Celebrity Marketing in China: What Philips and Jay Chou Show

Introduction#

When Philips (飞利浦) announced Jay Chou (周杰伦) as brand ambassador for its electric razor line in April 2025, the social media response was immediate and large: 25,000 posts generated 430,000 interactions within the month, total brand buzz reached 428,171 posts, and Jay Chou-related content alone contributed 93,547 posts. By any conventional awareness metric the campaign drew a great deal of attention, and what makes it worth studying is how that attention changed the content of the conversation and the people taking part in it.

We believe the campaign is useful to brand managers investing in celebrity endorsement in China, because it is one of the most precisely documented endorsement cases in the H1 2025 personal care category and its lessons apply well beyond razors. This article looks at the scale of the buzz and at how the campaign changed both what consumers discussed and who took part, and it closes with what this suggests about how endorsement should be measured.

The Scale of the Awareness Impact#

The April buzz is best understood against the brand's own baseline. In the three months before the announcement, Philips razor content generated 171,343 posts in January, 311,859 in February, when Valentine's Day gifting content raised the count, and 83,581 in March. April's 428,171 posts were 5.1x the March base, a very large increase in content for a single brand event in a month with no major shopping festival.

Within that April total, Jay Chou-related content contributed 93,547 posts (21.8% of the total), while the rest of the brand's content rose from 83,581 posts in March, when there was no endorsement content, to 334,624 in April. The announcement therefore lifted discussion of the brand's other content as well, as consumers found the brand more interesting to discuss and share whether or not a post referred to the endorsement.

The 430,000 interactions across 25,000 posts also point to active interest among consumers, since social media attention in personal care categories is hard to sustain. We believe an interaction-to-post ratio of this size suggests that Jay Chou's fans engaged with the brand's content instead of scrolling past it.

Why Product Discussion Led the Conversation#

The content analysis of social media posts about Philips razors and Jay Chou shows an outcome that celebrity campaigns rarely achieve. Ranked by buzz volume, product-focused conversation (9,065 posts) came ahead of discussion of the brand (7,485 posts) and of the endorser (7,193 posts), followed by discussion of user groups at 5,907 posts, of specific models at 5,756 posts and of body areas at 5,248 posts.

This matters because the most common problem in celebrity endorsement is that the celebrity's image takes over the content, which builds awareness without connecting it to the product. In this campaign, product and brand discussion together accounted for 16,550 posts, or 37.6% of total content volume, against 7,193 posts (16.3%) for the endorser. The endorsement therefore worked as a way to carry the product story to a larger audience.

Discussion of specific models, at 5,756 posts or 13.1% of the total, is the most commercially useful finding, because consumers talked about the 9Ulita model that the endorsement was designed to promote and not only about the brand's razors in general. We believe this shows the campaign moving consumers from awareness of the brand to consideration of a particular product, which is the step that has to happen before a purchase.

The word cloud of associated content shows the same two messages side by side, with lifestyle and aspirational keywords ("sunshine type", "fashionable", "celebrity-endorsed") appearing alongside functional product terms ("comfortable", "efficient", "skin care"). Jay Chou's clean-cut personal style, associated with the "celebrity-style jawline" concept, became a way to communicate the 9Ulita's positioning around skin care.

The Audience Shift#

The change in who was talking about the brand is the most important result of the campaign, and it is the one that a short-term reading would miss.

Before the endorsement, the 31-35 age group made up the largest share of the brand's social media discussion, at 19.8%, with substantial representation from older groups: the 36-40 group accounted for 12.4%, and consumers aged 50 and above contributed 15.1% of total discussion. The brand's organic audience skewed older, which is consistent with a product that loyal consumers had been buying for years.

After the endorsement, in April 2025, the under-30 age groups together rose to approximately 59.0% of total discussion, from approximately 34.8% before. The 26-30 group alone rose from 16.8% to 28.6% and became the largest single group, and the 21-25 group nearly doubled, from 13.0% to 21.5%. We read this as a large change in who is talking about, and considering, the brand's razors.

Female participation in the discussion rose by approximately 2 percentage points after the endorsement. The figure is modest on its own, but electric razors are a gifting category in China, where women are among the main buyers of razors as gifts for partners, family members and fathers. Any increase in their engagement with the brand may therefore raise gifting consideration around Valentine's Day, Father's Day and Chinese New Year, the three occasions that account for a disproportionate share of premium razor sales.

The geographic mix of the discussion changed as well. Tier 1 cities' share of the discussion fell from 45.5% to 36.7%, while the share from Tier 2 cities rose from 15.6% to 17.1% and the share from Tier 3 cities nearly doubled, from 6.7% to 11.3%. Jay Chou's recognition across the country started conversations about the brand in cities beyond those its own media spend usually reaches, which widened the geographic reach of the endorsement.

What This Means for Brand Strategy in China#

The case gives a precise measure of what celebrity endorsement can deliver in China's personal care market, and of how easily its value can be misread when the wrong metric is used.

What endorsement delivers, on this evidence, is brand awareness at scale among consumers that organic brand investment cannot reach efficiently, a younger and geographically broader audience with more women in it, and, where the campaign is well designed, content that ties the celebrity to the product. These are brand equity outcomes, which we believe build the base for future sales more than they produce an immediate purchase.

Short-term unit sales, higher average selling prices and immediate share gains are a different matter, because they depend on consumers moving all the way from awareness through consideration to purchase, a process that brand-building research consistently puts at 3-6 months at minimum.

The most common error in evaluating celebrity endorsement is therefore to apply a 30-day conversion metric to a 6-month brand equity investment. On that reasoning, the commercial return of a campaign launched in April 2025 is better judged in October 2025, around the Double 11 festival, and in February 2026, at the Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year gifting peak, than in the launch month. That is because the under-30 consumers and the Tier 2-3 city consumers reached by the endorsement will enter the purchase funnel on their own timeline.

Conclusion#

The 428,000 posts generated by the Jay Chou endorsement describe what celebrity marketing delivers in the first month of a brand equity campaign. The audience data shows where the value lies: a 24-percentage-point rise in the under-30 share of discussion, a wider reach into Tier 2-3 cities than direct media spending could achieve at a similar cost, and a conversation led by the product, which moved consumers from the brand to a specific model. We believe brands that judge endorsement only on short-term sales conversion will underinvest in one of their most durable sources of advantage. The question to ask of this campaign is whether the 59% under-30 audience it reached in April will buy the brand's razors in November.

For the full market context, including competition among brands in the mid-market and consumer pain points, see the H1 2025 Whitepaper: China's Razor Market & Consumer Research.