Insight
To overcome deep-rooted cultural traditions, Rejoice would need to use… deep-rooted cultural traditions. Tradition tells Chinese women to marry by 27, but in modern China, many women are too busy or shy to find love. The older they get, the more they’re deemed too old for romance.
Shampoo brand Rejoice wanted to help, but its global brand promise – Give Women The Confidence To Attract Any Man – was a cultural no-no as Chinese women who make the first move are labelled Lànjiāo (promiscuous). It had to overcome this cultural barrier and grow acceptance, all the while keeping close to the global brand positioning.
To express Rejoice’s message Mediacom identified a different cultural belief, one that could successfully counter the label of Lànjiāo: that for every woman there is one perfect man. In China, people believe that soul mates not only share interests, but actually share facial similarities as well.
Strategy
Rejoice needed to help China’s women find the man who was meant for them; to help them take the right actions to find their one true soul mate. To do so, Mediacom leveraged these young women’s addiction to social networks and gave them permission as well as the tools she needed to find love.
The platform was the ‘Rejoice-Cupid’ digital tool, a new way for Chinese women in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities to find love. ‘Rejoice-Cupid’ did all the hard work for the audience. It used social profiles and facial-recognition technology to create perfect matches based on personality, hobbies, and crucially in China, looks. In this way it could promote Rejoice’s message of ‘confidence’ and ‘attraction’ while keeping the brand on the right side of China’s complex cultural traditions.
Linked to her favourite social networks, participation on the ‘Rejoice-Cupid’ platform would be easy with no need to upload additional images or information. The only thing the audience had to do was click to see which of her social connections was the man for her.
To create interest in finding love and use of the ‘Rejoice-Cupid’ tool, Mediacom decided to kick start a national debate on why older women weren’t able to find love. To do that it used survey results to drive PR, both in mainstream media and on China’s thriving blogging platforms, beginning a provocative and animated conversation about what was keeping China’s late 20-somethings single.
The top answer from the survey – women were too shy (90%) to find true love – delivered massive PR coverage on China’s blogs / bulletin boards and offered the perfect validation and encouragement for taking action through a digitally-based solution.
Execution
Rejoice delivered love and romance to China’s women in three moves:
First, by releasing the survey results on an auspicious date – Single’s day in China. This created both a platform for debating social traditions as well as encouraging women to step out of their comfort zone and participate in the next stage of the campaign.
Second, it encouraged them to imagine themselves in love. Interactive viral videos allowed them to drop their own picture into a romantic film on China’s No 1 video site. They would then appear as the main character in the film and always get their dream date.
Finally, it gave them the tools to make this dream a reality. ‘Rejoice Cupid’ was launched on QQ-Weibo – China’s biggest social network – allowing members to find their “soul mate”, based on their looks, personality and hobbies.
Complex data analysis matched profiles within their networks, while media first use of facial recognition technology delved into profile pictures to assess the similarity of their looks. The campaign ended on another auspicious date – Valentine’s Day.
Results
China loved Rejoice’s message. It generated an amazing 120m engagements with the videos – far ahead of industry norms and P&G’s previous campaign best of 28m.
The videos were watched 94m times, 26m women used the ‘Rejoice Cupid’ tool and nearly 1 million couples were matched.
The activity attracted media coverage on CCTV and national satellite TV worth an estimated $600k.
Awareness rose rapidly, up more than 11% after just one month of activity.
Brand equity among the target audience went up 7% points, hitting record levels.
Sales soared and revenue rose by 11% year-on-year.
And almost best of all - for the romantic in all of us – Rejoice got thousands of letters from couples saying thank you.