Why Medical Aesthetics Is Not Actually as Competitive as It Looks

Recently an upstream manager I admire — serious, grounded — left the industry. Once it was confirmed, what I felt was more complicated than the usual understanding and regret: relief, release, even a little envy. Envy of her resolve, and of her luck.

For a long time now I have watched people who are a little innocent, a little kind, a little serious have their love for this work ground away by its realities.

Perhaps we have all grown so used to holding on and gritting it out that we have made the grind into an excuse.

What exactly is this industry grinding at?

Short video and social feeds shout in unison about the grind, about cutting prices — collagen stimulators breaking price, skin boosters breaking price, the market scorched earth, as though price cuts were the only route to differentiation, an inevitable choice, and no one who refuses will be spared. Meanwhile the faint voices discussing formulation, dose, concentration, particle size and differences in clinical outcome get almost no attention at all.

Beyond the surface competition on price there is a more pervasive grind: imitation and copying.

The moment a new concept appears, everyone piles in behind it, with no thought and no discrimination at all.

Repeated names, repeated colours and packaging, repeated marketing posters, repeated scripts…

Take my own case, and I do feel this. Aesthetic Reflections does not publish often, and yet whole articles, data, charts, headlines, columns and editorial concepts are routinely copied and reposted.

My colleagues console me by saying it means we are recognised. Fine. But deleting the source and the author deliberately — is that the accepted rule of the game in this industry? So much so that when an account occasionally leaves a courteous message asking whether we would whitelist the original for reposting, I am unexpectedly moved to find that original work is still respected here.

I have always thought that a low-grade price war and high-frequency copying are not real competitive intensity. They are disorder: following blindly for want of any core competitiveness, and laziness for want of any thought invested.

Medical aesthetics as a whole is not really grinding. At least, not the kind of grind that has quality in it.

Real intensity should be a contest of thinking, of systems, of innovation — not a stampede of imitation and price-cutting. A short-term price cut on a comparable product is a pricing-strategy failure, and a pure price war between competitors has no winner.

Today’s grind looks more like the disorientation and reshuffling that follow rapid growth and a flood of new players. Anxious voices draw the most attention, and more considered thinking gets swept along.

The upstream of this industry is nowhere near ground down. It has not even begun to grind at the right things.

I would rather compare medical aesthetics with the car industry.

From business model, channel structure and competitive landscape to the consumer decision chain, the two resemble each other more than medical aesthetics resembles pharma, FMCG or luxury.

As is not necessarily universally known, there are close to 140 medical-aesthetics products holding Class III certificates in China, and roughly 130 domestic passenger-car brands. Registration certificates are not the same as brands, but the competitive density of the two industries is fairly comparable.

Look at the car industry, though: the landscape is clear, positioning is definite, and classic marketing cases keep coming.

The intensity in cars is real competition, built on extremely clear strategic positioning and thoroughgoing marketing differentiation.

Brand marketing, from lending a persona to co-creating content

The classic car campaigns fuse a brand story with the qualities of a person.

The advertising conveys a personal character and a philosophy of life closely aligned with the brand’s tone. Andy Lau’s “Grain Buds” commercial, with its refined and restrained narrative, was precise and highly successful.

Look at today and you find more car brands choosing their primary channels precisely according to their audience — partnerships on content platforms like Bilibili, for instance, which do not force a product placement the way traditional media does, but fold the product into the context in which it is used.

Take the Bilibili creator Planet Research Institute, which I have long enjoyed. It often works with car brands, folding a model’s characteristics — off-road capability, range — into a sweeping geographic narrative, part of exploring the world. That kind of soft placement does not irritate; it stays with the viewer.

User targeting taken to the finest grain

Turn back to medical aesthetics. Out of professional habit I look at every brand’s marketing position, and the overwhelming majority are vague.

Given the chance, I ask managers directly: what is your product’s target positioning?

The answers come back as “wealthy women”, “younger women”, “bone-structure filling”, “contour support”.

Behind that breadth is a crude reflex: as long as it sells, anyone will do and any approach will do.

In cars, meanwhile, target segmentation has been refined down to the second car in the household.

(Driving does nothing for me personally, which does not stop me loving car advertising.)

Here is what precise brand positioning and clear narrative look like:

• Li Auto L9 positions itself as the dad’s car: creating a home that moves, creating a happy home. Every design decision — space, safety, entertainment screens — revolves around one core customer picture: the head of a high-income household with children, meeting every need for comfortable travel for the whole family, especially spouse, children and grandparents.
• Xiaomi SU7 positions itself around driver and car as one. The target user is 25 to 35, technology-minded (an Apple and Xiaomi ecosystem user), a first-time buyer who wants both good looks and driving pleasure. The high proportion of female owners — over 30% — comes simply from getting details like sun protection exactly right. (Who would have thought it: a market whose buyers are predominantly male, startled for the first time. And the mockery does nothing to diminish how precisely differentiated Lei Jun’s marketing is.)
• Huawei’s AITO series targets loyal users of the Huawei ecosystem. They trust Huawei’s technology deeply — the HarmonyOS cockpit, the assisted-driving system — and their purchase decision is driven strongly by the brand’s technical strength. They are the archetypal believers in domestic technology.

The car industry is competitive enough that a brand has to know exactly who it is speaking to, what it is saying, and in what manner.

In medical aesthetics, by contrast, the more a brand chases a broad, all-encompassing, blurry position, the more confused the market becomes. If the manufacturer cannot tell the product’s story, is the clinic really expected to tell it for you?

From hyaluronic acid to collagen, from regenerative materials to biosynthesis — hundreds of products in a lively market, and the naming clusters tightly around a handful of syllables: zhen (针/臻/真), li (丽/莉), yan (颜/妍), su (塑/素), ai (艾/爱), ti (缇/瑅).

Chinese is a vast and profound language, full of poetry, space and beauty, and yet we insist on playing tongue-twisters with these few characters.

Not that those characters sound bad or look bad — but in terms of brand recognition and memorability, there is no craft in it.

Compare L’Oréal and Estée Lauder, whose Chinese names combine sound and sense and carry a grace and a poetry that survive the decades.

Medical-aesthetics brand names are still impoverished in linguistic taste, in sound, and in cultural resonance.

Here I want to single out one Chinese product name I genuinely admire:

Purely on the classical criteria of fidelity, clarity and elegance, it is the best Chinese product name in medical aesthetics I saw in 2025: fluent in sound, graceful in form, in tune with what the product does. Ti (缇, the deep orange-red of fine silk) and tou (透, translucency, the effect) carry a homophone play as well — the most expressive naming in the field that year.

The pity is that the product’s marketing strategy is hard to describe politely. I could not find a single piece of visual identity material anywhere online that expressed the design of the name.

Look at successes in other industries:

• NEIWAI (内外): simple, and a triple pun — inside/outside, underwear/outerwear, inner self/outer self — closely aligned with a brand about comfort, restraint and self-assertion.
• To Summer (观夏): a seasonal image carrying an Eastern lifestyle narrative. The two characters alone hold a picture and a warmth, and the brand has extended them successfully into content assets.
• DOCUMENTS (闻献): the sense of documents and record carries the proposition of scent as cultural record, with the Chinese and English names each revealing the other.

Could medical-aesthetics brands not spend a little more time and effort grafting the product’s mechanism, its intended effect and its material characteristics into Chinese meaning and Chinese sound — producing names that are both elegant and differentiated, and that show some aesthetic cultivation in our industry?

I saw a line of GORE-TEX trainer advertising today:

“Wind has its own way of playing, rain has its own way of playing, and wind and rain are fun too.”

It was placed against Shanghai’s wind-and-rain weather at that moment, and it travelled widely and resonated.

When a brand can combine context, emotion and product character, it has a logic worth spreading.

Most products in medical aesthetics today are not yet fully homogenised. Product parameters, technical characteristics, clinical differences, service differences, brand positioning, target audience, channel strategy, business model, portfolio, even pricing — there is a great deal of solid homework still to be done.

Even today, before piling into an ocean of red, blue, green and purple, you can at least ask yourself:

given our product’s character and what our target market likes, how do saturation, greyness and transparency sit coherently with our brand positioning and our story?

Even today, if we are going to choose the same neck-line market, could we not think harder about focusing on one concrete treatment context — neck lines or the neck as a whole, grade one or grade four, filling or tightening or improving the banding…

I hope people in this industry can put down the obsession with the price-cutting party and focus more on how to think through and refine what makes them different. Focus does not mean losing other markets; it means attracting more of the right consumers and the right contexts.

Medical aesthetics is still on the road, nowhere near maximum intensity. Too many people simply have not worked out what they are grinding at, or what will keep them alive.

Grinding out the volume and speed of short videos is worth less than grinding through the process and the logic of thinking;

grinding on price is worth less than grinding on how brand and product differentiate within a niche;

shed the copying and the blind following, cultivate the habit of independent thought and study, and this industry still has value, still has warmth, still has possibility.