The development of NEV in China has been far more rapid than that in other countries, which is reshaping the “old money” dominated car audience pool with more new future looking young generation. The traditional gasoline lubricant business has been facing big challenges as well. As a global lubricant brand, Shell felt the urge to update not just product portfolios, but also its brand image to match the fast-growing green agenda in China and build rapport with the young generation.

Lubricant is still a low involvement category where majority of Chinese car owners will leave to 4S maintenance shops to recommend. And technology stories about lubricants are boring. We need a new way to engage the new generation audience.

Select 4 different rare animals from the documentary series to create co-branded product pack. A set of limited peripheral products were released to promote both Chinese nature and Shell product. We adapted these cute, rare species into emoticons on WeChat to unlock the exposures in social chat.

A campaign TVC was broadcasted over leading national online and offline platforms to promote the beauty of mother nature as well as the new Shell Helix brand we were aiming to re-shape.

Celebrate the special collaboration with a set of NFT release. We had the four rare animals as the prototypes and derived over 100K variables for collectors, which will be rewarded a unique one based on a H5 personality test. To make the NFT meaningful, special CRM benefits was embedded into each digital collectable.

We found 70% of premium car owners like nature, dare to explore and love to try new things. Triggered by the three years Covid lockdown, they are craving for reconnecting to the natural wonderland. We observed the strong raise of travel-related content in the post-pandemic era.

Meanwhile, ¾ of audiences enjoy engaging with content IPs including not just stories, but also product and peripherals.

Based on these, we selected Discovery Channel, the well-known natural & science content creator, as IP partner, travelling to the hills of southern China, the snowfields of the north, the water towns of East China and the western regions, and jointly started a wild and interesting journey full of adventure and exploration.

We created “DISCOVER THE NATURE WONDERS” campaign powered by this special IP sponsorship.

We let IP empowered technology to create "new packs", "new peripherals", "new social networking", "new advertisements" and "new collections".

Phase1: Announced the cooperation of Shell Helix X Discovery and launch co-branded product pack via owned media. Meanwhile, co-branded emoticons and more than 30 co-branded peripherals unlock the exposures in consumers’ social scenario.

Phase2: Impactful exposure on TV and over 28 national coverage platforms to establish awareness. New 3D creative ad format was used so that the immerse experience can be enjoyed in the mass level.

Phase3: Leverage life information and navigation platforms to precisely catch car owners who love outing and drive camping while driving traffic to EC to promote new crossover products.

Phase4: Cooperate with Tencent to release branded NFT and the NFT is acquired through well designed psychological test, and each test selection will influence the collectibles’ design.

Phase5: Cooperated with variety of KOLs to further increase the awareness &interest of this Shell X Discovery special collaboration among different online communities.

Shell is the first in lubricant category in China to use NFT to engage with the young & trendy audiences. Over 100K visitors flooded into the NFT purchase channel within 10 second after the NFT was open to sell.

The brand won more than 300million impactful exposures with around 8million engagements.

WeChat search index broke 1 million, which was 5times higher than competitors on the launch date and had maintain the top 1 position throughout campaign period.

Business Results:

2B: We created a new record of total no. of purchase orders by dealers,which was far exceeding Helix history. The purchase volume of dealers in a single area exceeded 100million yuan,an increase of over30% compared with the last new products launch.

2C: Offline maintenance orders driven by the Discovery campaign accounted for majority of the total sales of the month. Offline sales achieved 5%growth comparing with the same period of 2021.