Why is this work relevant for PR?

In this campaign the PR strategy was truly integrated from the beginning. Utilizing our insights on how the Chinese audience works and behave on social media, we tailor-made a strategy designed for traction and engagement. The campaign reached over 100 million women in China in just 7 days, and garnered 184 PR stories, earning a reach of 1.1B. It started a tidal wave of positive consumer response, with over 54,000 consumers posting organically about the campaign on social media only 5 days after launch, the highest volume of earned posts for any brand initiative by SK-II to date.

Background

In 2015, SK-II launched #ChangeDestiny – a platform to empower women all over the world with the courage to break barriers, social stereotypes, to embrace individuality and create their own destiny. Since then, SK-II has continued to build on #ChangeDestiny by fuelling conversations around issues women face with campaigns such as “The Marriage Market Takeover”, “Dream Again” and “The Expiry Date”. With the latest installment, “Meet Me Halfway”, the brief was to continue building the momentum from earlier campaigns, and to further strengthen the connection with the target audience in China. Young women in China are still under tremendous pressure to get married, and SK-II wanted to support them by putting the spotlight on the issue, hopefully making it easier to talk about. The objective, as always, is to help make it easier for women to live life on their own terms.

Describe the creative idea (20% of vote)

In China, 8 out of 10 single women hesitate to travel home for Chinese New Year. When their family and relatives gathers, the nagging about finding a husband and starting a family reaches its peak, and for many, becomes unbearable. Besides cultural difference between daughters and parents, a major issue is the lack of communication, as it's generally frowned upon to oppose your parents. To help bridge the generational gap, global skincare brand SK-II encouraged three single women to open up and ask their parents to meet them halfway - both figuratively and literally. The initiative was documented and released on WeChat, where both parents and daughters are present. To get the conversation going, we asked influencers in the same situation to share their own personal stories in order to inspire others to do the same.

Describe the strategy (30% of vote)

We leveraged the insight that ‘young women feeling pressured to get married and because of this, experience a generations gap of understanding between themselves and their parents’ is not restricted to China. It is something women feel and face around the globe. We wanted to mobilize women’s voices in both western and Asian countries, to create a sense of unity and collective experience. We fuelled a conversational momentum from within China, and then expanded it to other regions of the world where the insight is stronger, even in the US where thousands of women engaged and responded to the message that daughters and parents can meet have way and find common ground even though they have different views on marriage.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

When it came time for the launch we collaborated with a number of creators and ambassadors important to the target audience. We worked with experts and endemic partners that could help set a credible vantage point for the debate, and created content with them to investigate the problem of marriage pressure and the generations gap as a root cause. The intension was to open the subject and create a diverse set of conversational angles that different people of different backgrounds could relate to -to make the target audience comfortable in sharing their own story. The strategy proved effective: compared to 2016’s “Marriage Market Takeover” the number of partnerships were six times less yet three times as effective in reaching consumers.

List the results (30% of vote) – must include at least two of the following tiers:

The campaign was quick to pick up momentum throughout China. Within 24 hours of its release, the film garnered over 18 million views, and the story became one of the Top 5 trending stories on Weibo, China’s second largest social network. The approach we took compelled consumers to engage and within 5 days of campaigning over 54,497 consumers took to social media to organically post the film and talk about the campaign, resulting in less than 0.5% negative sentiment because it was the women driving the story and the conversations organically. Since then, more than 75 million people have watched the film. It has received over 2.5 million social engagements across China, which is 60% more engagement compared to the top five Super Bowl ads of 2019. The film has recorded the highest volume of earned posts for any SK-II-brand initiative, with an organic global reach of over 1.18 billion.

Please tell us about the social behaviour and/or cultural insights that inspired your campaign

Even though young Chinese women are advancing like never before, educating themselves and becoming financially independent, they’re still expected to marry, settle down and become housewives before they reach 30. The fact that women’s worth is often tied to their marital status causes young single women to face enormous amounts of pressure, from society as a whole, and their families. This campaign was designed to spark a conversation about marriage pressure, and provide women with a clear way forward, by showcasing three encouraging examples of women who are taking the first steps of reaching out to their parents. This is no small feat in a country where freedom of speech is limited and the government itself has vested interest in keeping the status quo (In 2017, the Chinese government launched the term “Sheng Nu” that translates to “leftover woman” and has been used by state media to stigmatize unmarried women).