Blackmores hopes healthy Shawn Dou can boost China sales

Shawn Dou was born in the Chinese city of Xian but moved to Canada with his family at the age of 10.

Shawn Dou was born in the Chinese city of Xian but moved to Canada with his family at the age of 10.

Growing up, he agonised over whether he should pursue a career in hairdressing in London or acting in China, applying to study both when he left school.

He moved back to China in 2008, when he received an offer to attend the prestigious Beijing Film Academy.

In his first year he attracted the attention of famous Chinese film director Zhang Yimou, who went on to give him a role in The Love of the Hawthorn Tree. That role put him on the map in the Chinese film industry.

He then went on to star in a string of Chinese movies including Wolf Totem, Youth Dinner and historical drama Princess Agents.

But it was the 29-year-old’s outdoor life — riding motorbikes and mountain climbing — that ­attracted the attention of Australia’s Blackmores, which named him as its latest brand ambassador for China at a media launch in Beijing this week.

He may not be well known in Australia, but Blackmores will be hoping Dou’s clean-cut, action-man image — and his 11 million followers on China’s social media platform Weibo — will give the company an added boost in the highly competitive Chinese consumer market.

Blackmores will give an update of its sales in China in its first-quarter figures to be released at its annual meeting in Sydney tomorrow.

Its sales to the China market were a key driver of the company’s increasing revenues in the financial year to the end of June, up by 22 per cent at $143 million — making up 23 per cent of the company’s total annual revenue of $601m (a rise of 9 per cent over the year).

Brand ambassadors and social media influencers are critical to sales in China, in a world where the bulk of sales for Blackmores’ products — and many other consumer products — are conducted online through e-commerce platforms such as those operated by Alibaba.

The Blackmores board visited China in June, signing a joint business plan with Alibaba to grow its presence on Alibaba’s platforms, including Ali Health, Tmall and Taobao over the next year.

Blackmores’ big rival in the China market, Suisse, an Australian company bought by Chinese company Health & Happiness in 2015 and 2016, was on a winner with China’s highest paid actress, Fan Bing Bing, as its brand ambassador, until she was detained for tax evasion and fined more than $US130m a few weeks ago.

Her fate, which shocked and saddened her millions of fans in China, means Suisse won’t be able to use her as an ambassador in its all-important Singles Day promotion on November 11 this year like it did last year.

Blackmores’ China strategy has a slightly differently focus, with a strong emphasis on living a healthy outdoor life — something Australians take for granted, but in pollution-ridden Beijing and other big cities in China it provides a strong aspirational goal for the nation’s rising middle class.

A television commercial released this week for Blackmores in China shows Dou running, bike riding and mountain climbing, in a video that includes a photo of a kangaroo staring at a sunset.

“I like to see myself as an explorer,” Dou told The Australian at his media launch. “I hike and do a lot of outdoor sports.”

Being outdoors and being in touch with nature, he says, gives him a sense of inner strength and “a positive vibe”.

Peter Osborne, chief executive of Blackmores’ Asian business, told The Australian at the launch: “We were looking for the next brand ambassador for Blackmores in China, for someone who had a strong fit with our brand.

“Shawn being a movie and television star gives us a great opportunity to project that to a much broader audience in China. His total approach to health and lifestyle particularly attracted us.”

One of Blackmores’ previous brand ambassadors in China was tennis star Li Na, who still retains a connection with the company.

Ironically it was a revelation a few years ago that Fan Bing Bing used a face cream made by Blackmores that helped its brand take off in China, although Blackmores never signed her up as a brand ambassador.

Osborne says major buyers of Blackmores’ products in China are women aged between 30 and 45 — a key social media-using and online-shopping cohort — who buy the products for their families.

The good-looking Dou is aimed at pitching to this audience, but also expanding the appeal of Blackmores products in China to health-conscious men.

As Dou explained to The Australian, life for young middle class Chinese these days may look much more affluent but they are under increasing stress from heavy use of social media, competition for jobs as well as skyrocketing rents and housing prices.

He sees part of his personal message as telling the new generation of Chinese to take things easier, get outdoors more and to take better care of their health.

With a long, cold winter coming on in China, Blackmores also used the launch to step up its promotion of vitamin C. The China market for consumer products is highly competitive and subject to big shifts in consumer demand.

Dou is a hard worker, with two movie projects and four online television dramas ahead of him.

He may be seen by Australian audiences in the future when The Legend of the Sun and Moon, a ­Chinese-Australian co-production filmed at Village Roadshow’s Gold Coast studios this year, is released.

In the meantime his focus will be selling the Blackmores’ healthy life message to one of the biggest consumer products markets in the world.