Plant Attack on Frizz, Smoothness Gets You Hooked

One of the key communication challenges in hair care is that consumers already know that smooth hair is desirable, but almost every brand claims to deliver it.

When “smoothness,” “softness,” and “plant-based ingredients” become highly standardized product language, simply adding more functional descriptions does little to create stronger memory.

The New Year context offered another point of entry.

The Chinese word “顺” carries strong emotional significance during the New Year: hair can become smooth, while life can also “go smoothly.” A product can solve the problem of frizz, while the New Year represents people’s hopes for a smooth, successful, and harmonious year ahead.

Therefore, the question was not simply:

“How do we tell consumers that the product makes their hair smooth?”

Instead, we asked:

“How can ‘smoothness’ become both a product experience and a New Year wish?”

Based on this idea, we reconnected the product’s functional benefits with the emotional context of the New Year, allowing “smoothness” to become the central language connecting product experience with seasonal emotion.

We established “植击毛躁，顺间上头” as the core communication concept, using the relationship between “植击,” “毛躁,” “顺间,” and “上头” to connect product function, New Year wishes, and consumer experience.

“植击” — represents the product’s plant-based ingredients, using the dynamic idea of “striking” to give the ingredients a sense of action and effectiveness.

“毛躁” — directly identifies the hair problem consumers want to solve, making the functional benefit clear and tangible.

“顺间” — refers to the instant transition from frizzy to smooth hair, while simultaneously drawing on the New Year meaning of “顺” to express wishes for a smooth and successful year.

“上头” — conveys the pleasurable experience of smooth hair while giving the overall concept a more rhythmic and memorable expression.

Thus, “顺间上头” became the key semantic connection within the campaign:

When your hair feels smooth, may the New Year go smoothly too.

The concept was then extended into key visuals, interactive content, communication materials, and activity touchpoints. The recurring language of “植击,” “毛躁,” “顺间,” and “上头” became a unified memory structure across the campaign, allowing product benefits and New Year emotions to remain connected across different communication contexts.

This project helped me develop a deeper understanding of “translation” in advertising creativity.

Product benefits are not necessarily communicative ideas by themselves.

“Plant-based ingredients,” “smoothness,” and “frizz control” are product language, while “植击毛躁，顺间上头” is communication language created by reorganizing those existing product messages.

The idea of “顺间” particularly showed me that a strong creative concept does not always need to invent something completely new. Sometimes, it can start with a word that already exists within the product proposition and create new meaning by reconnecting it with a different cultural context.

In this project, “顺” connects two seemingly different things: the product experience of hair becoming smoother, and the New Year wish for life to become smoother and more fulfilling.

This made me realize that the value of advertising creativity is not always about adding more information. Sometimes, it lies in reorganizing what already exists and finding a connection that allows consumers to understand, remember, and emotionally respond to it in a new way.