Nowadays branded content is one of the popular new approaches for brands, both international and domestic, to engage consumers in China. However, struggling with the balance between brand’s role and content itself, most brands so far have found their efforts bringing little impact compared to the expectation put into them. The reason behind it is that Chinese consumers are very sensitive about if the content is ‘too obviously commercial’ or the brand/product itself is ‘too weirdly placed’. All of this makes ‘authentic’ and ‘believable’ content the biggest challenge in front of anyone who aims to engage consumers with branded content in China.

On the other hand, as TV media is becoming overly expensive, internet has become the the main channel for brands to publish their content, which, in result, requires a meticulously crafted digital media plan another key factor to unleash the full engagement value of branded content.

We decided to use the 'family portrait' as the vehicle to push people for more efforts in their engagement on CNY so as to bring the ‘family’ back to the ‘family reunion’. We shot a mini film about how family misunderstandings had made parents and children drift apart. And then we brought the three generations back together through the bonding power of family portrait. As a result, the film received 1,874,607 views, and it was voted as 1 of the 7 most touching Chinese New Year brand films, the only one from digital camera category (Source: SocialBeta.com).

With only 13% of last year’s campaign media budget, Nikon achieved 3 times more engagement performance compared with last year:

The campaign film received 1,874,607 views, and it was voted as 1 of the 7 most touching Chinese New Year brand films, the only one from digital camera category (Source: SocialBeta.com)

3,520,812 topic conversations were generated, among which only 23,204 conversations were directly linked to online opinion leaders, indicating strong interest from the public

53% of the total conversations mentioned that people are either going to take a proper family portrait this year or they have already done it because of the campaign

471,258 consumers shared their family portraits or stories with Nikon

CCTV Channel 1 and Channel 13, as well as 15 newspaper titles, reported the campaign, generating PR value estimated to be more than US$ 2 million. (Source: Nikon)

Nikon’s D-SLR category sales grew by 5.5% in the campaign month, turning around 3 months of consecutive negative-growth. Comparing the media cost per camera sold with last year’s performance, Nikon made this year’s media investment 4.35 times more effective. (Source: GfK; CTR)

As a result, Nikon managed to move its total market share from 24.9% to 26% . (Source: GfK)