Yadu owned 93% of Beijing's humidifier market but had sold almost nothing 100km away in Tianjin, so it stopped advertising the product's benefits and publicly asked Tianjin residents to explain why they weren't buying.

the problem

a product that dominates one nearby market is ignored in a demographically identical one, and repeating the same benefits-led pitch does not move it

background

the move

Yadu rewrote the ad itself into a direct, public question addressed to Tianjin residents by name of their city: given everything a humidifier does for a household's health, the company said, it genuinely did not understand why Tianjin wasn't buying — and it asked readers to write in and explain their own reasoning, in their own words. The move converted an outbound pitch into an inbound request that only a real person could answer, which meant it could not be skimmed and discarded the way a benefits list could. Over 1,200 Tianjin residents wrote back. Yadu treated every letter as a real reply rather than a stunt: each writer received a personal thank-you note, a discount voucher toward a humidifier, and had their name printed in the local newspaper, followed by an in-person Q&A event where company staff answered the objections raised in the letters face to face.

the payoff

Sales in the two months following the campaign reportedly exceeded 4,000 units — more than the prior three years of conventional advertising combined. The case is now taught in Chinese marketing and executive-education courses (including a Tsinghua leadership-course case study) as an early example of a company entering a nearly-saturated-by-fatigue ad market by asking a question instead of making a claim.

what came after

Yadu, led by founder He Lumin, went on to expand nationally through the 1990s on the strength of humidifiers and later air purifiers, and the Tianjin campaign became one of the standard citations in Chinese business writing on regional market entry — less for the product than for the observed mechanism: a message addressed as a question to a specific, named audience gets read past the filter that a generic benefits pitch does not.

references

1. [1]亚都：不明白为什么天津不买账（经典营销案例）知乎 (Zhihu, business-case retrospective), 2022zhuanlan.zhihu.com
2. [2]亚都称霸小市场清华总裁班 领导力课堂 (Tsinghua executive-education case library), 2020gototsinghua.org.cn

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