Haier

The challenge: Growth from a leadership position

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Haier leads the global home appliance market, and a wave of direct-to-consumer (DTC) challengers was competing for the same attention. To defend their market leadership and extend the brand's awareness and influence, its annual Global Fans Festival was the chosen vehicle. But with the festival in its fourth year, the obvious audience was already won, and real growth had to come from people who had never engaged with Haier before. Doing so across 16 markets, on a compressed timeline, against a high creative bar and a wide spread of time zones, made the execution as demanding as the ambition.

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Outgrowing three years of success required new audience pools.

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The audience that was largely untouched were younger and lived on TikTok, making it challenging to reach them through Haier's established channels. The campaign had to be purpose-built to suit TikTok's content mechanics and user behaviours, the most important of which is that user engagement comes from good trends that are participatory and not just watched.

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"Global" could not mean "uniform".

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A campaign spanning 16 markets had to account for both Haier's differing brand position in each and the cultural behaviours that drive sharing locally. For example, audiences in India respond to song and dance; while the mature Philippines market converts well through live interaction. Rather than treat localisation as translation, the team used TikTok's market trend reports and category training resources to read each market on its own terms before a single asset was made.

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Our strategy: Creating symbolism across borders, culture and language

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A gesture needs no translation, and is able to scale infinitely, and carries the brand without a logo. Using the 'H' in Haier to represent the campaign tagline "Hi, awesome life", the gesture anchored the whole campaign, from key visuals to TV commercials to branded stickers and filters built to pull fans into the action.

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The engine of the campaign was a TikTok gesture challenge fronted by KOLs across multiple countries, with the participatory mechanics tailored to drive engagement based on cultural and user preferences for each country. For example, the campaign in India used a celebrity-led gesture-dance challenge paired catchy lyrics with simple moves to tap into the market's passion for song and dance, while in Germany, we leaned on the hype of blind boxes by integrating a blind-box interactive game into the challenge.

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From there, the work was split into three main workstreams:

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• Differentiated communication strategies were layered into the TikTok UGC strategy. Using TikTok's trend reports, we built in new mechanics such as live streaming for the Philippines and TikTok Shop campaigns, and seasonal campaigns.
• Coordinating content output across stages so that paid and organic reach reinforced each other instead of competing.
• Template-based production resources were used to generate video creative at a high volume to keep the always-on campaigns running smoothly across 16 markets.

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The results

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• Brand awareness: 800 million impressions (+180% of target)
• High-quality UGC: 9 million user-engaged videos (+140% of target)
• Fan growth: 500,000 new fans
• Event interaction: 27 million interactions
• The festival also ranked among Facebook's top trending topics

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Building a multi-market engagement strategy? See how we can help you build one that speaks to your markets. Speak to our team here.