MAB Launching Tempo to local Chinese

MAB needed a sales and marketing campaign that would drive awareness for its new Box Hill apartment project, Tempo, among the local Chinese population. With the project’s display suite slated to open in May, we were tasked to develop a campaign to prime the market, drive registrations of interest and then foot traffic into the sales suite in order to drive sales.

In our strategic approach we also had to help our client understand the ‘tried and tested’ approach to selling property wouldn’t work for Chinese audiences, due to the different communication and consumer behaviours between Chinese and western audiences. Our client had also secured activation spaces in Box Hill Shopping Centre, so our strategy had to leverage a number of activations to bring online and offline together.

To reach the Chinese audience, WeChat must sit at the heart of every strategy. Among the Chinese population, not being on WeChat is like not having a website. Therefore our strategy treated WeChat just like a project website would – we drove traffic directly to it where we served up information to followers to drive action.
We structured paid media and the shopping centre activations to all drive followers to MAB’s WeChat where we were able to serve up information on Tempo to encourage parties to enquire directly to sales agents integrated into the channel.

In crafting the approach we also considered the audience’s need for incentives. Chinese customers need incentives to follow and engage meaningfully with brands on WeChat. By reviewing the Tempo brand, which features chic illustrations of future Tempo residents by a Japanese artist, we envisaged a path to drive WeChat follower growth through the activation, which would act as an interactive photo booth style experience with oversized renders in which people could take pictures of themselves interacting with relevant fun props – because with Chinese consumers, a photo opp is everything and drives shareability and reach. The activation was fitted with QR codes and consumers were incentivised with collectible magnets of the Tempo characters to interact and follow MAB’s WeChat account. These magnets were also devised to become an at-home reminder of the project throughout the teaser campaign, until the display suite opened.

Within the WeChat channel we served up frequent and targeted media placements and episodic storytelling.

When COVID-19 shut down the activation, we pivoted, developing an interactive quiz on WeChat to capture potential purchaser data, using the magnets as incentives and driving to the quiz through paid placements.

Through the campaign we grew MAB’s WeChat by 292 followers, while our tactics reached 487,000 – with a focus on targeting Melbourne residents, particularly around Box Hill. Throughout the three-month campaign period impressions totalled 1.1 million, while articles drew 22,000 views.