Guerlain and Dior Beauty exemplify the power of celebrity endorsements in China, while local brands like Aupres, Proya, and Florasis succeed through innovative, market-tailored strategies, driving significant media value and engagement.
Published On: February 1, 2024
Celebrity Influence vs. Local Strategy: How Global and Chinese Beauty Brands Thrive
Global brands like Guerlain showcased the power of celebrity endorsement in China, with Guerlain’s global ambassador Yang Yang’s two Weibo posts generating a media value of $873,400 and 3.5 million engagements.
This underscores the substantial impact of celebrity influence in the market. Similarly, Dior Beauty effectively utilised celebrity partnerships, featuring actress Dilraba Dilmurat in its Rouge lipstick campaign, resulting in a media value of $631,100 and a 4% engagement rate.
“The difference between global and local brands is in marketing: international brands lean heavily on celebrity influence to help achieve significant exposure and traffic, while homegrown brands instead rely on quickly adapting to the dynamic local market, enlisting innovative marketing strategies, and responding much quicker to trends and ever-changing consumer demands.”
🚀 Local brands Aupres, Proya, and Florasis thrived with tailored strategies. Chinese lifestyle influencerThurman猫一杯’s engaging Douyin video generated a media value of $476,300 for Aupres, while Proya leveraged Chinese actress Zhang Ruonan to generate $88,100 in media value, showcasing the power of tailored influencer strategies. Meanwhile, Florasis capitalised on Douyin’s creative content format with Chinese lifestyle KOL 言真inky’s videos, contributing $318,800 to their overall media value, highlighting Douyin’s power for beauty brands aiming to enhance their brand impact.
Stay tuned for the next launch of the leaderboard in February. It’ll be interesting to see the top beauty brands who are activating their share of voice in the Chinese market.
Read the article here to see our monthly beauty leaderboard in collaboration with Jing Daily!
Access timely cultural trends, strategic creator guidance, and industry best practices.
Cannes Lions has always been where the industry takes stock, not just of the work, but of where the money is going and why. This year, creator marketing will be front and centre. Not because it’s new, but because the ground underneath it is shifting in ways that are forcing brands to fundamentally rethink how they plan, measure and value creator partnerships.
Here are the three topics we expect to define the week.
The top 100 media and entertainment brands across video streaming, audio streaming, and content creation generated $63.4B in total Earned Media Value in 2025, up +7.0% YoY. Growth is uneven across sub-sectors, video streaming surged while audio streaming declined sharply, platform dynamics are shifting fast, and a handful of breakout brands are rewriting what influence looks like in entertainment.
TikTok grew +70.2% YoY and is rapidly closing the gap on YouTube as the dominant entertainment influence platform. YouTube remains #1 at $32.6B but declined -11.3%, while Instagram grew +4.4% to $13.3B. Facebook nearly doubled to $7.3B (+98.9%), making media and entertainment one of the few categories where four platforms are genuinely competing for share.
Join our community and get cultural insights, creator strategy guides, and real-world best practices.