As undifferentiated products flood the market, clinics and distributors are no longer greeting new launches with the old enthusiasm — they are waiting. Waiting on clinical feedback, waiting on where prices settle, and waiting to see whether the brand’s voice in the market can stand out enough to actually help the front line sell.
Upstream, every company says brand is something they need to do. But for some, brand means picking a pleasant name and a luxury house’s colour; for others it means posting more on Xiaohongshu; for others still it means opening a WeChat account. In practice you very rarely see professional brand expression in this market.
A handful of brands perform consistently and are consistently well received — at which point some owners say: just poach their brand lead.
So why does a company need a brand at all? What was the original intent? What does “doing brand” actually mean? Does brand simply mean burning money? And how does a brand hold a stable boundary of trust and competition around a business?
01The original intent of brand: a bridge of trust
If brand in FMCG exists to be remembered, brand in medical aesthetics carries a deeper task and meaning. It conveys not only the product’s aesthetic idea but also the capability the market recognises in you, and behind that capability, confidence in the company’s commercial competence.
A brand in this field has to answer three levels of question: why will the physician use it, why will the clinic promote it, and why will the consumer like it?
Physicians want to see technology and evidence — the clinical characteristics that follow from a different device or material, and where its efficacy and safety show up.
Clinics want visuals that fit the medical-aesthetic register, that represent the target audience’s needs and aesthetic sense, and marketing content they can explain clearly and be proud to show, so the conversation with the consumer goes more smoothly.
Consumers care most about the result — but how they perceive that result depends on whether the brand knows which need it is anchored to, and whether it offers an experience that moves people, so the consumer feels the product is worth it and the feeling is worth it.
The original intent of brand is to bridge these three. So the physician dares to use it, the clinic wants to promote it, and the consumer likes it.
Brand ≠ logo
What a brand carries is a long-run difference in being recognised, trusted and remembered.
02The contradiction: form out of step with substance
In “The Fall and Rebuilding of the Upstream Marketing Department” I mentioned new products launching with a luxury house’s colour and a hastily printed card carton weighing under 300g. It struck a chord, and the guesses about who it was were varied enough to show this is not an isolated case.
A company has to get its own brand framework straight before there is anything to differentiate. Even a major agency has to sit down with the founder and work through the product idea, the keywords, the advantages and the target audience before it can express anything.
In the current competitive environment, the internal foundations of the brand come first. Be clear about why you are doing it and how — otherwise it really is burning money for nothing.
Consider the launch events most of us know well: similar line-ups, similar running orders, similar press releases in similar outlets, and very little in the programme or the content that conveys a clear difference. Or there is a striking creative idea that never reaches the target consumer.
There are of course brand events that are professional and genuinely bright, and worth learning from. But overall, form over substance is the industry norm. It is also what came through in my earlier clinic research, “More Than Moving Product: The Systemic Value of Clinics in Brand Building”, where clinics expressed dissatisfaction with the effect of manufacturers’ marketing activity.
This afternoon Huawei launched the latest Mate tri-fold Ultimate Design. The event was not long, and Richard Yu carried almost all of it himself:
- First the improvements in performance and the technical breakthroughs. (Apple’s style has shaped every industrial-product launch.)
- Then industrial aesthetics to reinforce the emotional experience — a short film, from craft to aesthetics, brief and striking.
- Then user experience: a presenter, a director and a designer each taking a few sentences to describe how their own pain point was solved. (Use-case design.)
- Then HarmonyOS ecosystem partners — Wonders and the Feishu product lead — on where the applications go next.
- Then a section on camera capability, which I did not understand why they had not put first. Anyway.
- Then brand ambassador Andy Lau on stage, bringing brand register and fan effect together, talking about opening and closing in life — the story of someone not born extraordinary but willing to be extraordinary. (A perfect match for the brand register.)
- Then one line on the brand plan ahead, telling the extraordinary story together with Shisanyao. (Mining the brand’s meaning, carrying the idea forward.)
The whole event builds level on level. You can feel an engineer-minded, plainly dressed CEO, in language that is not especially fluent, conveying with simple confidence a closed loop that runs from technical advantage to use case to brand statement to pricing to pre-order.
Genuinely worth studying closely if you work in this industry.
03The difference is not extreme, but the position in people’s minds is claimed
The PLLA market is white-hot, and honestly AestheFill’s product differentiation is not especially pronounced. But AestheFill did one genuinely differentiated thing: it distilled its own brand keywords, over a long period, consistently and steadily, and rooted them right through every marketing activity and every brand expression.
From “regeneration → active lactic acid regeneration → low-inflammatory regeneration”, it built a world of sport, health and nature, then ran market activity around skiing, sailing and cycling. AestheFill polished one narrative over and over and carried it into every corner of the brand’s visual design, until it became what physicians and clinics think of as a sense of quality.
Which tells us two things. First, within the constraints of a medical-aesthetic product, we should pursue and refine genuine technical differentiation. But where products really are very similar, the answer is not always in formulation and material; you can also think about translating product difference into differences in use case and brand equity.
Without any of those capabilities, the simplest and most direct outcome is difference on price alone. As “The Pricing Myths of Medical-Aesthetics Products” argued: in a price war there are no winners.
04Premium is not the only answer: the grown woman’s story
If medical aesthetics does not yet have many classic brand stories to learn from, look at fashion — and at the “grown woman” story of recent years.
Brand ≠ high price; high price ≠ premium
There is another kind of brand playbook to learn from this market.
To Summer
To Summer is the hottest oriental fragrance brand of recent years. It started with crystal diffusers and expanded into perfume, home fragrance and then personal care. In 2024 L’Oréal invested through Meicifang and BOLD, further confirming its potential.
To Summer’s cleverness is that it does not emphasise how unusual the scent is. Instead it uses recognisable assets of Eastern aesthetics so that you recognise it instantly — and so that it wins grown women’s aesthetic recognition and resonance from the inside. The spatial design of its stores, the visual symbol of the crystal, the narrative of gifting and atmosphere: these compose its long-term memory hooks. (Incidentally, its channel posters were the model I copied when I was teaching myself brand design.)
It also holds several consumption triggers firmly: gifting, self-reward, and emotional management at the turn of a season.
What that suggests for medical aesthetics:
Rather than chasing “premium” blindly, define the product’s use case clearly — the sensitive-skin recovery phase, say, or the male lower face: narrow niches with genuinely specific needs.
When clinics build treatment packages, they can add a timing dimension alongside the result: before a wedding, back at work after a holiday, a class reunion, a career milestone.
Songmont
Songmont is an original Chinese handbag brand. Its register is slowness — slow craft, slow living, slow narrative. It talks about workmanship and durability, and the story of its “grandmothers’ team” gives the brand authenticity and warmth.
In 2024 it exhibited at Paris Fashion Week, taking the “eastern waystation” story overseas. On Xiaohongshu, its founder has shared the brand’s ideas in the first person over a long period, forming a stable pool of conversation, and #SongmontBag has become a community tag for user stories. Its posters never promote the bag’s material or technique; they promote the person carrying it, the setting and the story.
A reminder that medical-aesthetics brands can also make the founder or the chief technology officer the human anchor of the brand — telling a professional story people can actually follow, in a long-term, authentic, unhurried voice.
05Brand strategy is not mysticism: learn the basic method first
A brand story is not conjured from imagination. There is theory and method behind it.
From FMCG, the Brand Key is used to work through target audience, key insight, core promise, reasons to believe and personality. It is not about writing a slogan; it is about being able to hold every piece of content up against the same single page.
Distinctive brand assets are the long-run consistency of colour, type, language, packaging and sound that lets consumers recognise you instantly. To Summer uses the crystal; Songmont uses the imagery of pine and mountain. A medical-aesthetics brand can equally use specific visual symbols and a specific language of technique to create recognisability.
In this industry, difference can be written into how the product is used. This is what is usually called a signature protocol: setting out indications, patient selection, dosing pathway, complication grading and follow-up cadence clearly, so the physician has a practical guide to the product. Rather like MD Codes™, binding the product to a standard of technique and an aesthetic plan.
For companies spanning several fields and brands, the brand house answers the question of how multiple brands inside one company relate to each other. Plenty of companies here have hyaluronic acid, regeneratives, ambitions in skincare and even devices. Without a clear brand-house logic, the market ends up confused.
Every brand needs an instruction manual — the brand guideline, covering logo proportions and clear space, the limits on typefaces and colours, the tone and register of promotional material, standards for extending the system, and consistency across online and offline visuals. This is exactly what many companies here lack: one logo lockup used for everything regardless of context, and marketing and medical affairs running events whose style and staging have no brand connection. Inconsistent application weakens memorability.
A company can also develop its own brand language and keywords, resonant with target consumers and carried consistently through offline events and online social content and operations, so that clinics and salespeople want to share and recommend — building a brand system and long-term brand equity.
In closing
For most of the people steering these companies, the first step is to understand the basic brand framework and the key KPIs for spend, and to spend what should be spent.
The point of a brand is not simply that it looks good. It is that through the market’s ups and downs it holds a stable boundary of trust around the business.
R&D answers whether it can be made. Sales answers whether it can be sold. Brand has to answer why it deserves to be chosen over the long run.
Brand is not harder than R&D, and not more expensive than sales. It simply requires patience, understanding and consistency.
When the next round of grinding competition arrives, whoever can hold the market’s trust through brand will hold the stronger competitive barrier.
