Chocolate was only introduced into China in the 1980s. Even after 40 years of growth, the per capita consumption of chocolate in China in 2017 was only 0.1kg, only a fraction of that in more mature markets like UK (7.6kg), US (4.4kg), or Japan (2.3kg). One of the primary barriers to unlock further growth for the category is the lack of a daily consumption occasion - top occasions for chocolate are giving as gifts to loved ones and attending to guests at home. As the category leader, Dove identified the workplace as a promising daily consumption occasion to tap into - we wanted to build it a habit for the Chinese consumers to eat chocolate at work. The objectives were two-fold: to increase salience and interest in our campaign, and deliver sales and penetration growth.

Workplace is not just about achievements and success, but also stress and anxiety - 93.4% of Chinese people claim that their negative emotions come from the workplace. As a brand that represents pleasure, Dove can help with Chinese workers’ negative emotions with chocolate, a snack that can increase the level of dopamine and, in turn, create pleasurable feeling.

While we know Chinese office workers don’t yet have a habit of reaching for chocolate when they experience negative emotions, they do turn to video content for a little escape. So we asked ourselves, can we interrupt their break sessions with videos that can make them feel the pleasure of chocolate directly?

Introducing Scientifically Proven Oddly Pleasurable Commercials – videos that melts away your workplace low emotions, just the way chocolate does.

Our target audience is workers across China, and they constantly experience negative emotions at workplace. When they do, they turn to social media (e.g. short video platforms like Tik Tok) for an escape to disrupt the stress and anxiety, thus social and digital media are important touchpoints to reach them.

Secondly, they would also get out of the office building and have some fresh air or have a cigarette, during which elevator media are also inescapable touchpoints.

In addition, when they crave for treat and snacks, they would also go to nearby CVS or order on “online-to-offline” (O2O henceforth) platforms.

In summary, in order to reach our target audience at touchpoints that can help build the brand’s association with the workplace, we leveraged digital/social media, elevator media as well as CVS & O2O platforms to create a unique consumer experience.

At the core of our campaign are two “oddly pleasurable commercials” - audio-visual experiences that can trigger pleasurable feelings in the viewers’ mind by generating dopamine. We collaborated with Paul Zak, neuroscientist and professor at Claremont Graduate University, and worked with him from the start.

In the beginning, Paul shared valuable insights about why elements in oddly satisfying videos can create pleasurable feelings in viewers mind. Based on these learnings, the team designed a range of different audio and visual concepts using items in workplace, and fed them into Immersion - a patented real-time neuroscience methodology. Using only modern smart watches, immersion can infer and capture brain activity. With data generated live, we could make key creative decisions including how fast the ribbon spins, the sequence of colors, the choice of sound effects and soundscape, and more. By iterating the production process, we optimized the dopamine effect.

The campaign was a big success in both communication and business measure.

1)Achieved 4.9 billion impression, 111% vs. planned;

2)Our oddly pleasurable commercials achieved 9.7 million clicks with a CTR of

1.86%, 5 times vs. planned;

3)Purchase intention index on e-commerce and O2O platforms saw a whopping

376% increase;

4)Sales on O2O platforms saw an 45% growth.