Cannes Lions
XIAOHONGSHU, Shanghai / SK-II / 2024
Overview
Entries
Credits
Background
Amid escalating international events and competitive pressures, the brand faced significant challenges in market performance and reputation. To re-engage past enthusiasts and enhance perceptions of its iconic Facial Treatment Essence, the brand aimed to create a groundbreaking, highly discussable marketing campaign to solidify its position as the dream skincare brand for Chinese women and resonate with young consumers.
Focusing on brand affinity, user engagement, and visibility, we leveraged platform analytics to tailor content that aligns with the emerging trend of female self-awakening and the pursuit of genuine beauty. The #MoreYouthfulAsYouAge campaign, co-created with influential photographers, featured five short films that depicted real-life challenges faced by women, disseminated across us and other social platforms.
This initiative not only reinforced emotional connections but also encouraged over 60,000 users to share high-quality content, significantly boosting the brand's impact and market share.
Idea
We reviewed all high-engagement topics over the past year and found over 4.5 million posts related to "Self Aspiration" (165x YOY) reflecting a growing sense of independence and social empowerment among Chinese female.
Additionally, #LiberateYourBeauty and skincare-related posts exceeded 15,000 with over 6 million interactions, revealing dissatisfaction with societal expectations that lead women to disguise or modify themselves. They are more interested in pursuing inner value and authenticity.
As the fastest-growing topic in women's issues (annual growth rate over 46,000x), it lacked any leading brand communication. Thus, we launched the first platform-based custom topic for women with commercial intent, rooted in user content preferences, introducing the highly social #MoreYouthfulAsYouAge. This topic played on the double meaning of "Zhuang," which means both makeup and pretending, highlighting the conflict with societal stereotypes of women. This campaign not only tackled industry trends around #LiberateYourBeauty but also subtly embedded product in the video content.
Strategy
The platform's top topics were sorted by metrics such as user posts, interactions, and topic exposure, and then categorized by content themes. This revealed rapid growth in women's empowerment. Based on the target audience, data collection analyzed user demographics, content preferences, interactive content characteristics, and personalized preferences across media-points and KOLs.
Analysis of data identified a societal trend among Chinese women towards inner confidence and authenticity, reflecting a desire to move away from traditional beauty standards and makeup-heavy expectations. By cross-analyzing keywords from recent posts on self-identity and emotional challenges with high-discussion brand keywords, we defined the themes for brand's short films, focusing on topics such as marriageable age, marital status, career choices, personal value, and external judgment.
Beyond the brand's fans base, we used platform audience overlap to identify related groups, eg: luxury seekers, extreme outdoor enthusiasts. Ongoing tracking of topic interactions and video performance data provided fine-tuned strategies.
Execution
Based on platform data insights, we collaborated with the brand to brainstorm the campaign theme. Once #MoreYouthfulAsYouAge was established, we delved into five key challenges faced by women regarding Self-Aspiration, using these as the video content theme to boost user engagement and emotional resonance.
The campaign spanned nearly two months, starting with a teaser from the platform's official account matrix in mid-February 2024. The official brand video was launched on February 25, followed by the rollout of five themed videos, integrated with platform features like splash screens, trending topics, and community resources to maximize reach and engagement. Partnering with a variety of KOLs and KOCs, and leveraging interactive incentives matched to user preferences, the campaign encouraged sharing of personal stories about pursuing inner beauty and confidence.
It achieved over 400 million total impressions on the platform, with over 27 million views of the #MoreYouthfulAsYouAge topic, attracting over 60,000 high-quality posts.
Outcome
From early insights to brainstorming creative ideas, optimizing media resources, and planning audience segmentation, content production and scale of deployment, the brand collaborated closely with us throughout the entire process.
The campaign achieved over 400 million impressions, #MoreYouthfulAsYouAge topic garnering over 27 million views and attracting over 60,000 high-quality posts (compared to the platform average of 20,000 per topic), successfully achieving high brand engagement.
The brand's search popularity on the platform grew by 22% year-over-year, with related content receiving over 120 million views. The brand's click-through rate during the campaign period ranked top in the essence category. The campaign attracted and retained over 7 million platform-based audience assets, outperforming the top 5 brands in the industry by 12.8%.
The NPS rankings has significant improvement: within the essence category, the brand ranked 4th, up by 45 places compared to before the campaign, and new post ranked 13th, up by 32 places.
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