Significantly impacted by COVID-19, the chocolate category declined by 15.2% yoy, with Dove, the category leader offtake declining sharply across its portfolio. As we approached Chinese New year (CNY), the peak season for chocolate consumption, our challenge was relevance of chocolate as a gifting solution during a period of stay at home mandates and increasing competition from alternatives. We needed to reverse penetration declines in the gifting category.

Dove had spent over a decade investing in CNY gifting relevance with the “Dove Girl”, rising stars that Dove amplified onto bigger stages, from Dongyu Zhou to Angela Baby. They really drove cultural relevance with the Nian Nian De Fu story, a play on words that incorporated both the Chinese name for Dove and Get good luck, a common Chinese New Year blessing. With these stars long out of contract and gifting suffering an identity crisis we needed to act.

Under COVID-19, getting together, and being together had been heavily emphasized across national TV programs. With Chinese New Year approaching, people were eager to do this, to reunion with friends and family and share the traditional good luck and happiness. However, the government implemented a late “no travel” policy putting all good laid plans, and opportunities to “gift” Dove to waste.

This gave us an opportunity to adapt to the emerging condition of going virtual and to reposition from a formal “gift”, to an opportunity to “share a good blessing” another play on the Chinese characters of nian nian de fu.

From Gifting to Sharing the blessing of Dove Girls

For this year’s Chinese New Year (CNY) campaign, with our strategic focus on “sharing”, we used the keyword “一块” （together in Chinese）, to bring out the new Nian Nian De Fu story. Dove encourages everyone to spend more time together, sharing Dove, and sharing blessings all around. Our strategic approach to this new CNY context is sharing Dove /blessing together, be blessed every year.

With our Dove girls out of contract, yet still culturally relevant we brought them back, virtually, creating a Dove girl group.

We brought the Dove virtual girl group to short video and social platforms and using the popular ACG (Anime Comic Gaming) format to develop a sing a long music video; inspiring our audience to dance and sing along with the Dove girls.

Furthermore, we co-operated with Mango TV on their hero IP, “Sisters who make waves” to deeply interpret the “sharing together” story, incorporating the dance from our music video as a selector of the next generation of Dove girls on the show. Amplified through social and KOLS to drive social talkability and conversion.

We succeeded in an Overall turn around, driving a total category rebound after Covid in Q1 2021 business,

• Q1 offtake value growth +8.8%, online sales +13.8%

• The overall reach 450 million people 15-40

• 62mil clicks to ecommerce, social buzz of 1.5million and 7million engagements, CNY Co-mention rate ranking NO.1 among chocolate category

Through our TA segmentation we reached 35mil new Unique Visitors and drove historical high CVR 0.6% and media ROI 3.42, vs 2020 CNY CVR 0.35 and ROI 2.58.