The Campaign

This is the story of how we created China’s first successful “officially unofficial Weibo account” In China, where millions of people face the horror of bleeding gums every day, parodontax wanted to draw attention to the consequences of gum problems. But many a brand has died an untimely death on social media. Had we used an official Weibo account, we risked a fate similar to that of several thousand other brand Weibo accounts - Utter ignorance from consumers. And so instead of creating just another official Weibo brand account, we created Miss Tree -The first de-branded account for a real life brand. We intentionally kept parodontax communication to an inconspicuous level, allowing people to interact with Miss Tree in a branding free environment. As a result, millions became aware of the consequences of leaving gum problems untreated, and that parodontax was the best toothpaste to help them fight their gum problems Sales grew by 273% during the campaign period engaging 9million people!

The Brief

Broadly our target audience was people between 25-44 years of age, living in Tier 1/2 cities. More specifically they are people who value their social life and also maintain a good oral healthcare regime. These are people for whom social status is very important. For them, enjoying themselves is as important as taking care of themselves. These were also people with whom our competitor enjoyed significant resonance with Our goal was to make these people aware of the consequences of leaving gums problems untreated and convey that parodontax was the best toothpaste to help them fight their gum problems instead of competition

Creative Execution

To generate interest, we started with an offline promotion event-Tree Homicide. People were asked to look for clues to find who killed the tree. Instead of building a normal official account to post brand information, we created a humorous and mysterious online presence-Miss Tree, to be an ambassador of parodontax We directed traffic towards the Miss Tree account where people could post their responses to the clues and win grand prizes The Miss Tree Weibo account was integrated with other social platforms to tell a complete story. Sina Weibo-the hottest social platform, was made the central social content and engagement hub to aggregate different social touch points. Once excitement had built significantly, we launched a specially made TVC to drive further reach. Finally, a made-for-web video announced the unveiling of parodontax as the ultimate toothpaste to fight gum problems

Newly launched parodontax grew sales by 273% during campaign period. The campaign delivered best in class engagement scores for parodontax- -over 200,000,000 exposures, over 18,000 comments and over 114,000 re-tweets on Sina Weibo! We went from having 0 followers to having 94,693 followers in just 45 days! Earned Media- -100,000,000 exposures, 8,639,096 reads on WeChat and over 6,000,000 exposure on Guokr. We managed to make Miss Tree a self-sustaining platform for conveying the consequences of leaving gum issues untreated and also that parodontax is the best toothpaste to help you fight them parodontax had successfully managed to break through the clutter, engaging more than 9 million people and reaching out to more than 300 million

Social media has grown exponentially in China and every brand is using it to engage more people. The consumer receives multiple messages from multiple ‘official’ brand accounts every day. Being a new brand, we had to break through this clutter to be noticed. An official Weibo account would just be one among the many talking to the consumer and not likely to gain attention. And so, instead of creating just another ‘official’ Weibo brand account, we created Miss Tree - The first de-branded account for a real life brand We assumed the role of a humorous and mysterious online writer to interact with consumers and arouse their curiosity about the murder of a tree We used Tree as a metaphor for Teeth. Our message- Just like a tree falls when the soil under is weak, so do teeth fall when gums are weak We kept the conversation unbranded, to get people to engage with Miss Tree in a brand free environment