Brief Explanation

Chinese youths face immense pressure to conform to society’s expectations. As a result, they don’t feel confident enough to go against the flow, by fear of being judged and criticized for it. As a brand that aims to bring out the “ShiLiPai” (someone with strength and capability) in everyone, this was a perfect opportunity to start a relevant conversation with youths and change their perception of Head & Shoulders as their “parents’ brand”. With the objective of increasing relevance and engagement with youths, we created a simple phrase encouraging them to stand up for what they believe in, while reminding them what our product does: “Bu Xie”. In Mandarin, it means “No Flakes” and is also a word play that means “Don’t Give a Damn”.

Results and Effectiveness

“Bu Xie” became a social movement. Youths not only used our templates, but also started customising their own statements and creating memes. As business results are confidential, we have put them under confidential information session below.

Creative Execution

WeChat newsfeed ad was the key media reach driver for this campaign, Chinese youth consumers were strategically targeted based on the WeChat user segmentation profile at the age of 18-25, as well as their engagement behavior to make sure our branded content is relevant to them. The campaign has leveraged different paid and owned social media channels to maximize the exposure, including various music, fashion and celebrity social media influencers with over 10 million of followers in Weibo to amplify our campaign, their generation of own “Bu Xie” statement has attracted huge volume of additional campaign traffic from their followers.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Chinese youths aged 18-25 who perceive the brand as irrelevant to their lives, and not as innovative, aspirational and youth-oriented as our main competitor. To promote our campaign, we leveraged a platform that would reach them in the most effective way – WeChat – China’s largest mobile social media platform with nearly 600 million users, the majority of active users being youths. WeChat advertising was a highly targeted social targeting solution which allowed our ads to appear naturally on users’ newsfeeds, so they could click on an ad just as they would on a friend’s post, without disrupting the WeChat user experience.