A key goal was to communicated Galeries Lafayette’s central values of creativity and innovation, while offering direct interest and relevance to Galeries Lafayette’s Chinese consumer base.

Hence, instead of translating the concept from French to Chinese, we decided to tell Léon’s Christmas story on Chinese social media in a new and universal language - binary code.

By turning all of our social content into binary code, we aimed to transcend national and intergalactic cultural boundaries, setting Galeries Lafayette up as a bastion of innovation and creativity within the global retail space. An additional goal was for the binary code and associated image assets to stand out visually at a time when Chinese social media is typically saturated with overtly commercial content.

We launched the campaign on 14th December 2015 with a post from Léon declaring his takeover of Weibo.

During the five day campaign, Léon released daily posts about himself and his observations of Christmas, all written in binary code.

Léon popped up in regular Weibo content - such as 1920s archive images of the store and in-store product recommendations for intergalactic style.

Léon asked fans to follow Galeries Lafayette on Weibo and repost the campaign posts. He left a personal binary code comment on each new fan post. Fans were then instructed to send this code by private message to Galeries Lafayette’s “auto-translator” from which they received a personalised reply translated into Chinese.

Key Chinese fashion and travel influencers were directed to the campaign content, sharing this campaign with their audiences and delivering significant reach to targeted creative communities.

Léon announced five lucky fans who won a porcelain model.

Fan reaction was impressive. The campaign generated 11.4 million impressions as well as nearly 3000 interactions and 1900 new fans on Weibo. All based on an extremely slim client budget.

Qualitative feedback from fans showed they embraced Galeries Lafayette's creative approach and garnered 92% positive sentiment with the target audience of 18-30 year old fashion forward consumers.