed Thailand, marketing fluff has its limits.
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