The power of colour — beauty campaigns in Japan using hashtags
Within the Japanese social media world, Instagram is the best platform for image branding as it allows strong communication with pictures. Many brand campaigns in Japan have put an emphasis on colour and others have ridden the wave of popular content (such as cats!). Below are some examples of creative beauty & cosmetic campaigns from the Japanese market. Here we go!
Happy red and white photo campaign - ASTALIFT brand (FUJIFILM)
For this campaign, the hashtag, “#幸せの赤と白” (happy-red-and-white), emphasized the brand colors — “赤” (red) and “白” (white). This made recognizing the brand easy for users on Instagram. In this campaign, posts on Instagram were aggregated and could be viewed on the official campaign website.
Find your rouge! - Shiseido
This famous cosmetic company, Shiseido, held a campaign called “Find Your Red!”. The campaign includes Instagram posts with a red theme and the phrase, “what’s your red”. The following hashtags were used: #shiseidored #rougerouge2016 #shiseidoginzatokyo.
As you can see by looking at the Instagram photo (example below), by asking users to tag the theme color “rouge”, red items appear on almost all of the photos. The aim of the campaign was to associate the colour red with Shisedo.
Kawaii is hero - INTEGRATE
The hashtag, #いい女なろう (Lets-become-a-beautiful-woman), was started by INTEGRATE and resulted in around 2,000 Instagram posts. Although the hashtag was promoted on a TV commercial, many women posted images with this hashtag as an expression of beauty culture, regardless of its association with the INTEGRATE brand. Similar type of coined words include: #おフェロ (o-phero), #かわいいは正義 (kawaii-is-hero), and #雌ガール (mesu-girl).
I love Favorina - FAVORINA
This hashtag, #フェヴリナ大好き (i-love-favorina), are posted by users of the FAVORINA brand with their favourite items. The aim of this campaign was to maximize the influencer effect from each user’s contribution. This hashtag only has 115 posts, so proves that along with a hashtag, a good amount of marketing is needed.
Shucats - SHU UEMURA
This campaign was run on Instagram with the theme, “Participate with cat make-up or your cat”. The hashtag, # shucats and #セレブ猫 (celebrity cat) were attached to the posts. The application process for this contest was to follow two official accounts (@shuuemura_jp, @shuuemura_ww) which boosted followers. The campaign increased user participation and many celebrity cats joined which increased the number of followers and recognition.
Instagram is a medium perfect for image branding in Japan. We can be sure that there’s a strong link between post-browsing and purchase of products. So let’s make some creative Instagram campaigns in Japan together!
