Why don’t Chinese women use tampons?

Why don’t Chinese women use tampons? This is what crossed my mind the last time I went to Watson’s, a Hong Kong-based drugstore chain (or as British co-worker Matt insists I write, a chemist) where expats in Beijing go to buy dental floss, tampons, and other things you can’t find at Chinese stores.

(I just lost an hour of my life trying to find a statistic online for how many Chinese women use tampons. No dice, although I did learn that in 2000, the Wall Street Journal published that 70 percent of American, Canadian, and Western European women used tampons and those percentages are much smaller in Japan, Spain, and Mexico. One Japanese friend tells me that about 30 percent of women in Japan use them. So everyone is just going to have to take my word for it that Chinese women, for the most part, don’t use tampons.)

Not only do all the expat women I know go to Watson’s to buy tampons, but the only brand they seem to carry there is o.b. (sans applicator). Why does o.b. seem to be the only tampon brand in China?

This led me to wonder what barriers exist in the Chinese market that a tampon company like Tampax would have to identify and overcome in order to get Chinese women to start using their product. Or that o.b. would have to overcome in order to get sold outside of expat havens like Watson’s. Sooo, I’ve been playing amateur tampon company market researcher and have been polling my friends, both Chinese and Western, as well as my mom, on why Chinese women don’t use tampons. These are the most common responses I’ve gotten:

1. It’s a chicken-or-egg conundrum. They don’t use them because they aren’t widely available. They aren’t widely available because people don’t use them.

2. Fear of breaking the hymen. In this respect the China market is a lot like the US market was back in the 1930s and ’40s when tampons were first introduced and people were nervous that using a tampon was equivalent to losing your virginity. This perception also brings with it a certain stigma associated with being seen buying tampons.

3. Related to the point above, a general lack of education about tampons. One Chinese-American friend tells me that during her first year in Beijing in a study-abroad program, a bunch of Chinese roommates in her program cornered her to ask how tampons work. In addition to thinking they would make you lose your virginity, they also just didn’t know how they worked, were afraid they’d get lost inside of you, etc. Many Chinese women also say tampons are uncomfortable, which I think can also be chalked up to lack of education since they’re only uncomfortable if you’re inserting them incorrectly, using the wrong absorbency level for your flow level, etc. They’re also perceived by many Chinese as unhygienic, which is ironic since tampon companies first got American women to start using them by marketing them as a more sanitary option.

4. Traditional Chinese medicine-related reasons. All bad things must be expelled from the body, and it is bad to “block up” your body in any way. This is the same reason Chinese people on the streets of Beijing are constantly hocking loogies left and right. According to traditional Chinese medicine, it’s bad to swallow your phlegm. This is also why babies don’t wear diapers. And beyond blocking actual physical waste from leaving your body, it seems that a tampon generally blocks the flow of “energy” throughout your body, whether it’s yin or yang or “qi” or whatever (unfortunately I don’t know enough about traditional medicine to say.)

5. A general mistrust of Western medicine and all its associated products. (This is why my mom never let me take Aspirin or Advil or Tylenol when I was growing up. It was a revelation to me in college to observe other girls and realize that you could actually do something about a headache, as opposed to just manning up and enduring it.)

6. One friend also points out that ad restrictions in China probably don’t allow tampons to be shown in a way that shows how they work and that would thus make people comfortable with them. I thought this was an especially interesting point since, looking back to my own girlhood, it does seem like a lot of my own knowledge about tampons came from reading teenage girl-oriented magazines like Seventeen.

So those are all the barriers to market entry that I could identify. How, then, would you overcome them?

My mom helpfully suggested that maybe it’s time for a career change and I “may want to write to manufacture and ask them send you millions of sample” to hand out to young girls. “May be you can be the marketing director in China for the co.” Which, in addition to revealing that my mother would apparently prefer that I work in tampon marketing than be a magazine editor, does point to just how important word-of-mouth recommendations are for the dissemination of information in China. The same friend who mentioned the ad restrictions above also tells me that there are a number of articles about this issue in Mexico and Latin America linked to marketing approaches, and it was found that group in-home sessions led by someone in the community worked best. I would think this would be true in China as well.

For this reason (that is, that the advice of someone they know carries more weight with your average Chinese than something they read in print or saw on TV), I don’t think that ad restrictions are actually a big obstacle for a tampon company. It’s all about the word of mouth. You just need the few women who do use tampons to start talking about it more, which will spread awareness of tampons as an option as well as teach women how they work, which will decrease the stigma associated with them, etc.

Also, one interesting side thing I learned over the course of my informal polling. Turns out that while just about all of my white and black Western female friends use tampons, far fewer of my Asian-American friends use them, and of the ones who do, many of them didn’t start until relatively late in life, like sometime during college. And the reasons they cited jibe with the ones mentioned above, and are all things that are true for me as well – their mothers don’t use them, there wasn’t really anyone around to tell them the benefits of tampons over pads and the pads seemed good ’nuff, they felt like there was a slight stigma surrounding tampons in their family because of their parents’ “traditional” views, a mistrust of Western medicine, etc. So perhaps there’s no need for a company like Tampax to try to conquer the China market just yet – there’s still plenty of unsaturated market left to target in the West!

Eveline Chao