What’s the Flavor of Dish Soap in China?

A Chinese appetizer: Pork Jello with Peach Blossom

If you are selling dish soap in a market, do you want to know what’s hot and what’s not? Of course, you can organize consumer focus groups or in-store surveys. How about getting the answers instantly from the comfort of your desktop?

Yimian Data has built a market-scouting tool to quickly explore China online markets of selected categories, such as dish soap. Before the tool gets an official name, let’s just call it the “Yimian market scout” in this article.

The current data scope is tmall.com, a major Chinese-language business-to-consumer (B2C) online retail platform, operated in China by Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group. The number of monthly active users is more than the population of US; it’s ranked by Alexa as the world’s №10 website by traffic as of Aug 30, 2018.

According to Forbes report in Aug 2017,

With 560 million Internet users spending 20 hours online per week, China is by far the largest Internet market in the world — twice the size of the U.S. market.

As a marketer, you are likely interested in the market size, growth rate, market share by brand and other attributes, and so on. Let’s hear what the market scout has to say:

Market size and growth rate

First of all, tmall.com has sold ¥218m(~$32m) of dish soap in the first seven months of this year. That’s a year-on-year increase of 72%.

Dish soap tmall.com sales by month

Market share by brand

Diving deeper, we see the top brands by market share:

The four-firm concentration ratio (CR4) is 56%. As a reference, the CR4 of hand wash category on tmall is 76%.

Market size and share by attributes

We can see market share not only by brand, but also by key attributes such as price range, package volume, advertised functions, and ingredients.

Here are the findings,

  • The best-selling price band is ¥25-55($4–8) per unit, representing roughly 1/3 of total sales;
  • The best-selling package volume is 2000–5500 ml, which brings in about 40% of total sales;
  • The best selling function is no surprise: “clean”. After that, “sanitizing” and “not hurting hands” are the next two functional keywords. Note that dishwasher penetration in China is still in single digit percentage, according to jiagle.com.
  • For ingredients, “natural” is the №1 word as consumers in China become increasingly health-and-environment conscious. The №2 word is “camellia seeds”, which has been used as a natural shampoo by Southern Chinese folks long before chemical shampoo. See a photo of compressed camellia seeds below. The №3 selling ingredient is “ginger”.
Camellia seeds with a label “the most natural shampoo and dish soap”. Source: Wikipedia.

Market size and share by hot words

Online stores choose the keywords in their product title carefully to optimize search engine hits. These keywords rise and fall just like brands and products. With natural language processing, we can reveal the fastest growing keywords using a word cloud, with each word sized by its revenue growth rate.

Hot keywords by sales growth rate

This word cloud shows the hottest growing keywords by sales revenue. There are somethings interesting in this cloud, such as the rise of “dishwashers” (洗碗机), the associated dishwasher brands (西门子/Siemens, 方太/Fotile), and the increasingly popular flavors (西柚/grapefruit,洋甘菊/Chamomile).

Top SKUs with the keyword “Grapefruit”

It turns out that one Hong Kong brand, AXE, has been leading the growth of both flavors.

If you are a consumer, choosing between chamomile or grapefruit for your dishes may not seem like a huge headache.

However, if you are one of AXE’s competitors, how do you differentiate? Would you bring your own grapefruit and chamomile dish soap, or would you introduce new flavors or even tout “odorless” versions? What package size and price range would you compete in?

Hope the insights from Yimian’s “market scout” are helpful.

Questions or comments? Please email me at zhangrong@yimian.com.cn.


Yimian Data

Yimian Data is a data and AI company based in Shenzhen, China, founded by data scientists and management consultants in 2014.

We are problem-solving partners to business leaders, helping them make intelligent decisions faster. To achieve this, we quantify market trends and customer voices, then turn data into insights and decisions. We are hands-on technology experts in data fusion, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning.


Rong Zhang | 张戎

Written by

Yimian Data | 一面数据

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