Planning & Execution
Clever consumer insight – customers are switching priorities when decorating their homes.
Previously, consumers classified the purchase of home appliances as the lowest priority when considering decorating their home. The core reason behind this attitude was that appliances can’t be perfectly be integrated into interior design. Instead, they function as a totally separate system.
But today, consumers are realizing that selecting a suitable integrated smart home system before embarking on decoration helps them do more with less in their homes. This redefines the game of the front-end market, and makes the consumer’s decorating process easier and smoother.
More and more manufacturers are revising their marketing and product strategies to sell a completely customized and integrated home system instead of a string of individual products. As a result, manufacturers not only favor customer’s preferences but also gain huge profits.
Haier Group is helping to shape this blueprint by offering solutions based on advanced thinking, cutting-edge technology and superior services.
How to bring this blue-sky-thinking to the Expo?
Haier would capitalize on the theme of this year’s AWE event, “AI, Smart Life.” Instead of each sub-brand promoting itself, Haier adopted an umbrella theme of “Haier smart family, customizing beautiful life.” The Haier booth would feature two full size villas installed with the latest integrated home system. Within each house, visitors could immerse themselves fully IoT enabled smart home system and appreciate how it can redefine their own living experience. Communications were leveraged to encourage consumers, business partners and customers to explore, experience, and associate Haier with smart home and smart life.
Creating a circle of influence
On the opening day, Haier put on its very own opening show featuring a video world premier exploring the vision, impact, and DNA of Haier’s seven brands; executive speeches and a teaser video and viral social posters featuring intellectual TV anchorwoman Yang Lan.
Seizing the AI topic before the expo had even opened won user generated content across knowledge sharing online platforms. At the Haier exhibition, stakeholders were invited to find out the answers and experience the true smart home tech out of curiosity.
Key vertical, lifestyle, family and celebrity influencers were invited to experience the smart villas. This influencer-led activity helped drive further brand influence and generated positive publicity within AWE for Haier.
A TV show hosted by Yang Lan on one of China’s highest rating TV channels was filmed on the Haier booth presenting clearly what smart life could look like. The show boosted the media coverage of Haier after the exhibition.
For manufacturers, Ketchum took an unusual strategy to showcase the smart home business model to the appliance front-end market. We knew that presenting the system plainly would not be enough to impress at AWE. To tackle this, the PR team devised a talk show at the villa to highlight the features of the smart home system, emphasising the selling point of Haier’s business model.
Effectiveness / Results
Smart Home brought Smart Results
Officially showcasing the smart integrated home system brought tremendous success.
Business
The Haier stand quickly became the must-visit priority spot at AWE 2019. Thanks to a carefully-planned series of themed events, the Haier pavilion attracted 80,500 attendees, the highest number of attendees within AWE, and a 10% increase over last year.
Participation at the highest level: 15 executives from various media companies participated in the event-series. Well-known media such as NetEase, iFeng and Sina China’s executives and editors were highly engaged. The Dean of the School of Architecture and Design at Central Academy of Fine Arts, Mr. Wang tie, plus nine other famous designers also showed up to support. Several investor representatives from Everbright Securities and Morgan Stanley also attended alongside Haier’s important business partners, such as Sunning.com and JD.com.
Brand
On the concept of “Smart home”, Haier owned 65% of consumer recognition across the market, making them the No.1 brand within the industry.
Haier led competitors with an over 70% share of voice as a global brand. This eclipsed all other brands’ share-of-voice combined!
From an offline perspective, the activations had a tremendously positive impact.
81% of surveyed customers and 86% of KOLs thought Haier was the most impressive brand at AWE this year – an incredibly desirable perception to achieve.
Besides, Haier successfully achieved a direct association of its brand name with advanced technology based on a 95% confirmation rate from an audience survey.
Communications
Media coverage of Haier during the AWE exhibition shot up to an unexpectedly high level. During March. 12-19, the Haier brand owned 260 million media coverages in total, which achieved 156% complete rates. The actual click volume was recorded as 3.8 million, which was 171% complete rates.
The numbers:
260 million total media coverages, 156 complete rates
3.8 million click volume, 171% complete rates
7 million viewers of Live
iFeng news, Yidian news, 36Kr and WeChat Moments were assigned as four of the main media platforms for media coverage. A number of articles, reports, and videos about Haier were generated and published within those platforms, exceeding expectation and goal by a large margin. Besides, an audience of 7 million have watched the live coverage of the Haier exhibition within AWE.
WeChat content about Haier at AWE from 11 KOLs attracted 60,000 pageviews
Videos by two influencers and one by self-media, Yitiao, totalled 5 million views.
Cooperation with the social media platform GQ lab was key. One of the most influential lifestyle platforms in China, GQ lab posted content in the form of comics about Haier smart home on their social media account, viewed by 10,000 people.