Global beautyscapes. An innovation-centered netnography of Chinese skin care and cosmetics consumers

This chapter draws from a commercial netnography we conducted to explore Chinese cosmetics consumers’ changing notions of female beauty. Specifically, we were tasked with informing the new product development efforts of ArtCosmetics, an Italian B2B contract manufacturer operating in the global cosmetics market. We use the project to discuss how we used a team of researchers to collect, interpret, translate, and understand data about the central role of cultural codes of beauty in cosmetics tastes and routines. In response to the complexity involved in the project, we improvised a netnographic research design. As a result, our netnography with ArtCosmetics was a methodological and intellectual journey that challenged us in many ways: transnational and effective sampling, appropriately bricolaged research design, collecting and comprehending the nuance of foreign language and foreign culture data from new platforms, resolving heterogenous data, managing vast cultural complexity, and translating sophisticated ethnographic finding into pragmatic consumer, brand, and new product development insights. Today, Chinese notions of beauty and identity are firmly rooted in historical ethnic and national identities but are also fluidly global. Adapting netnography to this fluid transnational context allowed us to grasp a flow of beautyscapes, infoscapes, brandscapes, selfscapes, and usagescapes as shifting elements in a primordial process that oscillates between East and West, traditional and futuristic, and symbolic and functional.