Guardian Malaysia's 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' CNY 2025 campaign features May Ho's debut festive single to connect wellness with family reunion traditions.
ARCHIVEGuardian Malaysia Celebrates Lunar New Year With a Song About Togetherness
Guardian Malaysia's 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' is a Adsoftheworld.clapboard.com/archive/central-department-store-the-great-chinese-new-year-2025-retail-2">2025 Chinese New Year brand film released in January 2025 in Malaysia, centred on family reunion, festive traditions, and wellness, featuring local Malaysian artist May Ho performing her debut Lunar New Year single for the brand, according to LinkedIn.
The campaign arrives at a culturally significant moment in the Malaysian retail calendar. Chinese New Year represents one of the highest-traffic retail periods in Malaysia, and Guardian — a leading health and beauty retail chain operating across the country — uses the occasion to position wellness not merely as personal upkeep but as something that flourishes in connection and celebration. The film's central thesis, articulated by Priscilla Wu, Managing Director of Guardian Malaysia, is that wellness extends beyond individual self-care routines. As Wu stated publicly, 'This Lunar New Year, we believe wellness extends beyond self-care routines — it also thrives in the joy and connection found in meaningful relationships.'
The campaign carries the tagline 'Own Your Year of Togetherness,' which threads directly from Guardian Malaysia's broader brand repositioning under the platform 'Own Your Beautiful,' launched in late 2024, according to reporting by The Star Malaysia and DFI Retail Group communications. The festive film deploys a single original song as its emotional engine, with May Ho — a Malaysian artist making her CNY single debut — delivering the musical centrepiece. Guardian frames the reunion dinner, the rekindling of family ties, and the shared beauty rituals of the season as expressions of its retail identity in Malaysia, according to Www-Euromonitor-Com Ezproxy Hs-Augsburg. The campaign also carried a commercial dimension, with promotional offers of up to 60% across selected brands and product categories during the festive period, according to publicly available campaign materials. A Clapboard Score of 70 out of 100 reflects competent festive storytelling that successfully aligns Guardian's retail services positioning with the emotional register of Malaysian Chinese New Year celebrations.
Guardian Malaysia operates in a health and beauty retail environment that is both large and intensifying in competition. Malaysia's beauty and personal care retail sales reached RM16.6 billion with 4% value growth in 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence, while the health and beauty segment recorded growth of 11.8% CAGR from 2020 to 2025 and is forecast to expand at 7.6% CAGR from 2025 to 2030, per Ken Research. In this context, Guardian's decision to anchor its Chinese New Year campaign around emotional connection rather than product promotion alone reflects a deliberate strategic choice to compete on brand affinity rather than price alone.
Watsons Malaysia, Guardian's most direct competitor, operates an estimated 600 to 700 or more stores across the country and holds an estimated 20 to 25% market share in the health and beauty segment, according to Prioo Care market analysis. With scale broadly comparable to Guardian's own footprint, the contest between the two chains increasingly plays out at the level of brand meaning rather than store count. Guardian's 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' positions the brand as a participant in festive traditions — not merely a retailer selling products associated with them.
The strategic insight underpinning the campaign is stated plainly by Managing Director Priscilla Wu: the brand vision revolves around the empowering phrase 'Own Your,' which Wu confirmed publicly as the connective tissue between the late-2024 'Own Your Beautiful' platform and the 2025 CNY activation. By extending this platform into Lunar New Year territory, Guardian signals continuity of purpose across campaign cycles. The retail-pharmacy subsegment, in which Guardian competes directly, represents 49.4% of Malaysia's health and beauty segment in 2025, per Ken Research — making festive purchase occasions strategically critical to defending and growing share across the Malaysian market.
Guardian Malaysia's creative approach to 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' centres on an original song rather than conventional product-led advertising. May Ho, a Malaysian artist, performs her debut Chinese New Year single within the film, lending the campaign an authenticity that distinguishes it from standard retail festive formats common in the Malaysian market during CNY season.
The film format chosen — a narrative brand film running as a single media asset — gives the creative room to develop emotional resonance over time rather than compressing it into a product showcase. The visual and thematic territory covers reunion dinners, family gatherings, beauty rituals shared between generations, and the warmth of togetherness that defines Malaysian Chinese New Year observance. These images are not incidental; they are the campaign's argument that Guardian belongs in these moments, not just on the shelves adjacent to them.
The original song functions as a mnemonic and emotional anchor simultaneously. In Malaysian festive advertising, music has long been used to extend a campaign's reach through sharing — the film's own call to action explicitly asks viewers to share the video to spread the joy of togetherness. This mechanic is designed to leverage organic distribution through social platforms, with May Ho's artist profile providing an additional audience entry point beyond Guardian's own channels.
Production credits for 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' are not publicly documented beyond May Ho's performance credit and Guardian Malaysia's brand ownership. The campaign sits within the creative lineage of FCB SHOUT, the agency appointed as Guardian Malaysia's partner in connection with the 'Own Your Beautiful' repositioning in late 2024, according to The Star Malaysia and DFI Retail Group communications — though FCB SHOUT's specific involvement in the CNY film has not been confirmed in publicly available sources as of the time of writing.
ARCHIVENo verified third-party performance data for 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' — including view counts, earned media value, sales uplift, or brand tracking results — is publicly available at the time of writing. No substantive critical reviews of the campaign appear in industry publications including Campaign Asia, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious, per Clapboard's research.
What is documentable is the campaign's structural effectiveness. The Clapboard Score of 70 out of 100 positions 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' as a competent and emotionally coherent piece of festive retail communication in Malaysia. The score reflects a campaign that successfully integrates brand platform continuity — the 'Own Your' framework — with the emotional demands of Chinese New Year storytelling, and that deploys a genuine cultural asset in May Ho's debut CNY single rather than relying on generic festive imagery.
The commercial layer of the campaign, comprising promotional discounts of up to 60% across selected product categories, provides a direct retail conversion mechanism that sits beneath the brand film's emotional surface. Guardian also incorporated a community partnership element involving a donation of personal care products, according to available campaign materials, though the full details of this initiative are not completely documented in public sources. Together, these components indicate a campaign designed to operate across brand, culture, and commerce simultaneously — a structural ambition that a score of 70 suggests was achieved with consistency if not exceptional distinction within the competitive landscape of Malaysian CNY retail advertising.
'Own Your Year of Togetherness' is Guardian Malaysia's Chinese New Year 2025 brand film, released in January 2025. It features Malaysian artist May Ho performing her debut Lunar New Year single and positions Guardian's retail wellness offering within the festive traditions of family reunion and celebration central to CNY in Malaysia.
May Ho is a Malaysian artist who performs her debut Chinese New Year single in the campaign. Her musical contribution serves as the emotional centrepiece of the brand film, giving Guardian Malaysia's CNY 2025 activation an original cultural asset that distinguishes it from conventional retail festive advertising in the Malaysian market.
The agency for 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' has not been publicly disclosed. FCB SHOUT was appointed as Guardian Malaysia's agency partner for the 'Own Your Beautiful' brand repositioning in late 2024, according to The Star Malaysia, but their specific involvement in the CNY 2025 film has not been confirmed in available public sources.
Guardian Malaysia's Managing Director Priscilla Wu confirmed publicly that the brand vision centres on the phrase 'Own Your.' The CNY campaign extends this into festive territory, following the 'Own Your Beautiful' platform launched in December 2024, creating continuity between Guardian's repositioning and its Chinese New Year retail activation in Malaysia.
Guardian Malaysia's 'Own Your Year of Togetherness' received a Clapboard Score of 70 out of 100. This reflects competent festive brand storytelling that integrates platform continuity, an original CNY single, and emotional resonance with Malaysian reunion traditions, without reaching exceptional distinction in the competitive landscape of Malaysian retail festive advertising.
Guardian competes in Malaysia's health and beauty retail sector. Its principal competitor is Watsons Malaysia, which holds an estimated 20 to 25% market share and operates an estimated 600 to 700 or more stores, according to Prioo Care. Malaysia's beauty and personal care retail sales reached RM16.6 billion with 4% value growth in 2025, per Mordor Intelligence.
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