Reconnecting a brand with its cultural market

Care in motion #9

an iCon in need for revival If you don’t live in China, you have probably never heard of Dabao. But in China, Dabao sells more moisturising cream than Pond’s or Olay. The brand has been around for decades, producing a line of moisturizing creams and beauty products. It is a huge brand but in the last years of the 2000 decade, business was tough. Brand communications were being pulled in a myriad of directions. The brand’s flagship product, a cheap, all purpose moisturizing cream which represent nearly 90% of the company’s volume, was declining in market shares as competing western brands invested massively in China.

How do you revive a dwindling, communist-era remnant in the glossy world of new China?

it’s all about Culture…

How many brands can claim that they started advertising in the 80’s in China? DaBao is one of the very few that can. The brand has been a staple of personal care for the Chinese through all the changes and development of their recent economic history. It is in the pockets of taxi drivers, wives offer it to their children, grand-children use it to carefully massage the hands of elderly grandmother. Dabao, as much as a brand, is an element of culture. To understand the brand, we had to understand it as such. To give it a new chance, we had to redefine its a place in the new culture of China.

But what was DaBao about? Analysing historical advertising was confusing – because the brand had shown everything, from fashion shows to farmers on their trucks. We knew we had to find out more about the people who used the brand. Who were they? What did they find in this brand that they helped shape? How did Dabao fit in their lives?

To find the answers to these questions, we proposed a broad exploration process with brand users: The Cultural Research Process.

Cultural branding to drive growth

INNATE TOOL:Cultural researchCATEGORY: Personal CareCOUNTRY:China

building a brand that fit into people’s lives We started by exploring the cultural context of Dabao. To do so, we immersed the marketers in the real life of their product’s users, in order to facilitate intimate, intense conversations. These conversations were not just about the products and the brand, but about the deeper, broader human themes they’re rooted in.

For Dabao, we talked about care. We explored what it meant, in a culture that appears often materialistic. And we discovered that behind the glitzy surface of modern China, there was another world. In China, care is not expressed with words. Couples do not share deep “I love you’s”, parents maintain a dignified attitude with their children. Yet care is present, through a multitude of small gestures – cooking a meal that a spouse likes, massaging the hands of an elderly parent, preparing a snack that a child loves…

Care, also, was important. Fast development, in China, has often broken families. Husbands leave their villages and return changed. Money creates envy. Advertising creates frustration. It’s a world where we always need more… Of course, some benefit. Others struggle, or choose to quit the rat race. And to all those people, what made sense was to return the essentials – the care for each other.

This was, for us and for the marketing team, a surprise, because our perceptions were tainted by the glitter of big cities. Yet, for a majority of the Chinese, care was a core value, something that helped to deal, every day, with development fatigue. And DaBao, for them, was the symbol of that sense of care. The brand had forgotten it, but its strength was all in that need for simple care, in the face of a world that changes too fast.

genuine Care is simple Based on these transformative learnings, the team capture an idea around which to build the brand: “Genuine Care is Simple.” It was

a sentiment that was shared with them, over and over, by the people they’d met. It was what the team felt about the brand, and it was everything Dabao stood for. It wasn’t just a great insight – it was an idea that the brand’s followers could buy into. An idea that they wanted to believe in, and fitted Dabao’s simple, earnest products.

It’s been over three years since Dabao worked with Innate, and Dabao is now one of J&J’s most successful operating companies. This success, explained Christina, was largely due to the vision that her team had brought back to the brand: “Honouring Simple and Genuine Care”. Our work together had powered Dabao’s revival.

The Cultural Research Process helped Dabao re-invent itself because brands are often much more than business matters. They are cultural objects – and as such grow when marketers know how to attune them to culture – not just to business realities.

Hello!

We are business humanizers who dare to care about helping brands and businesses create more value for the people they serve. Our company has no bricks, borders or bosses, just a simple belief that generosity pays: the more we give, the more we will get.

We’ll love to tell you more about our work in person! Find us atwww.in8motion.com