Mother’s Day is one of the most important shopping festivals in China as Chinese have become accustomed to expressing gratitude to their mothers through gifts.

Many skincare brands use celebrities or offer big price promotions and invest a fortune in their advertisements.

Instead of following the crowd, Chando, a Chinese skincare brand, chose to inspire Chinese women with the real meaning behind Mother’s Day.

Numbers of creative assets have been shared through multiple media channels to create hot topics and drive conversations among the target audience in social media, building an awareness and love for the brand.

Competition in the Chinese skincare market is becoming increasingly fierce, with over 8,600 brands in China in 2016 and 2.4 new products entering the market every hour. To compete, all brands – deploy a diverse set of communications tactics to drive sales, especially during shopping festivals which are heavily targeted as gifting opportunity by all marketers.

Our communications objective was to create hot topics in social media with campaign exposure of over 60 million viewership and to encourage social conversations with Chinese women with an aggressive target of increasing engagement rate by 100%.

Our business objective was to triple ecommerce sales* during the five days of the campaign. (*as compared with non-campaign period. )

Looking to Chinese culture, we identified a well-known traditional notion, “your physical body is a gift from your parents”, and all daughters inherit specific looks or features from their mothers. There are always some unique common features between mother and daughter.

Our creative idea was to leverage ‘plastic surgery lines’ embedded with a love letter from a mother to her daughter. We found three real Chinese women to feature in this campaign. At the first glance, it seems these 3 young women were going to have plastic surgery on different facial features but when you have a closer look, each set of surgery lines is actually a love letter from her mother, sharing the beautiful family story behind her daughter’s unique features.

Received wisdom in Chinese society about what represents female beauty is best captured in one phrase: “Big eyes, straight nose and oval-shaped face”. This stereotype of beauty is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Mass media has created an illusion that women achieve more if they are pretty.

Many reports indicate more and more young Chinese women have considered or gone through cosmetic surgery, especially in the age of 18 – 25 who are easily influenced by mass media (our target). To them, plastic surgery is the obvious shortcut to get things done and to enable them a fantasy and confidence in a short time.

Chando wanted every woman to believe that she was born beautiful. Chando’s strategy was to leverage Mother’s Day, a day to express gratitude towards all mothers, to inspire young Chinese women to appreciate the unique features they were born with, through multiple social media channels.

The campaign period lasted from May 9 to May 13, the Mother’s Day.

We customized the creative idea for specific each media channels:

Giant Outdoor Posters: This media was selected to initiate the campaign, located at popular shopping malls in Shanghai to precisely reach our targets. These stunning visuals were also designed to stimulate social sharing, extending the reach of the medium more broadly.

Animated Social Posters: Due to the small mobile phone screen size, we executed the creative idea in a different way by animating the surgery line stories with narration from the three women’s real mothers.

H5 on WeChat Moment: A H5 was developed to trigger our targets’ awareness with intriguing question as opening and engaged them further through making-of video.

All creative assets direct our targets to a discussion page on Sine Weibo, a social platform in China to share their stories.

Business outcomes: Sales of Chando e-commerce exceeded the agreed target by 118%, especially sales on the first day of the campaign which exceeded the target 15 times!

Impact: The “Beautiful Surgery Lines” discussion page on Weibo became a huge hot topic on the first day of the campaign and total viewership was 16 million.

Campaign Reach

- Campaign exposure: over 2 billion, exceeding our KPI by a huge 398%

- Engagement: over 1.4 million engagement, exceeding our KPI by almost 21 times

- Making of video: viewed by almost 60 million Chinese

- Earned media: over 30 media stories published including mass prints, celebrities, KOLs and major portals