Creative Execution

The Pantene Praise Project (developed in collaboration with Grey Hong Kong) invited everyone to support women for making their own life choices. We developed a mobile site where people’s thumbprints were captured and transformed into beautifully illustrated digital cards. Participants could send these cards as messages of encouragement across social networks to female friends or family members, creating a positive show of collective admiration. Using WeChat and QQ, the most popular social platforms in China, these messages of praise became a co-created social movement that showed how Pantene truly understood the modern Chinese woman and encouraged them to Shine Strong.

With so many women sharing messages with each other and their circle of friends, the Praise Project became powerful branded content that showed how Pantene was an enabler of positive thinking. Our mobile platform fit in perfectly with the lifestyle and behavior of our tech-savvy audience, who love to share content they like with friends. We provided an intriguing engagement mechanism (thumbprint simulation) along with a chance to share something meaningful. The Praise Project mobile activity achieved over 28 million engagements on the campaign site--a historical high for the brand! It also met our key objective of beating previous campaign KPIs. Almost 10 million people shared or liked the praise cards through the mobile WeChat platform and positive sentiment online increased greatly, boosting brand awareness and relevancy, especially among young female consumers.

Women in China are always told they must live for others. China's one-child policy means girls carry many expectations, and women often struggle with self-doubt. Receiving praise is uncommon in Chinese culture, especially for women who go against societal expectations. To make Pantene “The brand that really knows me”, we wanted to celebrate women with the inner strength to choose their own paths and encourage them to embrace their differences, regardless of social stigma. Chinese female consumers viewed Pantene as old fashioned-- irrelevant for young, dynamic women. We wanted to make Pantene relevant again and build a strong brand relationship through a meaningful topic that modern women could identify with. Our campaign needed to increase engagement and position Pantene as a market leader, helping women shine from the inside out. Since the majority of people in China access the Internet via mobile, we chose this platform to execute our campaign.