Insight
You would think a country that has become the second largest economy in the world would have plenty to smile about?
While China’s rapid economic development has lifted millions out of poverty, it has come at a cost – People in China are just not as happy as they used to be.
Using mobile and integrated content Zhonghua helped its audience find their reason to smile, re-energising their perception of Zhonghua and transforming the business along the way.
Leveraging the female audience’s love affair with mobile and in particular how they use selfie photo apps to not only engage the audience but also use mobile selfie apps to drive reach and scale for the brand.
With over 65% of Chinese female mobile owners using selfie apps (source: enfodesk and analysys international, 2014) and photo apps one of the most popular downloads (source: her.91 2013 survey), they were the perfect platform to generate more Zhonghua smiles in China. Zhonghua took up the challenge to generate more smiles when the audiences are using their mobile to capture and share photos.
Strategy
The brand’s audience of young post 80’s urban Chinese have spent most of their lives striving for success in an ever-competitive landscape. The result? While material wealth has improved living environments, it has not necessarily improved quality of life. The stressed out younger urban Chinese audience feel they have less reasons to smile.
A smile is contagious - when you see someone smiling, you can’t help but smile back.
This simple idea was the basis of the campaign, creating three pillars to help the audience find their reason to smile, share their smile and spread smiles to others.
Find Your Reason to Smile.
Using online branded content to reach, engage and inspire the audience to find their reason to smile, despite the odds. Zhonghua created an 8-minute film, starring China’s Julia Roberts, Yao Chen, in a story that struck a chord with the young urban female audience.
Share Your Smile: Partnering with Story Camera, China’s leading picture app owned by Tencent, Zhonghua added a first of its kind innovation the app. Creating ‘smile-fie’ technology, that prompted and detected the strength of a smile in the selfie
Spread The Smile To Others: Linking the Find Your Reason To Smile campaign to Zhonghua’s social cause – sponsoring corrective surgery for Chinese children born with cleft palates.
Execution
The centrepiece of the campaign is an 8-minute short film, starring China’s Julia Roberts, leading actress, Yao Chen. The story centres on Yao’s character, a world-weary photographer burnt out by urban life. Gaining a glimpse into her future, coupled with the wise words of a worldly newspaper street vendor, Yao’s character understands the importance of finding her one reason to smile.
Using the branded content as inspiration PHD also provided the audience with a platform to share their own smile. Partnering with Tencent’s selfie app, Story Camera, PHD created a new tool for the photo app users to make it easier to capture their best smile and share with friends.
Zhonghua’s Smile-fie App within Story Camera added an automatic smile powered picture taker to the existing app. Users would simply have to frame themselves in the picture and give their best and brightest smile. Upon detecting the smile, Story Camera automatically took the picture. No button’s to press; just look, smile and Zhonghua did the rest.
Zhonghua also created additional filters and frames for your selfie, making it easier to share with friends by gamifying the experience using the power of your smile to generate smile points. This encouraged the audience to only send their friends their strongest and highest scoring smile.
To encourage more smiles, points and shares, Zhonghua linked the smile points to its social cause, providing corrective surgeries for children born with cleft palates.
Through gamifying the experience and generating share smile points via the app, Zhonghua has returned the smile to five children in rural China who were born with severe cleft palates.
Results
Through the simple power of a smile, Zhonghua was able to transform its brand in China.
Using inspiring branded content Zhonghua’s “Find Your Reason To Smile” film attracted over 27 million views across online and mobile.
Bringing the idea in the film to life through the innovative Zhonghua Smile-fie innovation with photo app Story Camera, the brand was able to engage and extend the reach of the campaign. Over 1.9 million filters and selfie photo frames were downloaded and used an 2.5 times per asset, with over 2.7 million photos shared across different SNS platforms including Weibo, WeChat and Zhonghua brand platform, generating over 8 million retweets.
The campaign had immediate effect on Zhonghua’s business with the brand increasing sales 24% vs. same period previous year and outstripping category growth by 20%, delivering an impressive ROI of 790%.
However it is the smallest number that means the most. Through the smile points generated by this smiling and engaged audience, Zhonghua was able provide corrective surgeries to five children, helping them discover their smile for the first time.