The market is always changing, but two things stay the same – quality and service. After that, it’s just the system. By Amerson Wang, China Regional President of VIORA
I received almost ten years of professional medical education and training in China before being enrolled in a famous business school in the U.S. and completed my MBA study there. It enabled me to view China’s medical aesthetic industry from a new perspective. During the first ten years, the industry saw blowout growth and all the businesses involved experienced a boom.
With improving living standards, people now have a higher interest in living quality and their physical and mental health. Ten years or twenty years ago, it was not very common for ordinary people to visit beauty salons or plastic surgery hospitals, and we were not clear how much it would cost. But nowadays, we see an increasing number of such business with more transparent prices. Many more people are willing to come for a try.
In my opinion, the key words for the medical aesthetic industry in the next 10 years are personalized treatment, individualized service, and utmost pursuit for quality. It means that you should really understand the individual’s particular needs and offer accurate solutions. In this age, people are emphasizing individuality more than anything else.
To be specific, we need to develop medical aesthetic programs based on customers’ occupations, preferences and also their appearance. For example, guests aged between 20 and 30 are longing to appear fashionable and chic, they want to have tall and straight noses, Barbie style face and eyes. But guests from 30 – 50 years old emphasize more on natural beauty and elegance. So they often seek anti-aging programs. New mums will particularly need postpartum rehabilitation programs. Therefore, our programs must target the distinctive needs of different age groups. Only in this way will we be able to win more customers.
The market is ever changing, but two things remain the same – quality and service.
Life beauty is a sub-category in the beauty market, including invasive skincare, body shaping, spa treatments, and make-ups through non-medical approaches. Due to lower risks and smaller investment, it has been quite popular among customers and has seen fast development.
However, in recent years, the changes in consumers’ needs are triggering an upgrade of the beauty industry. Meanwhile, the main consumption force of beauty industry has also changed. The traditional beauty approaches can no longer meet the requirements of the new generation of consumers. Compared with traditional life beauty, more and more customers now prefer “light medical beauty”, photoelectric technology, and medical aesthetic approaches which show a high cost-performance, such as hi-tech skin management, mini-plastic surgery and plastic surgery.
Beauty industry features huge market potential and big room for making profit and therefore draws many people in. After over a decade of rapid development, the industry has undergone a big transformation. In the past, industry participants relied on speculation or emphasized a single technology and service. Now, however, it’s more a kind of system competition.
The life beauty market still depend heavily on Word of Mouth as a way of promotion. Yet it’s not the traditional WOM, but now via popular online platforms such as WeChat groups, Weibo, Little Red Book, TikTok, etc. Product and equipment manufacturers and distributors should think from the standpoint of their clients and offer relevant support such as continual training, flexible product delivery and maintenance, personalized marketing programs, and more. Such support should thread through the whole process from pre-sales to after-sale, maximally ensuring client benefits.
China’s medical and beauty industry has already been geared to international standards. Huge numbers of new devices, new technology and new concepts continue to be introduced to the domestic market. In order to keep aligned with the latest development trends, our company integrates global resources and has established a complete supply chain for medical beauty devices and skincare products. We also bring overseas medical service resources to China and provide multiple personalized services to our clients.
For instance, we regularly invite KOL and marketing experts from our overseas clients to come to China and give support to our domestic clients. We have gradually established an international R&D team and doctor team. We have built R&D centers in America and Israel, and formed strategic partnership with several famous medical and beauty equipment manufacturers in the world. Meanwhile, we support our domestic clients to go abroad and study the overseas medical aesthetic market and the latest technologies so that they can always stand in the frontier of the medical aesthetic world.
We are not only a device supplier, but more importantly, a service provider and continue to provide our clients with services in their daily operations and marketing.
It is our goal that every piece of equipment that we provide to our clients must be able to help them win more target guests with a reasonable cost (even a few dozen yuan), so that they can have a higher profit margin. For example, concerning our star equipment, Matisse, clients can of course pay in full and take it away immediately, but we also provide rental services. So they can rent it and take it to their store. If they want to buy it at any time in the future, they can pay by installments and the previous paid rental fees will be deducted. In this way, our clients are able to possess the global leading photoelectric beauty devices without any pressure of huge investment.
Meanwhile, we have launched Infusion needless electric mesotherapy. Traditional massage fail to bring bio macromolecule nutrients like polypeptide into the deep layers of the skin by penetrating the skin barrier. On the other hand, injection treatment has a high demand on the practitioners, and ordinary beauty salons and centers are not allowed to deliver such treatments. Meanwhile, it is not very safe and also painful to receive injection treatments. Electric mesotherapy perfectly solves all these problems and therefore has become a very popular device in the market. Infusion and its affiliated VIORA ampules have entered many hospitals and high-end beauty clubs in China and have successfully helped them win many more guests.
I believe that a popular device must be very easy to manipulate. It means, an ordinary practitioner in the life beauty industry can manipulate it independently after 2-3 days of professional training.
Every device has its life cycle. What we try to do it to extend its life cycle as much as possible and continue to increase the overall value within its entire life cycle. Ordinary consumers will normally choose a program with not so high a price but highly safe for the first try. If they are satisfied with the treatment and build trust to the beauty center, they will then choose more programs with high added-values. With an understanding of such psychology, we correspondingly provide products and devices with different features. VIORA has a rich product line and each product is reasonably positioned to cater to the end guest’s needs at different phase and thus give full play to each product’s economic value.
Devices like Pristine and Infusion feature ease of use, small investment and quick effect delivery, so they are quite suitable for ordinary skin management centers. After the guests try these basic beauty programs and witness the magic of high-tech devices, we will guide them to try our light medical beauty programs such as Matisse which gives a more amazing effect. Premium guests can then try our more advanced photoelectric medical aesthetic programs like Reaction and V-line. So during different phases of guests’ beauty journey, we are able to provide them with the most suitable devices and services, thus maximizing the benefits of both the consumers and our clients.
Amerson Wang
Amerson is a Master of Medicine from Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology with an MBA from the University of North Carolina. He is now the China Regional President of VIORA, a global leading brand in medicine and life beauty.
