SK-ll: Marriage Market Takeover – building a cultural movement in China

Baggrund

SK-II is an international prestige skincare brand looking to grab a larger share of the Chinese market. But in China advertising for cosmetics is often rational and celebrity focused. “Use this cream and get flawless skin, just like this movie star.” In order to stand out, SK-II was looking to do something with emotional quality.
They had already established #changedestiny – a campaign designed to inspire women to shape their skin destiny. The creative idea wanted to elevate the campaign to include “life destiny”. To achieve this we (F&B & Be On) traveled to China to conduct interviews with women in the target group. The Sheng Nu label, meaning “leftover woman”, and the pressure to marry, sometimes at the expense of their careers and independence, emerged as a big issue in their lives.
The objective was to change the perception of Sheng Nus and challenge the way we view single women all over the world.

To do this we said that we needed to create a movement not only in China, but outside of China as well - as a way to mobilize voices across cultures to support the idea that "as a woman, no matter where you are from, you should be able to marry for love and not out of pressure".

On top of this, the pressure to marry and the concept of Sheng Nu is widely stigmatized in China - so we faced a huge challenge in opening up conversations about this to facilitate an actual response from Chinese women - and no brand had previously dared to talk about this controversial subject.

Løsning

To truly create a movement that would open up conversations about the pressure to marry we needed to understand our target group from every angle. Based on our research in Beijing and Shanghai we worked integrated, F&B and Be On, to build the creative solution in tandem with the media strategy. We surveyed opinion and online behavior among our target audience, and build specific messaging/stories to connect with different types of women - those that were progressive, those that were not, and all the women in-between. We also found out that many Chinese women circumvent the "great Chinese firewall", blocking access to Facebook, Twitter, Google etc., by using VPNs. The women who did this were generally more progressive and followed a lot of influencers from US and Europe. These women were looking for inspiration outside of China, and were very much influenced by western culture.

We also knew that in China, word of mouth is integral, as 48 percent aren’t likely to view branded content unless it comes from a trusted circle.

The answer was an inside out/outside in approach, meaning that the outside world had to be made aware of the Sheng Nu issue and that the people of China had to be made aware that the outside world had taken notice.

Based on this knowledge and our understanding of the Chinese social media landscape, we utilized influencers to spread our messages across five of the biggest social media platforms in China. And to reach the Chinese women who follow influencers outside of China, we worked together with opinion leading influencers on Twitter and Instagram who was proven to have followers from China.

We wanted to avoid a demonization of Chinese culture, instead raising an important topic and using it to kick-start discussions on every continent, as pressure being put on women is a universal problem.

This approach resulted in a map containing 600 social media influencers in China, and 400 outside of China - and through them we were able to reach our target audience and orchestrate conversational momentum to scale awareness and engagement. This was combined with a PR strategy reaching both influential media inside and outside of China - and more than 800 titles and influencers were mapped and reached with PR.