Client: Watsons
Product: Branding Campaign
Title: Your Beauty Your Choice
Media: Social Media
Country: China
Date Of Campaign: Jan 01, 2019

Background: “When was your last time to visit Watsons?” Watsons, founded in Y1841 & once the leading health and beauty retail brand in China was left behind by aggressive uprising e-commerce competitors. The brand has lost its growth momentum in consecutive three years. Members do not visit our stores anymore and the recall rate continues to decline. Watsons brand image is seen as outdated and less relevant to consumers. There is a big gap between an aging, conservative brand and the new emerging generation Z. In particular, our digitally empowered young females are no longer familiar with Watsons’ “look good, feel great” philosophy. The objective is to rejuvenate Watsons brand by injecting new meanings into our beauty philosophy to make it relevant to Chinese young women; re-initiate the conversation with them and eventually make them discover what new Watsons stands for and fall in love with Watsons again.

Idea: Gen Z spend much time on social platforms every day. We learned that they are facing real problems in current society with anorexia, anxiety and depression about their appearances. On one hand, they believe everyone is different and deserve beauty. On the other hand, the beauty definition is too narrow. They hated to live like others and wanted to appreciate who they are and take care of themselves. In China, 80% of young females ever considered taking plastic surgery in order to cater to the public opinion of beauty, and every year, there are more than 20,000 people suffering from failed plastic surgery.Is beauty valued as a society’s choice or your personal choice? It’s must be your choice. The brand speaks out loud: “Your beauty your choice”, to break the stereotype of the status quo. On behalf of young Chinese females who don’t have conventional public approved beautiful face, Watsons celebrates the individual differences and provide the stage for them to discover and show their own beauty.Instead of using celebrities, when we shot the brand video, we picked four girls as models who have squared face, small eyes, low nose bridges, freckles to represent the new Chinese beauty although they probably are more seen as ugly in most people’s eyes. We brought them to public places such as streets, restaurants, swimming pool where they normally feel less confident or comfortable to speak or do anything bold. We made them sing, dance, act boldly and proudly in front of camera to show their attitudes of “NO” to stereotyped beauty.

Results: The video has received 8 million views in just one day. On Sina weibo, the topic #your beauty, your choice# received more than 200 million views and generated 9,240,000 discussions. Celebrity like Charmaine She and KOL like “Thought focus” retweeted our post to support our point of view.The “My Beauty My Choice challenge” engagement video released on Tiktok app quickly attracted 220,000 Chinese young girls to participate and received 400 million views. In 10 days, the total views went up to 2.8 billion. This number exceeded Tmall (the biggest E-commerce brand in China) by 500 million views higher for their best engagement activity on Tiktok. The engagement activity received 43 million likes in total.