MEXICO CITY — Nivea and Wal-Mart have teamed to launch the Beauty Parade 2015 campaign to shore up sales in an otherwise flat Mexican beauty market.
Biesdorf Mexico and Wal-Mart’s Mexican and Central American franchise Walmex recently unveiled a marketing alliance to market Nivea’s products during a sales spree which will see 7,000 multibranded beauty products marked down as much as 30 percent. The campaign, which follows a similar effort in March, will run until April 27 in the chain’s 250 Mexican stores.
The action “will help us get ahead of our competitors before the Christmas Season,” said Walmex’s corporate communications director Antonio Ocaranza. “There are going to be many season events and parties. We want our shoppers to know they can find all their beauty needs here, to hopefully have them all ready before Christmas.”
Despite some views that the Mexican beauty business could be flat this year, trailing the Latin American average, Ocaranza insisted Walmex’s latest discount effort is unrelated.
“This is not our case [he said of the industry’s projected performance],” he said. “Beauty is an important segment that has been growing and this is an opportunity to have bigger sales in a year when they have been good.”
The successful March blitz, called the Beauty Parade, emboldened Mexico’s largest retailer to pursue its sequel, which will see Nivea publicize its new Nivea Care skin line among other staples.
There will be new launches in body lotions, makeup, lipsticks, shampoo and hair dyes with 900 products discounted and 700 product package offers.
Maybelline’s Colossal Chaotic Lashes Mascara will hit shelves for the first time while Cover Girl’s fledgling makeup and lipstick lines Ready Set Gorgeous and Colorlicious respectively will also debut nationwide, said Ocaranza.
Other overstocked labels such as Not Your Mother’s, Babyliss and Splat hair treatment products, Body Fantasies fragrances and Elf makeup sets will also be highlighted.
The Walmex alliance will help Germany’s Biesdorf meet its forecast to boost Mexican sales 4 percent this year to an undisclosed sum, Ocaranza confirmed.
Biesdorf could not be reached for comment. However, the firm has in recent years moved to launch new and innovative personal-care products in Mexico’s mass market category, currently benefiting from high inflation and sluggish economic growth.
Biesdorf commercial director Aldo Barrientos said the country’s skin cream penetration stands at 50 percent, compared to 80 percent in Europe, signaling strong growth room.
The partnership appears timed to leverage tougher times ahead.
Some Mexican beauty executives expect trade will be flat or slightly higher this year after new taxes cripple consumer spending and gross domestic product hovers at 2 to 2.8 percent, though the government has been notorious for issuing overly optimistic targets that don’t materialize.
“We see a very flat market because retail and door-to-door sales [including of masstige and premium brands] are suffering,” Unilever’s skin care marketing manager Didier Chanove conceded to WWD.
However, he noted the mass-market segment and discount skin-care category are growing strongly as consumers trade down to bargains.
The category is seeing tough competition, however, as brands step over themselves and raise marketing spending to win consumers’ attention.
In a June research note, Euromonitor forecast Mexico’s beauty market will grow 4.6 percent to $13.5 billion in 2018 from $10.8 billion last year. This compares with an average 7.2 percent growth for Latin America in the same period.
Lower consumption and prices will dampen value sales in the region’s number two market, dominated by P&G, L’Oréal and Arabela, said analyst Bethany Gomez.
