Brazil's natural personal care market both attractive and challenging, Kline

The study, entitled Global Market, Natural Personal Care Products 2009, revealed that the Brazilian market for naturals is one of the fastest growing (up 15 per cent on 2008) due to growing consumer purchasing power and a greater supply of products.

According to Nancy Mills, the author of the report and industry manager of consumer products at Kline, the natural personal care market in Brazil is currently worth $3,056m, in manufacturers’ dollars.

Many products ‘natural inspired’​

Kline analyzed ingredients of many products in the global marketplace and gave each brand a naturals rating between 1 and 10, with 1 being ‘barely natural’ and 10 being ‘almost completely natural’.

Using those ratings, the market was broken down into to ‘truly natural’ versus ‘natural inspired’; with Kline’s research revealing that nearly 75 percent of so-called ‘natural’ products are merely ‘natural inspired’.​

It was noted that consumer differentiation between ‘truly natural’ and ‘naturally-inspired’ products was quite low in Brazil, highlighting a potential greenwashing problem.

Mills told CosmeticsDesign.com USA that there were several reasons for this, including a lack of informative advertising and media reports, prevalence of natural-seeming labels and names, and a lack of regulation.

She suggested that in order to increase consumer differentiation of what is truly natural and what isn’t, the country needs more consumer education, certification and regulations for natural personal care products.

In terms of the move towards more certification of natural products, Mills said that although Brazil is lagging behind Europe and the US in this respect, it is ‘beginning to catch up’.

Brazil​ could be difficult to break into​

For some brands looking to break into the Brazilian market, the fact that two thirds of the market is dominated by a single, domestic player, could represent a challenge, the report cautioned.

“Direct sales is the dominant channel for natural personal care products, and the dominating company excels in this channel,”​ said Mills.

However, sales in the drugstore channel have been boosted significantly due to retailers dedicating more shelf space to such products, according to Kline.