Unilever’s shampoo and soap brand Lux (力士 – Lìshì) has rolled out another campaign featuring the famous actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. The ad above shows the Welsh star promoting the new Lux beauty range in China.
The new commercial is based around Lux’s Chinese slogan of 让您光彩照人每一天! (ràng nín guāngcǎizhàorén měi yītiān!) which roughly translates to ‘Allowing you to shine everyday!‘.
However, this is not the first time Catherine Zeta-Jones has featured in a Chinese commercial for Lux. Last year she featured in a short film entitled The Alchemist (shown below) and has since become the main brand ambassador for the Lux brand in China and Japan respectively.
Unilever will be hoping this new campaign will bolster Lux’s market position against Procter and Gamble’s product ranges such as Head & Shoulders, Rejoice and Pantene Pro-Vwhich together account for around 40% of shampoo sales in China.
Japan, Korea and other countries in Asia have been using foreign celebrities to promote their products for a number of years. Yet, a recent press release from the Associated Press stated that foreign celebrity endorsement will now become an integral part of Chinese brand strategies as they try to establish themselves in their domestic and international markets.
This turn of strategy is likely to have come about as Chinese consumers now find themselves bombarded with, much like their Western counterparts, advertising everyday. It is quite incredible considering that 20 years ago the Chinese advertising industry barely existed.
The country is developing rapidly in certain regions and this has been reflected in the nation’s advertising spend on TV, radio, newspapers and magazines which grew 14 percent last year to 597 billion RMB (around £5.4billion) – a truly colossal sum.
On my first visit to China I spent much of my time in Anhui Province (central China) and it was not until after a few months later that I visited Shanghai. I found the difference between Chinese people outside Shanghai and those living within the city was quite striking. The citizens of Shanghai are like ‘Westerners’; the way they walk, the clothes they wear, the food they eat, and the technology they use is so different to the majority of Chinese people living elsewhere.
A recent survey of 15,000 Chinese consumers by McKinsey & Co. found that Chinese consumers are now “extremely brand conscious.” They demand the same things that any other consumer living in a developed country would.
These demands have arisen quickly, but advertising in China is still catching up – many people forget that China is still a developing country. In the US and UK brands have to be extremely innovative now to break through the advertising smog, but in China advertising is still relatively new and celebrity (particularly foreign) endorsement strategies currently have much greater effectiveness than they would in the western hemisphere.
To that end here are some examples of celebrity endorsements in China to date:
Ads of China // 中国广告 