The social nature of WeChat grants luxury brands an opportunity to tell stories and engage with Chinese consumers personally (especially since it replaces email newsletters for most people in China). Taking into consideration the increasing importance of this platform, the editors of Jing Daily have picked the winners and losers of last week’s luxury and premium fashion campaigns on WeChat. We selected our choices based on pageviews* (those with the most and the least), originality, and the level of engagement. Since there are two types of accounts** you can have on WeChat, we also indicate the type of account.
In the comments section below, tell us what you think were the best and worst campaigns of the week.
Winners of the week:#
MCM: A millennial's travel guide#
Pageviews:#
6564
Likes:#
33
Account type:#
Service
MCM took the reader on a marvelous trip to Germany this week. Inviting Style-Notes fashion blogger Ling Xiao to lead the trip, MCM created a campaign that was, in essence, the blogger's travel journal, but the travel she was embarked on had a brand-specific focus. Ling was sent on a journey around Germany to various locations and to document her travels in pictures posing with a bag inspired by a given place. At the end of the post, Ling took it a step further by asking the reader to comment on their own memories of Germany. And the person with the comment she likes best will receive a special gift from MCM. This post is both information and picture rich, which satisfied the curious minds of Chinese travelers, perhaps buyers too, since all the bags mentioned in the post are available to buy on MCM’s WeChat boutique, which opened on May 23.
Fendi: Take your time to enjoy#
Pageview:#
17,884
Likes:#
76
Account type:#
Service
Entitled “Take YOUR Time!”, Fendi introduced six watches in different styles and encourages followers to take their time to enjoy the post. Featuring a video made by Vogue China, the main character is Fendi Girl, actress Jiang Xin, who appeared in the hit show "Ode to Joy." In the post, she personalized the watches by wearing them in different scenarios throughout the day. For example, the elegant Policromia is for early mornings at the office. The Momento Fendi Bugs is for the sophisticated young woman who knows the importance of enjoying her 4:00 pm coffee break. Filled with colorful GIFs, and accompanied by the fast beat of the video, it feels like the watches are going to jump out of the page as time ticks by. At the end of the post, readers are asked to engage and vote on their favorite watch.
Berluti: Exclusive update on WeChat#
Pageviews:#
1,794
Likes:#
16
Account type:#
Service
Berluti knows how to use WeChat to keep their fans updated. The brand had a clear purpose in this WeChat post, it announced the grand opening of a new store in Hangzhou, and rolled out three unique bags that were only made available for sale there. The post gave information about the address of the new store and a phone number for eager fans to attempt to get their hands on the one of the bags. The exclusivity of this offer is what got us.
Losers of the Week:#
Tory Burch: So close to “call to action”#
Pageviews:#
10129
Likes:#
22
Account type:#
Service
Tory Burch’s new post featured various styles of its signature Sawyer bag and gave consumers advice on how to wear them in different scenarios. But once it created these creative posts, it didn’t give any direction for readers on how to purchase a bag. Considering how important a metric a call to action rate is to the success of a company's campaign, it's almost essential to have it at the end of a post. For luxury brands like Tory Burch with no China e-commerce presence, a retail address or store phone number would go along way to helping the reader out.
Chloe: Pictures alone don't have enough pizazz for WeChat#
Pageview:#
5,803
Likes:#
39
Account type:#
Service
The new Chloe post featured pictures of the 2017 Fall/Winter collection without much more. For a creative platform like WeChat, we thought this campaign could have done a bit more work to lure consumers in. At the end of the post, though, the brand provided more information for users to buy, which was a thoughtful act, stating that they have the option to reserve new products either on Chloe’s Chinese site or via WeChat message.
Louis Vuitton: There could have been more#
Pageviews:#
50,499
Likes:#
414
Account type:#
Service
We had high expectations for luxury brand Louis Vuitton since it just launched a new fragrance collection in China (not to mention a new smartwatch). The new WeChat post celebrated this news with a video featuring brand ambassador Fan Bingbing, though the vivid promotional video is intriguing, it simply showed pictures and names of the seven different collections. Compared to the exclusive and creative campaign for their Supreme collaboration, this one left us cold. That didn't stop the post from getting a very high number of pageviews. But big brands shouldn't rest on their pageviews alone.
*We derived our data on pageviews from the WeChat industry monitoring software Curio Eye, which monitors over 1,000 accounts in 15 different industries. Our pageviews report is based exclusively on data from this monitoring tool. While some brands have multiple accounts on Curio Eye, not all of them may currently be monitored.
**A WeChat account can be categorized as either a service account or a subscription account. A service account allows the brand to publish four times per month and to focus more on customer service, whereas a subscription account focuses on providing content and allows the brand to publish once a day. Because each brand may have more than one WeChat account, in this series we specify the type of account on which the campaign was published.