[Photo by Ma Xuejing/ China Daily]

Tourism boost

For many local companies, building a widely recognized brand not only requires star products, but equally important, a good marketing strategy.

Unlike Herb-tale, which promotes its products through franchises in large shopping malls and attracts customers by providing a free basic skin care massage with every purchase, the fragrance brand Mythic Flora promotes itself through Yunnan's booming tourism market.

Last year, the province welcomed 3.2 billion domestic visitors and more than 107 million tourists from overseas, according to the provincial tourism authority. Tourism generated income of $50.5 billion last year, not far off the $61 billion New York earned from tourism in 2014.

"Many ethnic groups in Yunnan cook flowers as part of their daily diets, including adding them to soups or frying them along with other vegetables. That culture is now becoming known nationally thanks to the soaring number of tourists," said Du from the Kunming Institute of Botany.

As examples, he cited the Dai and Yi peoples in southern Yunnan, who eat the flowers of pomegranates and Japanese bananas, while the Bai people in the north prefer white rhododendrons and pumpkin flowers. They believe flower diets are not only healthy, but also make people beautiful.

"Flowers are now a unique symbol of Yunnan. Ten years ago, travelers took lots of fresh flowers when they left. Now, planes and trains leaving Yunnan are fully loaded with gift boxes containing pancakes made with flowers. The next trend will be in fragrance products," said He Jian, Mythic Flora's general manager.

Investment

Yimei Industrial Holding Group, Mythic Flora's parent, has invested 3 billion yuan to build a holiday resort in Kunming and further its aim of promoting cosmetics made from natural fragrances.

In addition to a five-star hotel, a large shopping mall and a cinema, the resort, called The City of Flowers, also runs Colorful Wonderland - the world's largest flower-themed greenhouse - and a perfume museum, which tells the 300-year-long story of the fragrance trade between China and France.

"We run Mythic Flora's biggest boutique in the resort, trying to introduce our products as part of the process of promoting Yunnan's fragrance culture," He said, adding that the biggest obstacle to the development of local brands is consumers' strong reliance on big-name brands.

"Many people never try cosmetics made in China. But promotion is easier with tourists. If they try our goods, we have at least had a chance to prove the quality of our locally made products," he said.

Although they have taken different marketing paths, Mythic Flora and Herb-tale are now facing the same problem: a lack of both packing and logistics companies and of talented designers.

Both companies purchase their pill bottles from Guangzhou, a coastal city in Guangdong province that's famous for manufacturing, while their product designers all hail from Shanghai.

"A quality problem meant the product labels couldn't be fixed firmly on the bottles made in Yunnan. Extending the industry chain isn't easy, but we have to try," said Zhao Pingzhou, Herb-tale's vice-president.

"Most global brands are born in the areas where the raw materials are produced," Zhao said. "As China's botanical garden, and the home of many rare plants, Yunnan should have its own cosmetics brands - companies that will make the leap from local and national fame to becoming well-known in the global market."

Lyu Chang contributed to the story.

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