In China, there is a chauvinistic trend on social media called 好嫁风 or ‘good for marriage’. Since there is a common notion of men 'marrying down', the term encourages women to diminish themselves so they are not too smart, too ambitious, or too successful for the average Chinese man. In a country where marriage pressure is immense, the term reinforced stereotypes of a woman’s only value being her ability to get married.

SK-II's long standing "Change Destiny" brand platform has advocated for women's right to choose their own destiny for almost a decade. To push the brand platform further, we decided to do something about 好嫁风 (‘good for marriage’).

To combat societal pressure in a country where people are often expected to abide my certain standards and not stand out, we needed to give women a safe space, a testing ground of sorts, to make life decisions that reflect who they truly are.

To do that, we created the skincare industry’s first interactive movie: My Destiny, My Choice.

The film stars you, the viewer and award-winning actress Zhang Zifeng as your best friend, you could navigate through twelve story paths and over 1 hour of playable content that covered life’s most important decisions. You could choose to either be ‘good for marriage’ or stay true to yourself.

Every choice allowed women to defy traditional marriage pressures and write their own narrative.

All within the digital space of video platform Bilibili, one that was safe, free from judgment and allowed women to navigate the experience at their own pace.

SK-II believes that women should have the right to choose their destiny. So we wanted to create a safe space for women to explore making their biggest life decisions for themselves, not to be ‘good for marriage’.

To ensure correct representation and depiction of the struggles women in China undergo, we interviewed 30 women all over China to understand their struggles. Many of those stories were later adapted into the script.

Through quantitative desktop research and the help of our Mainland China partners, Bilibili was identified as the platform where users go looking for opportunities to engage in a more immersive way with the content. On Bilibili specifically, a special ticker feature allowed viewers of our film to leave personal comments at moments that resonated with them and which could then be seem by the entire community at any point in time.

We had found our safe space.

The script was based on real experiences from interviews with 30 women, interwoven into one multi-dimensional story. The script was written by an all female team and brought to life by an all-female group led by award-winning female Chinese director He Wenchao.

Beyond the script, the experience included participation from actress Zhang Zifeng (your best friend in the film) and simulated phone calls and text messages from movie star Tang Wei.

Through the intentional selection of Bilibili as our core platform for hosting the experience, we could reach a substantial part of our cohort with the platform seeing 336 million average monthly active users, 52% of which are women.

Further more, the platform's real-time commenting was integrated so women could discuss their choices and have their perspectives appear live to everyone else watching.

“My Destiny, My Choice” was recognized as the “Most Played” video on platform Bilibili within a week of launch.

But it went beyond it's original hosting platform, gathering 480M mentions on Weibo, China's second largest social media.

It was picked as a official selection of Vogue China Film Festival.

And it made SK-II the #1 skincare brand on e-comm site JD.com, resulting in a important spike in sales.

But most importantly, we successfully challenged the derogatory term 好嫁风 ("good for marriage") by igniting a new trending term: “#hardtomarry”.