Dove’s Weibo Campaign Case Study: 47,000 Retweets, 34,000 Comments, Up 226% in Sales
For last year’s Chinese Valentine’s Day (or Qixi Festival) on August 6, Dove wanted to do something special to promote its chocolate gift set. It was a 2011 project but the agency which Dove appointed for the task is SapientNitro, who only recently uploaded the video case study on YouTube and shared it with us.
It’s worth looking at for anyone trying to market a product in China. What impresses me most, assuming this is true, is that the campaign is entirely free of paid media, proving that it is indeed possible to market a product on the cheap, substituting dollars with effort and creativity. The tools? Web videos, a weibo account, and Ma Jin, an industrial artist who was the central figure of the campaign.
To impress his then girlfriend (now his wife), Ma Jin wanted to build a carriage decorated using Dove’s heart-shaped tin boxes. He needed a lot of those to complete the carriage but for obvious reasons he didn’t want to buy them himself. So he used Weibo to seek help, asking others to donate their Dove heart-shaped tin boxes so that he could complete his carriage. Folks on Weibo were very helpful, so much so that he became a search trend named “carriage boy.” Naturally, the sales of Dove’s gift set also went up.
The results were pretty impressive, generating a whopping 47,683 retweets, 34,328 comments, and a 226 percent rise in Dove’s chocolate gift set sales during the Chinese Valentine’s day period last year. It was even reported in the papers. So that’s Ma Jin and Dove’s example on how you can use social media to market your products in China.
47,683ツイート→47,683リツイートの誤りです。失礼しました。