Nathan Baker currently serves as the group account director for We Are Social’s North Asia Region. He has been working in the digital marketing sphere since 2012. Nathan currently services Acer computers and Predator Gaming on their global social and digital channels, while also supporting them in campaigns and eSports event sponsorships. Nathan has also previously serviced Chinese brands going global, such as Vivo Smartphone, ofo, TCL Electronics, Hisense, Lifan Motors, Changan Motors, and JAC Motors.

 

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Celebrity endorsements may not be especially new or unique to China, but for the last eight years, Chinese and foreign brands have turned to a growing number of online influencers as alternatives to typical celebrities when it comes to advertising. Known as “Key Opinion Leaders” (KOL) marketing, the strategy is now the standard in China, using their social media presence to reel in consumers. Marketers have become quite dependent on their relationships with KOLs in order to amplify their brands products and campaigns.

What Is a KOL? 

Key Opinion Leaders include both celebrity and online influencer endorsements and marketing. While there is some debate as to what exactly qualifies someone as a KOL, celebrity and influencer collaborations are leveraged in the same way, in which the endorsement or ‘opinion’ of the KOL sways the audience towards the brand.

KOLs fall under a number of categories beyond the celebrity-influencer dichotomy. They can be broken down into five key categories: Doers, Movers, Lookers, Knowers and Characters.

Taking Chinese KOL strategies around the world

Chinese celebrities have long endorsed brands in China, from local businesses to multinational entities. More recently, Chinese brands have started expanding abroad, drawing on Western KOLs to promote their brands to new markets. Hollywood actress Gal Gadot was one of the most prominent faces in this scene, with her endorsement of Huawei in 2018. Her influencer role had some issues, however, when she famously tweeted out an ad for the new Huawei Mate from an iPhone, causing quite the stir.

The Chinese brands that are creating the largest global footprints tend to be tech brands, which often take the Character KOL marketing approach. Usually this strategy involves a simple celebrity endorsement that can have a bigger impact in regional foreign markets, such as Gal Gadot for Huawei USA, or Brazilian model Paola Antonini advertising Midea air conditioners in Brazil. 

Character KOLs: a favorite for phone brands 

You might be familiar with the ubiquitous cellphone ad in China: a famous person holding a smartphone next to their face.  This advertising model, a simple yet popular use of Character KOLs, has been notably exported by Oppo and Vivo in South and Southeast Asia. India is the most notable of these markets.

Oppo and Vivo KOL advertisements are incredibly common in India, becoming so ridiculously visible that they’ve created a new cultural moment, complete with its own slew of memes and internet humor. The most notable case of this was with Vivo and Oppo’s “marriage” in India, when their respective celebrity spokespeople Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone tied the knot at the end of 2018. 

These tried and true Character KOL campaigns have given Oppo and Vivo incredible visibility and a cultural moment in India, and created an opening for another KOL marketing development: working with the Doers. 

The power of Doers

Vivo has made its camera technology the key selling point of its phones. One campaign Vivo India has been running is the National Geographic Traveler India “Lenscape” campaign, in which Vivo equips talented photographers with their smartphone devices. These photographers travel to scenic landscapes or vibrant cultural events and snap high-quality photos with the devices. 

While some of these photographers may not have a lot of followers by influencer standards, such as Nirvair Signh Rai’s humble 13,200 Instagram followers, Nat Geo Traveller India has an additional half-a-million fans on Instagram that Vivo is able to leverage for amplification. Their work combined brings a considerable amount of credibility to Vivo and its cameras. It is extremely straightforward from a product promotion perspective. A professional photographer takes amazing shots with a smartphone device, backed by the well-established National Geographic IP. It gets audiences saying, “Hey, I could take amazing photos with that phone too!” making the campaign relevant to the general consumer. 

Vivo and Oppo were able to leverage celebrity "Character" KOLs to gain broader brand awareness in India. This made smaller influencer collaborations with Doers more effective, as consumers were already familiar with the brands and could get to know product features more intimately in an authentic way.

Off the mark: missed opportunities for TCL

While Character KOL marketing, a.k.a. celebrity endorsements, is a tried-and-true form of marketing, it doesn’t always go as planned. 

Electronics brand TCL announced its sponsorship of the Brazilian soccer player Neymar Jr. in 2018, months before the FIFA World Cup. However, one issue that TCL hadn’t considered is that Neymar Jr is not very well-liked across the globe. He turned out to be at the center of one of World Cup Russia 2018’s most talked about moments — the infamous “fall and roll,” when an apparent brush on his ankle during a game turned into a dramatic drop to the ground where he writhed in pain. So many memes and parodies were made about this and the star’s flair for the dramatic. 

Neymar Jr may not be universally liked, but he is one of the most “meme-able” soccer players, with plenty of humor generated by internet users at his expense. Such a reaction to Neymar, then a major face of TCL, made his product sponsorship much harder to take seriously, especially when paired with TCL’s tagline, “a brand chosen by legends,” a phrase meant to be reserved for revered icons, not internet memes.

Could Neymar be more likable if he didn’t take himself so seriously? My team wanted to find out, and so we created a Facebook post featuring Neymar from six angles in six TVs. The visual was planned to run as a social media post on TCL’s corporate account. We wanted to do something more akin to the falling and rolling memes, showing Neymar in six funny angles. The idea was for Neymar to laugh at himself and connect with the global audience in an authentic fashion. 

Predictably, TCL wanted to play it safe, and I don’t think Neymar would have liked it either, so the post was never published. But doing something like this would have gotten more people to like both Neymar and TCL, and the decision not to run the ad was a missed opportunity.

Fast-forward to January 2019 and there were more missed opportunities, again due to Neymar’s public behavior. We were hoping to take advantage of the buzz surrounding Neymar during each of his scheduled matches, with social content featuring him and TCL, but he suffered an injury and was off the field for 10 weeks, so there wasn’t much we could do with him as a result.

Then shortly after he got back in the game, he punched a football fan in the stadium. Granted, it wasn’t a very hard punch, but it still caused a lot of alarm for the league and sponsors alike. Neymar was suspended from several matches, and TCL wanted to avoid him. Missed opportunities all around.

Choosing a celebrity spokesperson as a brand is very risky. Neymar isn’t cheap and he has multiple brand collaborations. In the end, they all suffered as a result of his own bad publicity. 

Celebrity KOL collaborations are a big investment. Things can easily fall apart, including a brand’s investment. Partnering with Neymar was surely costly, but the return on investment was limited when so many problems arose. Brands need to be mindful of who they collaborate with, how they collaborate with KOLs and how those influencers are perceived worldwide.

Zaful’s Instagram and Youtube Tactics

Ever heard of Zaful? The brand is most famous for selling its bikinis online. Zaful is based in Shenzhen and runs an extensive influencer marketing operation. The strategy: find attractive-looking women on Instagram and offer them a sponsored bikini shopping haul in exchange for content and cross-promotion. These Instagram influencers don’t necessarily need to have huge follower numbers, many of them have fewer than 10,000 fans. These are your quintessential Looker KOLs, using their image to promote products, above any expertise or far-reaching sphere of influence. 

Zaful also works with quite a few YouTube “fashion haul” KOLs too, influencers who buy several items of clothes at once and review them for potential shoppers in 10-20 minute videos. You could consider these to be Knower KOLs, as their opinion on shopping is key, with many uploading daily videos to offer tips on where to find bargains.  

One of Zaful’s “fashion haul” KOLs is Kendra Rowe, who has roughly 250,000 subscribers on YouTube. But check out the comment section on any of Kendra’s videos, and you’ll see that it’s mostly engagement from adoring male fans, who aren’t quite the target audience for an online bikini store. This fact actually makes her a Looker KOL, rather than the expert shopper Zaful should be looking for to endorse the quality of products.

When you start looking for more female audience-oriented “fashion haul” YouTubers, you’ll find that Zaful is mentioned in many video topics, but not always in a flattering way. Multiple YouTube shopping personalities have posted negative videos about Zaful’s products and lack of corporate professionalism. Some have even posted their own non-sponsored videos reviewing the swimsuits, which aren’t very positive. 

So while Zaful aims to promote their bikinis with both Looker and Knower KOLs, they often fail to impress the more knowledgeable KOLs with their products and tend to only succeed with Lookers, who may or may not have the audience Zaful is actually looking for to drive sales. This is a severe misstep in their KOL marketing strategy. 

Brands must be mindful of a KOL's audience. Who needs a million fans when they aren’t your target audience? Whether a brand is working with a Doer, Mover, Looker, Knower, or Character — they need to make sure their audience has the potential to drive the result they are looking for.

How TikTok blew up in the West and how it is sustaining growth

TikTok, a Chinese-based social media app for posting short videos, reached worldwide cultural relevancy in the fall of 2018 when famous YouTube personality PewDiePie made multiple videos about the app.

TikTok made a big push for global user acquisition in 2018, running programmatic ads all over YouTube, Instagram and Facebook that featured users’ uploaded. The ads attracted notice—but people often didn’t like what they saw. Then came the onslaught of memes from users that made fun of the brand and many of the cringe-worthy videos that had been used in promotions. 

TikTok took advantage of the attention, making the popular meme The ‘Hit or Miss’ girl the global face of TikTok in the fall of 2018.  More memes and cultural reactions followed, and daily usage for TikTok rose worldwide thanks to the exposure. App downloads spiked in the U.S., and by November 2018, even Jimmy Fallon was talking about TikTok on the Tonight Show.

People were using TikTok, whether ironically or not. And while not all of the attention was positive, it was memes that brought TikTok front and center in the public eye. 

Like any good fad, memes eventually get stale, and star power now helps keep TikTok alive. Singer Cardi B had an official collaboration with the brand in December 2018. Cardi B used the app’s interactive video features in a rap battle against her husband, Offset. As the platform is largely music-driven, two famous rappers dueling it out using TikTok’s unique mode of user-interaction was quite fitting.

TikTok became an even bigger media darling in 2019, with the likes of Jennifer Lopez using it to promote NBC’s “World of Dance.” It has been prominently featured in popular music videos, such as the 2019 hit “My Type” by Saweetie. 

TikTok capitalized on the buzz it was getting from meme culture to draw in Character KOL collaborations and sponsorships. This launched it into such cultural relevancy that it became a platform to launch other new KOLs— making it the successor KOL platform to Instagram. It even helped launch the hit 2019 song "Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X. This all makes TikTok the biggest success story when it comes to Chinese brands using KOL marketing globally. 

Meme culture is very powerful. It can create or accelerate cultural moments that get KOLs and media talking without paying them. Brands need to be prepared to react to these moments and capitalize on them, as they can launch a brand into cultural relevancy. In the case of TikTok, it expanded on that cultural relevancy with strategic KOL partnerships with cultural icons.

Conclusion 

While celebrity endorsements have stayed consistent in many ways throughout the years, social media has given KOL marketing almost endless opportunities, if a brand and its KOL partner are brave enough to take risks. Relying on a celebrity or influencer’s publicity to sway consumers may be fraught with potential pitfalls, but if a brand can successfully capitalize on cultural momentum, the payoffs are plentiful.

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The article is from the Insight Magazine Nov/Dec 2019, you can download the whole issue here.