How Communications is helping Sukin, Australia's No.1 selling 'natural' skin care brand in pharmacies, to connect with young Chinese consumers with a mega on-trend creative marketing campaign. We launched Sukin ‘Plant-type Youth’ campaign on Weibo yesterday and we are excited to see 200k+ views overnight.
With a brief from Sukin to engage with young Chinese consumers to increase the understanding of the brand and its products, our task was to create an appealing & culturalized brand image to engage with Chinese consumers.
The idea came from the trend among young Chinese to create new words to describe and categorize the characteristics of their generation, such as ‘Buddha-like youngsters' (佛系青年), ‘Animal-type Boyfriend/Girlfriend’ (动物系男友/女友). These words always become popular on social media and stimulate large user-generated content.
HowComms team came up with the concept of ‘Plant-type Youth’ (植物系青年) to reflect the brand essence of Sukin as ‘natural’ and ‘extracted from plants’. While each plan has its own characteristics/personality, they are always natural and healthy (自然治愈) just like the Sukin brand.
We selected 9 plants that are key ingredients in Sukin products and engaged with a cartoon illustrator to ‘personalize’ them. Why 9? That’s the maximum amount of images that one could post for each WeChat and Weibo post.
Another challenge was how could we make sure each single individual could find the ‘plant-type youth’ relevant? Referring to the theory of ‘Enneagram of Personality’, a model of the human psyche which is principally understood and taught as a typology of 9 interconnected personality types, we endowed each ‘plant-type youth’ is with one characteristic role of the nine types, ensuring that audience could always relate themselves to one or several ‘plant-type youth’.
The characteristics of each ‘plant-type youth’ also reflect the functions of each plant, to subtly educate audience on the benefits of Sukin’s natural plant ingredients.
The campaign is currently running on WeChat and Weibo. We also partnered with the fashion glossary Cosmo China to hold Sukin beauty classes in top universities in Beijing and Shanghai to promote the campaign and drive traffic from offline to online.