SHANGHAI — Crazy ideas in China require not just an embrace of creativity, but also an element of bravery, especially in outdoor advertising, where the visibility of the medium puts pressure on advertisers to be politically correct and stay out of trouble. Case in point: Xiao Zhu ("Little Bamboo" in Chinese). With China's skies often shrouded in haze, air-quality indexes frequently reach severe levels. Xiao Zhu, a year-old air purifier brand, wanted to stand out in a market that was as congested as China's heavily polluted air (a search on Taobao turns up 101,800 air-purification products from at least 23 brands including Sharp, TCL, Philips, Midea, FuseWins, Haier, Blueair, Diqua and Xiaomi). According to researchers at Tsinghua University, the burning of coal is responsible for between 50% to 70% of the air pollution in some of China's heavily industrialized areas. Y&R, Xiao Zhu's creative agency, decided to call out the culprit by using the smoke spewing from factory smokestacks as an outdoor medium.

The project involved projecting pictures of choking and crying children, bought from stock photo libraries, onto the smoke plumes along with the Xiao Zhu logo and a message: "Don't let a future of asphyxia happen." The video documenting the acts in Hangzhou and Shanghai delivered more than 17.3 million views and a 38% increase in brand awareness in the week of April 7 when the campaign launched. The campaign went on to win seven Lions at Cannes last month, including a Gold in the outdoor category. Sales of Xiao Zhu air purifiers increased 20% in the past quarter, according to the company. Ong Kien Hoe, executive creative director of Y&R Shanghai, said that his team would not have been able to pull off the campaign without "such a brave client," referring to Xiao Zhu founder Ye Xiang Bin. "It is risky on two fronts: using pictures of kids (even if they were stock pictures) and hijacking the smoke as an advertising medium without any permission from the factories," he said.

"We were worried that the factory owners will disrupt our 'production,' and we had to be very careful." Handsome Wong, ex-CD at Y&R Shanghai, who was involved in the campaign before he quit in May 2015, recalled one incident at the Hangzhou Ban Shan Power Plant. Local police and security guards approached the team's truck with suspicion to enquire about the assembly of light-beam projectors. Seeing that the group was not technically trespassing on factory premises, and then understanding the intent behind the light projections, they went away, to the relief of Ong and Wong. Still, it was precarious to use a sensitive topic to latch onto in order to break the new brand into the air-purifier market. "The client is not big, so it's all about the word-of-mouth effect for them," said Ong. The publicity on environmental issues was exactly what got "Under The Dome," a self-funded documentary about China's overwhelming air pollution, pulled and blocked from domestic websites by Chinese authorities in February, two months before Xiao Zhu's bold outdoor stunt.

The documentary took Chai Jing, a former China Central Television news anchor, one year to investigate and produce. When the topic of Chai's documentary influencing the campaign idea was broached in a group interview, Ye was less adamant than Ong about distancing the campaign from the documentary.air flow purifier "It is the factories that are mostly causing pollution, not the government," Ong said. sharp air purifier online india"We don't think that selling air purifiers can solve the problem. best air purifier for nail salonsWe just want to say that the air in China is not good and we want to improve it somehow, even if the improvement is just indoors. That Chai Jing thing is too big for us." While Ye said, "We would like to use a cultural lens to think about environmental issues, and that thinking is evident in our product that utilises bamboo even in the filtration material inside it.

Chai plays a role of promoting industrial change, while we see ourselves as putting that into practice."Air pollution in China is one of the biggest development issues of the country. Org, Beijing has a very unhealthy Air Quality Index of 172 which is almost the double of Shenzhen or Guangzhou’s pollution index. This trend led the Chinese population to seek for tools that will help them breath better. According to GFK, a global market research company, 3.52 million air purifiers products were sold in 2015 in China generating a revenue of about US$1.2 Billion which equals a 10% increased compared to 2014. The ratio of air purifiers in Chinese families is 10 for 100 families which is pretty low compared to some of China’s neighbouring countries. There are huge opportunities for brands wishing to sell air purifiers in China as M.Zhou, GM of GFK China stated, the market in China is not saturated nor mature yet. As an example Bosch Group, a german home appliances brand saw their revenue increase by 10% from 2014 to 2015 and exceeded 70 billion euros of sales.

The best way to lower your unit cost of production and core costs such as promotion, PR, and sales is to go digital. Not only will it be more cost-efficient and it will also enable you to connect directly with your potential customers. As you may already know, Google can’t be used in China. If you want to be visible when Chinese customers are looking for air purifiers, you have to be on the first pages of Baidu. Baidu is a Chinese search engine and the leader of its market. It actually owns more than 80% of market shares in China! As Baidu’s requirements are different from those of Google, you should tailor your SEO strategy and optimize your website accordingly. When certain keywords are typed on Baidu about air purifier, your brand should be on the first page or at worse second page. Another way to use Baidu is to do PPC. This basically means that you pay a certain amount to Baidu in order to rank better on certain keywords. Here is an example of the brand Philips which ranks first when we type 空气净化器 （air purifier) on Baidu.

The fastest way to get your products to the Chinese market is to sell online. You don’t need to care about having a shop assistant facing the customer or handling cashier issues. Of course, you will need to have a dedicated team to manage online orders and reply to online customer’s queries. called 天猫, Tian Miao in Chinese is a Taobao e-commerce website released in 2008 as the B2C platform. It sells several products such as brands products, apparel, beauty products and so on. Tmall is part of Alibaba group led by Jack Ma. also called Jingdong Mall (京东商城 Jing Dong Shang Cheng in Chinese was founded in 1998 by Liu Qiangdong. It is now headquartered in Beijing and is one of the main B2C e-commerce platforms in China. layout with air purifiers being listed with their price and characteristics. Now that you know where you can sell your products, you have to attract Chinese visitors to these websites but most importantly, you have to raise your brand awareness.

Using online PR by doing interviews for online websites, will make your brand more visible to the Chinese potential customer. The best way to use E-PR for an air purifier brand is by being present on targeted and specialized websites such as PCHOME.net. This a Chinese website talking solely about electronic products like household products, laptops, mobile phones, camera, and of course, air purifiers. An article published on PC home Finally, you have Chinese social media platforms. With more than 660 million Internet users in China and an estimated 9 out of 10 Chinese netizens having at least one account on social media, having a profile on main Chinese social media platforms will definitely benefit your sale forecasts. The main social media in China are WeChat, Weibo, Qzone, QQ and Ren Ren. WeChat is the most widely used in China. 68% of adult Chinese netizens use WeChat. WeChat is an instant messaging mobile app developed by Tencent (father of QQ). As a brand, you can create an official account on WeChat (see picture for Phillips above)

Another social media you may consider using is Weibo. Weibo is a microblogging platform with more than 222 million active users in China alone. As you can see Phillips has more than 135 000 followers on Weibo. As the word-of-mouth is prevalent in China, sharing information on social media platforms allows the Chinese visitor to build their own opinion about the products and sometimes to share the information with their online friends. Chinese people tend to directly think “online” when they encounter an issue with a product or a service. Social media is a double-sword tool that should be used wisely. Xiao Mi, a growing Chinese tech company, had to deal with both the good and bad sides of social media in China. The brand usually had good reviews and positive comments online when it started to sell their air filters earlier this year. Actually, this good reputation helped them to sell more than 800,000 units of air filters almost instantly after the launch. However, they are recently dealing with e-reputation issues.