In 2015, SK-II launched #ChangeDestiny – a platform to empower women all over the world with the courage to break barriers, social stereotypes, to embrace individuality and create their own destiny. Since then, SK-II has continued to build on #ChangeDestiny by fueling conversations around issues women face with campaigns such as “The Marriage Market Takeover”, “Dream Again” and “The Expiry Date”.

With the latest instalment, “Meet Me Halfway”, the brief was to continue building the momentum from earlier campaigns, and to further strengthen the connection with the target audience in China. Young women in China are still under tremendous pressure to get married, and SK-II wanted to support them by putting the spotlight on the issue, hopefully making it easier to talk about. The objective, as always, is to help make it easier for women to live life on their own terms.

In China, 8 out of 10 single women hesitate to travel home for Chinese New Year. When their family and relatives gather, the nagging about finding a husband and starting a family reaches its peak, and for many, becomes unbearable. Besides cultural difference between daughters and parents, a major issue is the lack of communication, as it's generally frowned upon to oppose your parents.

To help bridge the generational gap, global skincare brand SK-II encouraged three single women to open up and ask their parents to meet them halfway - both figuratively and literally. The initiative was documented and released on WeChat, where both parents and daughters are present. To get the conversation going, we asked influencers in the same situation to share their own personal stories in order to inspire others to do the same.

In China, marriage pressure is a topic on a lot of people’s minds, but usually it’s centered on how to avoid talking about it. Our theory is that no problem will get resolved by remaining unaddressed so we wanted to go in the opposite direction and take on the issue heads-on. 

Throughout the years of working with the client we have travelled China together and gotten to know the young ambitious women of the target audience through countless interviews. This has been combined with the data from the larger surveys we have conducted. As a result we discovered that marriage pressure has driven a wedge between many young women and their parents. This is a highly topical issue and very relatable. We strove to not only shine a light on the issue but to provide a way forward.

In order to make the film more easily relatable we decided to shoot a documentary style film featuring three real women and their parents. In the movie we emphasised meeting halfway by having the daughters and their parents meeting in a physical place, halfway between their normal residence.

When it came time for the launch we collaborated with a number of creators and ambassadors important to the target audience. These partnerships were designed with quality over quantity in mind and the most important aspect was to make the target audience comfortable in sharing their own story. The strategy proved effective: compared to 2016’s “Marriage Market Takeover” the number of partnerships were six times less yet three times for effective in reaching consumers.

The campaign was quick to pick up momentum throughout China. Within 24 hours of its release, the film garnered over 18 million views, and the story became one of the Top 5 trending stories on Weibo, China’s second largest social network. The approach we took compelled consumers to engage and within 5 days of campaigning over 54,497 consumers took to social media to organically post the film and talk about the campaign, resulting in less than 0.5% negative sentiment because it was the women driving the story and the conversations organically.

Since then, more than 75 million people have watched the film. It has received over 2.5 million social engagements across China, which is 60% more engagement compared to the top five Super Bowl ads of 2019. The film has recorded the highest volume of earned posts for any SK-II-brand initiative, with an organic global reach of over 1.18 billion.