The Campaign

Our answer was a nationwide WeChat mobile game that rewarded users the more they explored. To play, users simply needed to open Lee’s WeChat account. For every kilometer they travelled, they earned points. To incentivise youngsters to stay curious about every district of their city, we hid QR codes with bonus points in less-explored areas across Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Points could be used to unlock experience-based prizes for a variety of winter-friendly activities including coffee vouchers, movie tickets and an exclusive winter photography and cooking workshop with top social media key opinion leaders (KOLs) in China. In essence, the further users went, the more reasons they had to keep exploring.

Creative Execution

We leveraged Chinese users’ mobile behaviour and the built-in functions of WeChat to maximise the adoption of The Lee Warmth Tracker, a HTML5 game embedded in Lee’s WeChat account. Users across China participated by following Lee’s account and setting their hometown position via WeChat’s native “Share your location” function. Lee could then track users’ locations every time they visited the Lee WeChat account and reward them with points for the distance they had travelled since they had last opened the account page. During the two-month campaign, users unlocked incentives they had accumulated. All the incentives encouraged users to leave their homes to explore. To kick-start the campaign, a video series featuring KOLs pursuing their passions during winter were released to drive interest. QR codes with calls-to-action and bonus points were placed in OOH, print and prime locations of Tier 1 cities to further activate and encourage exploration and repeat participation.

We succeeded in connecting Lee’s “stay curious” and the characteristics of Lee’s new Magma Fusion collection with the brand’s target audience. During the campaign, participants checked in 161,032 times on the Lee Tracker WeChat game. The total distance participants travelled was more than 1.21 million kilometres, which equates to going around the earth 30 times. A total of 19,686 people acted on their curiosity and physically travelled and went out in the cold, using the Lee Tracker to capture their explorations throughout China. Lee’s WeChat fan base increased by 22 percent during the campaign period. The average redemption rate for all prizes was 34.4 percent while 100 percent of the movie coupons were redeemed. Lee’s KOL winter exploration videos were watched more than 958,000 times during the campaign.

There were two challenges the strategy had to overcome. Firstly, the competitive denim category calls for a new innovation every season and brands tend to communicate the functional benefits of their product. For Levi’s Warm Jeans it’s “keep warm and stylish” and for Uniqlo’s Heattech it’s “New! Heat Generating Clothing.” Secondly, we had to link Lee’s “stay curious” with the youth culture in China in a way that would make youngsters want to act on that curiosity. We would also have drive immediate and repeat behaviour offline for the entire length of winter. On the brand level, the key to achieving this was to steer away from putting Lee’s fabric innovation as the core message and hone in on the target audience’s behavior instead.