Yue Sai Buzzed my Blog

"Girls seriously, how could we make it without make-up?"

Most digital strategies fail to impress my brilliant mind, but there are glorious times when I am truly amazed and break business routine to blog about it. And this is how L’Oreal Yue Sai’s social media strategy buzzed the blog of an overwork lady temporarily away from her beloved Shanghai.

Yue Sai Kan, a Chinese woman born in Guilin, raised in HK and US founded the eponymic cosmetic brand Yue Sai  in 1992 to cater to the skin & tastes of Chinese women.

L’Oreal – which does not need an introduction unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 20 yrs, bought Yue Sai in 2004 and took it to the next level with a greater use of natural ingredients.

Yue-Sai Kan by Andrew Rowat

In 2010, how to reach out to a younger and edgier population of active Chinese women?

Yue Sai needed a virtual lifting as it had never been very active online according to the brand marketing director Michelle Kwok.

Early in june, L’Oreal launched Buzz my Heart, a serie of 8 webisodes starring 3 young women (4 would be too SATC right?) each of them encountering different life  and love problems of course.  I remember this strategy was actually used around last year by Maybelline in the US and the scriptwriter was..Candace Bushnell herself, – the author of Sex and the City. How will it go in China ?

If girls busy with love and make-up may sound shallow, this is nonetheless adequately good marketing : content placement, cinema-like quality videos, online penetration out of the brand website on Yoka, soft seduction with no brand mention until the 5th episode…

You can watch the 5th episode here. I’m off to a mani-pedi now.

Buzz my Heart

Client : Yue Sai – L’Oreal
Agency : Wunderman
More ? L’Oreal Freshens Up Yue Sai’s Image with Edgy Web Series

July 14, 2010 | BuzzandtheCity | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments »

Brands : so you think you can ‘blog’?

 leviscloud
 
 
It is no news brands and companies are struggling to find alternative and cost-effective ways to sell, survive and possibly stand out in the over-crowded world wide web.
 
Following that Darwinism trend, the model
companies – sell to- customers
seems to become
brands – talk to / with – people
 
(the “with” is very important. At least, some have started picking up on that.)
 
As the second model relies largely on social media (because this is what you want, “socialize”, right?) now brands are beginning to open blogs to reach to the Chinese consumers.
 
I’d love to quote a phrase in article the 7 deadly sins of blogging featuring on excellent blog Copywriter :
“You know that guy at the party who just refuses to shut up? The one who lectures you for 45 minutes about his Warcraft collectible figurines, without ever noticing that you’re desperately wishing you had a cyanide pill so you could quietly end it all?

Don’t be that guy.”

Since brands are stepping in the blogosphere, they might want to apply the same principles :
 
1. Give before asking or taking. Don’t be selfish
2. Provide valuable content.
3. Engage in a dialogue, talk about them and not about you
4. Don’t be boring
 
 
When we take a look at the Levi’s blog in China, it appears none of these principles were applied
 
Hello Levis !

Hello Levis !

I can’t help but think :
- What’s in it for me?
- Content is too much text and looks corporate. I do not want to click through.
- 4 articles talking about Levis : Brand story, Levi strauss and the 501 product story (+ 1 article “hello world” which is actually the default wordpress article whenever you open a blog…(sigh)
 
Seems like we have a Levis blog talking about Levis product…
 
No offense but just because setting up a wordpress blog is easy does not mean you have to do it if you don’t know how to have a strategy and :
 
1. Build content : Give something, aka valuable and entertaining content
2. Build context : the content based on your universe. Levis could bring for example news like hipsters trends or whatever close to the brand
3. Engage in a dialogue by providing a mix of brand stories/news/original content
4. Go online when you are ready…
 
 
Now the good thing is that as it seems it’s just getting started, Levis blog (and many others) can still change their strategy before investing too much time and energy into something that will make them say
 
“Blogging does not work for brands.”
 
 
1 cookie point for blogging, but for the rest, go back to your room and finish your homeworks.

Other articles

 
 
 
October 26, 2009 | BuzzandtheCity | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

The Extinction of Badvertising – Part III : The Transporters

 

cab ads

 

I’ve been meaning to write this article for a long, long time. When it comes to transportation in Shanghai, what options do we really have?

 

x Walk. I love walking, but it’s not always the fastest way to go from A to B, especially if you are unfortunate enough to go to Pudong.

x Bike. Have you seen my logo? Do I look like a bicycle person ? Not really, and frankly the way people drive around here does not make me want to become one.

x Scooter/Motorbike. As much as I enjoy the fact that nobody will arrest you if you’re not wearing a hammer, it’s not safe for anyone. I do love Vespas though, so I might think about it.

x Bus. It might come as a shocker, but I took the bus several times in Shanghai. At night when it’s empty it’s not so bad if you don’t miss your station.

x Subway. I don’t even know where is the nearest station from where I live.

x Cab. Probably the most used transport way, as most of us lazy foreigners don’t own a car here.

 

There come the Taxi Ads. I believe one day, a Madman took a cab and thought :

 

“Wow, look at how many people use cabs everyday..If we could find a way to exploit it…Eureka! Let’s put video screens in cabs. People will have no choice but watch it. Let’s make the turn off button very, very small and inconvenient. Hm, no actually, let’s take it off. Brilliant!”

 

Intrusive? I admit I have touched the screen a couple times when stuck in traffic ;  my ipod was out of battery and none of my friends would answer their phones – bored, yes. But I was even more bored after I discovered most games or videos are not very entertaining – it’s all about product review and flat description. Cool…

 

But it must work obviously, because I also have very clear images in my mind of Josh Hartnett for the latest Armani perfume and I’m glad to know Barbie gives cooking class. So I would say this is effective for a brand/product awareness.

 

Wait. What kind of awareness ? This kind of branding might be sticky for sure, but does it give a good, positive feeling? If I’d be spending between 120 000 rmb-250 000 rmb/month for running my little video in 1000 cabs, I’d appreciate some sympathy.

 

My point : when advertising is ready switch to an inclusive – not seclusive, marketing, and move from “me me me” to “you” and “us”, then maybe we’ll have some real experience and won’t feel like white mouses under some experiment.

Until then, when I take a cab, first thing I do is switch off the screen – or turn off the sound.

 

Related articles

City to silence taxi video ads

Annoying Taxi Ads on the Move?

October 10, 2009 | BuzzandtheCity | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Social Media Love Theory

 

 

Social Media Love Theory by BuzzandtheCity

Social Media Love Theory by BuzzandtheCity

 

 

Last night in a beautiful sunday dusk, I shared a few martinis with a good friend of mine who was telling me how much in love he was with this girl.

The thing with people in love : they feel the need to justify and explain in details how much love they feel and why.This is just magic – even just to watch it happen.

And then as if he was a life-long researcher in medicine who just discovered a revolutionary cure, he started drawing on a napkin his newfound theory about love.

 

“This is two circles, he said while drawing. The one on the left is her, and this is me. These 2 circles represent our worlds. Then at the center, love is where our worlds meet.

This shared part is my world with her, and this one is her world with me. But most important is the part of our new world that has nothing to do with our current worlds and which is what we create and build together.”

 

Honestly I find this definition of love brilliant – romantic and analytic. The fact that my friend managed to define love between two people by using 3 circles wowed me.

 

Then here I am thinking about this love theory applied to brands interaction with consumers - yes, I’m a bit obsessed with work lately.

And I found this is exactly the mirror of what social media can do entertwined with a brand :

 

The ideal relationship between a brand and its consumers is a loving one. We must get rid of old school marketing archaism, where the engagement with the customer is a post-engagement, and move to an “inclusive marketing” in which there is a conversation rather than a monologue (full article from Customer Collective here )

 

I believe social media is the best way to re-create these love circles. To paraphrase my friend :

On one side, there is the users world. On the other side, the brand world. Then through social media (love) two worlds meet to share a part together in each other’s world. But moreover, social media will provide a whole new space belonging exclusively to both of them and thus creating the new “inclusive” experience.

 

My best wishes to my friend and his sweetheart xx

 

For more on Social Media, visit ZeroDegrees and SocialMediaToday

September 14, 2009 | BuzzandtheCity | Tags: , , , | 10 Comments »

What Google says about you

 
bigbrother2 
 
 
I often Google myself. Not that I am a total self-obsessed person, but I like to manage my image just in case people want to get information about me. As in the “real” life, I have a “rep” to protect : mine.
And, let’s be honest for 2 seconds and face it : we all do it. Ok maybe not ALL of us. Only 47% of people google themselves, while 53% google others*. In US, 45% of recruiters use social networks, while 35% disqualified candidates after having access to their profiles. 29% of IT and services companies use Facebook, 26% LinkedIn and 21% MySpace**. That makes me think. I also Baidu-d myself and got different results..funny
 
Control the information
 
This is a basic. Yes, you want some people to find you when they Google you. But do you want anybody (random strangers, potential recruiters, clients) to know about your pet diet, your sexual orientation, your religion, who you know and see your last very flattering party pictures?
My advice would be to never, ever put such information on the net. You just don’t know who can have access to it and how they can use it. Trust me, you don’t. A friend of mine was seeing this lady who has a high position in the police. She cracked his facebook account to check if he was messaging other girls…No comment…
Depending on the level of privacy wanted, you might also change your name on your Facebook profile, refuse to appear on search results, be invisible (my favorite) or settle a dedicated email address that can prevent people from finding you with your email (a sneaky one I admit). This is true about Facebook and about any decent social network. Be sure to check privacy checkings before uploading any personal information.
 
Manage your reputation
 
So, you still can’t help to do status updates and tell about your holidays of debauchery in Thailand or your sister’s wedding (sigh..) at least manage who has access to it :
 
x Google yourself and see results
x Pick the ones you want to keep and shut down the others
x Go to all your social networks profiles account and adjust the privacy settings
x Google yourself again to check if it is effective
x Brand yourself in a positive way (the ME 2.0. article is great, check it out) 18% of the previously mentioned companies said they decided to hire a candidate after checking their profiles on different networks.
 We live in a world of first impressions and appearances. Virtual information is still “real” and it can have an impact on your “real” life. Both of them - virtual and non virtual, mesh thus matter.
 
 
(*) Pew Internet study (dec 07)
(**) Harris Interactive for Careerbuilder.com (aug 09)
 
 
August 19, 2009 | BuzzandtheCity | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments »