---
title: "Growth of 47% and Penetration Below 5%: Personal Care Brands Race into Instant Retail"
description: "In the past few years, retail has undergone significant changes, especially in the channel landscape, with nearly two-thirds of consumers shopping across channels. For personal care brands, the breakthrough lies in finding channels with capacity and incremental growth, and instant retail offers answers. According to the white paper, the personal care category in instant retail is expected to reach 171.2 billion yuan by 2027, accounting for over 20% of all channels, with a market growth rate of 47%."
author: "周群"
publisher: "New Distribution"
email: "zhaobo258@gmail.com"
telephone: "+8615854817671"
published: "2023-03-11"
language: "en"
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original_source: "https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/qMCKasCg3ztr-zS3GK2G0A"
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# Growth of 47% and Penetration Below 5%: Personal Care Brands Race into Instant Retail

> In the past few years, retail has undergone significant changes, especially in the channel landscape, with nearly two-thirds of consumers shopping across channels. For personal care brands, the breakthrough lies in finding channels with capacity and incremental growth, and instant retail offers answers. According to the white paper, the personal care category in instant retail is expected to reach 171.2 billion yuan by 2027, accounting for over 20% of all channels, with a market growth rate of 47%.

In the past few years, whether in personal care or the entire FMCG category, retail has undergone significant changes.
This is particularly evident on the channel side: there is no longer pure online or offline shopping; nearly two-thirds of consumers shop across channels.
In the past, consumers went to the supermarket once a week, but now it may be once a month, or even once a quarter in the future. Consumers visit 4-5 channels within a week, and the frequency of shopping in a single channel is declining.
**Consumers are still the same, but for brands, they need to think about which channels consumers go to, how to reach them, and how to influence their decisions.**
In this context, the breakthrough for personal care brands lies in finding channels that have capacity and are incremental. The instant retail channel may provide some answers.
A few days ago, the "Personal Care Category Instant Retail White Paper" (hereinafter referred to as the "White Paper") jointly released by Meituan Instashopping, Unilever, and Kantar Consulting pointed out that by 2027, the personal care category in instant retail is expected to reach 171.2 billion yuan, accounting for over 20% of all channels, with a market growth rate of 47%.
The continuously growing instant retail channel is helping personal care companies achieve new growth.
**Instant Retail: An Incremental Channel and a Marketing Arena**
**New Distribution mentioned a viewpoint in 2020**: "If instant retail was an uncertain trend in the past, now it can be said to be a certain future." The White Paper data also confirms this viewpoint: the overall instant retail market is growing rapidly, and this trillion-yuan market has become a mainstream channel that FMCG companies cannot ignore. Focusing on the personal care category, the market opportunity in the instant retail channel is even greater.
**First, from a category perspective, although the penetration rate of personal care in instant retail is not high, the growth rate is significant and the development space is large.** The White Paper's forecast data well proves this: in 2023, the channel share of personal care in instant retail was 5%, and by 2027 it is expected to reach 21%, with a market growth rate of 47%, far higher than other channels. It is not difficult to see from the data that instant retail will definitely be an important sales channel for the personal care category in the future.
**Second, from a consumer perspective, instant retail platforms not only cater to current consumer trends but also gather higher-quality consumer groups.** Consumers today have a fundamental pain point: increasingly compressed discretionary time. Everyone wants shopping to be simpler and more convenient. The emergence of instant retail actually helps consumers solve this pain point. From this perspective, instant retail is definitely an inevitable consumption trend.
**On the other hand, in terms of consumer profiles, sophisticated moms are the main force of personal care consumers in instant retail. Compared to other channels, these consumers are younger, wealthier, and have higher consumption potential.** The White Paper survey data shows that the consumer profile for personal care in instant retail is: 58% female, 62% aged 25-35, 57% with a personal monthly income of 8K-25K, and 66% married with children.
**Third, from a channel perspective, the instant retail channel is an important sales channel for the personal care category, and for brands, it is definitely incremental business.**
**From a market perspective, the personal care category is indeed a stock market. But brands need to see that consumers' purchase touchpoints are shifting and their consumption habits are changing.** Every shopping touchpoint competes with each other. Brands need to compete on touchpoints that are in development trends to gain incremental growth in the stock business. Therefore, for personal care brands, the current instant retail is definitely incremental business.
**Finally, from a marketing perspective, the instant retail channel is gradually becoming an important marketing arena for personal care brands.** In traditional marketing methods, usage scenarios and shopping scenarios are separated. For example, if you advertise online that waterless hand sanitizer is suitable for camping, the brand still needs to think about which channel to distribute the product to: CVS or a small store near the campsite? Lv Bing, Unilever's Omnichannel Shopper & Category Operations Director, believes that **in such a state, the effect of scenario marketing is hard to amplify. But in the instant retail channel, the shopping scenario is also the usage scenario, making the demand more three-dimensional. Brands can do various scenario marketing, stimulating consumers while completing transactions.**
**Meituan Instashopping: Reconstructing People, Goods, and Scenes to Bring Qualitative Growth**
The emergence of instant retail is not to subvert the retail industry, but to use internet technology to reconstruct people, goods, and scenes, empowering physical retail. From traditional stores to traditional e-commerce to near-field e-commerce, the essence is that the transaction scenario changes. Instant retail uses the internet + digitalization + scenarios to bring consumers a better shopping experience while allowing brands to get closer to consumer groups. In the instant retail channel, brands and platforms complement each other: brands provide product endorsement, and platforms gather traffic. In this process, the platform is greatly tested; consumers' loyalty to the platform depends on whether it can provide a better user experience. Therefore, for brands, choosing a good instant retail platform is very important.
The instant retail channel model is mainly divided into platform model and self-operated model. The White Paper mentions that currently, the platform model has the highest consumer usage and penetration, with penetration exceeding 90%. Focusing on the platform model, **relying on Meituan's coverage and fulfillment capabilities, Meituan Instashopping is undoubtedly a leader in the trillion-yuan market. In terms of order share and sales volume, it is the instant retail platform with the largest market share.**
**So, from the perspective of personal care brands, what can Meituan Instashopping bring?**
**First, it taps into the potential of lower-tier markets and achieves precise distribution there.** Cui Jie, Unilever's Omnichannel Key Accounts and Digital Marketing Director, mentioned, "Unilever's future growth will definitely come from scattered stores in lower-tier markets. The O2O sales share of these stores is still very low. Using Meituan Instashopping as a lever can effectively achieve penetration in lower-tier markets." The vastness and complexity of the Chinese market meant that in the past, brands could only cover as many as 6 million offline stores through deep distribution. But this model faces a big problem: people cannot be infinitely deployed downward. When the marginal cost is far higher than the output per store, coverage hits a bottleneck. Meituan Instashopping's advantages are: first, deep coverage of lower-tier markets, covering more than 2,800 cities; second, knowing where consumers are, with 230 million annual active users; third, knowing consumer needs, what products consumers need at different times. With these advantages, Meituan Instashopping can co-create with brands to achieve precise distribution in lower-tier markets. In the past, it might have been necessary to cover 1 million stores; now, through full-chain data, it may only be necessary to cover 10,000 or 5,000 stores to precisely reach target consumer groups.
**Second, it helps focus on brand audiences, break marketing barriers, and create new marketing scenarios.** In the past, the essence of traditional retail was "goods-scene-people." For brands, as long as the product was good and cheap, and distribution was done well through channels, they were not afraid that consumers would not buy. But in the era of consumer sovereignty, the order of the three elements has become "people-goods-scene." "People" is the core. If you cannot find where consumers are or know their needs, it is hard to do well. Meituan Instashopping has advantages in the layout of "people-goods-scene."
1) "People": focusing on high-value groups, such as new white-collar workers, who account for over 60% of the consumer base on Meituan Instashopping. For the personal care category, this consumer group is a precise target consumer group.
2) "Goods": focusing on high-quality, high-end trend products. On the one hand, it can meet the high requirements and high demand of new white-collar workers for quality life; on the other hand, it can also promote the brand's high-end upgrade and iteration.
3) "Scene": Meituan ecosystem, in addition to the supermarket business, also includes hotel channels, flowers, tickets, surrounding tours, and a series of other local life services. Compared to the supermarket business, these started earlier, so transaction volume and traffic are larger.
Based on the layout advantages of "people-goods-scene," personal care brands can break away from traditional marketing methods and use more innovative marketing scenarios to drive consumers and promote transactions. For example, Unilever and Meituan Instashopping jointly created the "#一季一花#" (One Season One Flower) cross-ecosystem marketing IP, from "graduation season" to "Qixi Festival" to "Christmas season." Off-platform, both parties' off-platform media used customized full-length long images, including KOLs, KOCs, and other interesting short videos for effective traffic diversion. On-platform, through exposure traffic on the delivery side, flower side, and supermarket side, they carried and harvested traffic, building a very sufficient traffic pool, truly achieving traffic resonance between on-platform and off-platform, online and offline, and platform and brand.
**Final Thoughts**
In today's fragmented channels, the overlap of consumers' online and offline consumption is getting higher and higher, and it is increasingly common for consumers to exist in multiple identities on platforms and offline stores. Behind this stock competition, the competition lies in the brand's insight into channels and consumers. Wherever consumers are, brands should pay attention to that channel. The rapid growth of instant retail is enough to prove the potential of this channel. Taking Meituan Instashopping as an example, its efficient fulfillment capabilities, vast lower-tier market space, and large ecosystem marketing arena are definitely incremental opportunities for personal care brands in the stock market. Whoever can seize the opportunity of rapid growth in the trillion-yuan market will take the lead in future channel competition!
**Scan the QR code to download**
**"Personal Care Category Instant Retail White Paper"**
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