Everyday Care: a global platform, localised for China

The situation

Virbac is a top-10 global animal-health company in 70+ countries. For its pet-care portfolio it had built a single global brand platform, Everyday Care (EDC), and shipped it to every affiliate as a finished kit: a brand universe, packaging charter, creative guidelines, editorial calendar, jingle, B2B/B2C detailers, and a first batch of SEO content. The instruction to markets was explicit: use the global toolkits and adapt available content; deploy with a "specific strategy per region."

That instruction contained the whole problem. The global guidelines were written for a world of webshops and Amazon-optimised product pages, the channel reality of North America and Europe. China does not buy that way. The Chinese pet owner discovers a brand on RedNote and Douyin, validates it inside WeChat, and converts on Tmall. None of that machinery exists in the global playbook. The kit gave us a brand truth and a margin guardrail. It did not give us a go-to-market.

The market was moving fast: Tmall pet GMV up 50%+ year-on-year, the buyer getting younger and actively seeking specialist, science-backed brands. That was EDC's positioning exactly. The window was open. The default move was the cheap one: translate the global assets, post the global carousels, stand up the homepage, and call it localisation.

The decision

I refused to run translation as strategy. The decision I owned: keep the global brand truth fixed, and rebuild the go-to-market for how China actually buys. EDC's positioning (high-quality, scientifically proven, environmentally friendly pet care, organised as a range rather than isolated products) was non-negotiable and genuinely strong. Everything underneath it had to be re-derived from the Chinese funnel, not inherited from the global one: channel architecture, content format, the path from awareness to purchase.

"Localisation" stopped meaning render the assets in Chinese and started meaning re-architect demand creation and capture on the platforms where the category actually lives. That is the move the global brief asked for in one line. It is also the move every affiliate is tempted to skip.

The strategy

Three architectural choices carried it.

1. WeChat as the brand's owned engine, not a brochure. I built WeChat into the depth layer of the funnel, where a curious buyer becomes a convinced one. We restructured the official account around two standing content franchises mapped to the marketing priorities (a skin-care pillar 肤洁净 and a parasite/de-worming pillar 虫驱净), and rewrote genuinely hard topics (otitis, atopy-vs-allergy, skin micro-ecology, zoonotic parasites) into accessible, illustrated pieces. The interactive layer was the differentiator: an H5 campaign engine (the Chinese New Year 净转新年礼 lucky-draw H5 was the standout) turned passive readers into participants. The data confirmed the bet. The year's top-three articles were the interactive H5 plus the two hardest science pieces.

2. A tiered KOL matrix sized to the funnel. I ran a tiered KOL/KOC strategy on RedNote, banded by follower scale, with format-matched briefs (product reviews, how-to tutorials, pet-care education with brand visuals integrated natively rather than bolted on). This sat inside the broader network I built across the Virbac years (280+ KOLs, 11.2M+ combined reach), so EDC launches drew on a standing matrix instead of starting cold.

3. An e-retail conversion path the global plan didn't contain. The global guidance named "selected e-retail" abstractly; in China that means Tmall, livestreaming, and promotional tentpoles (6.18, 11.11). I aligned the content calendar and seeding waves to those moments, with offline activations (PR gift boxes, trial bags through vet clinics and pet stores) feeding the same range story, so awareness built on social actually landed as GMV on Tmall.

Execution

We ran EDC as a single integrated range campaign across an omnichannel matrix (RedNote, Douyin, WeChat with 公众号 + 小程序 + 视频号, Weibo, pet-vertical media, plus offline clinics and stores) rather than as isolated product pushes. WeChat head articles averaged ~5,000 reads (above the prior year); the franchise pillars and menu architecture were rebuilt for systematic discovery; the interactive H5 and seasonal campaigns drove the engagement spikes. On RedNote, the tiered KOL waves seeded the range: a first batch cleared 200k+ reads, and the July launch wave alone drove 730k+ impressions. I sat as the client-side owner, coordinating the agency layer rather than being run by it, owning strategy, KOL proposals and negotiation, calendar, and performance reporting.

Result

• Tmall category #1. The pet ear-cleaning line reached number one in its Tmall category.
• GMV +25% on that line.
• ~3.13M social impressions from the RedNote seeding program; 77 notes → ~2.08M reads (avg ~180+ interactions per post).
• +25% engagement lift on owned social through data-driven content optimisation.

The global platform stayed intact. EDC's brand truth, positioning, and look-and-feel were preserved exactly as the global team specified. What changed was the route to market, and that route delivered a category-leading position China's webshop-and-Amazon global playbook would never have reached.