ARCHIVEWatsons Malaysia Turns Chinese New Year Into a Music Video Moment
Watsons Malaysia's "Happy Beautiful Year 闪靓过靓年!" is a 2025 Chinese New Year retail campaign built around an original multilingual music video titled "Sim Leng Leng," featuring six Malaysian celebrities performing choreographed routines to drive brand engagement across the health and beauty category during the Lunar New Year festive season in Malaysia.
The campaign launched publicly on 14 January 2025, according to reporting by The Star, with a promotional window running from 31 December 2024 through 12 February 2025 in West Malaysia and from 7 January to 19 February 2025 in East Malaysia, per Watsons Com My. This deliberate regional phasing reflects the operational scale Watsons brings to the Malaysian market, where the brand is reported to operate more than 700 stores and serve 7.5 million loyalty members, according to prioocare.com. The campaign sits within the brand's established "#HappyBeautifulYear" platform, which Marketing Interactive reports was first introduced in 2023 to connect health and beauty themes with family and festive values.
In Malaysia, the Lunar New Year period represents one of the most commercially contested moments in the retail calendar. Watsons positioned the 2025 edition as a deliberate format shift: where the 2024 "Enter the Dragons" campaign, as documented by marketing-interactive.com, centred on a narrative brand film following a fictional Dragon family, the 2025 execution replaced storytelling with spectacle, anchoring the campaign in a music video designed for repeated viewing and social sharing. The result is a campaign that functions simultaneously as entertainment content, brand advertisement, and participatory cultural moment — a structure that Clapboard's editorial analysis identifies as a growing signature of effective festive retail marketing in Southeast Asia.
ARCHIVEWatsons Malaysia operates in one of Southeast Asia's most competitive health and beauty retail environments. In Malaysia, the health and beauty retail market was estimated at US$6.174 billion in 2025 with a projected value of US$8.040 billion by 2031, implying a compound annual growth rate of approximately 4.50%, according to kenresearch.com. Malaysia's beauty and personal care retail sales were separately estimated at MYR16.6 billion in 2025, with approximately 4% value growth recorded during the year, per Mordor Intelligence. Within this context, Watsons competes directly with pharmacy-led rivals such as Guardian and specialist beauty chains including Sephora, both of which activate aggressively around the Chinese New Year window across Malaysia.
The strategic logic behind the music video format is rooted in consumer behaviour. Festive campaigns in Malaysia's retail sector increasingly compete not just for purchase intent but for cultural presence — the ability to generate the kind of organic repetition that turns a brand asset into a shared seasonal reference. By building the campaign around an original song, "Sim Leng Leng," Watsons created an earworm engineered for the conditions of social media shareability. The multilingual execution, delivered in Mandarin, Malay, and English across the video and its accompanying social copy, extends the campaign's reach across Malaysia's ethnically and linguistically diverse consumer base.
The campaign also embedded a structured loyalty mechanic. Per watsons.com.my, Club members spending a minimum of RM80 with any Visa card — in-store or online — through 31 January 2025 were eligible to participate in a daily contest offering cash prizes of RM8,888, with a total prize pool of RM1,888,888. This figure, reported by Pamper My, anchors aspirational Lunar New Year numerology — the number eight carrying strong auspicious connotations — directly to a transactional brand behaviour, converting entertainment engagement into measurable commercial participation.
Moss Motion directed, designed, and produced the "Happy Beautiful Year 闪靓过靓年!" music video, with character animation handled by Thrillion Studio, according to mossmotion.com. The production brings together six Malaysian public figures: Phei Yong, Jestinna Kuan, Perry Kuan, Mskuan, Danny Lee, and Amber Chia, each appearing as a performer rather than a spokesperson, integrated into choreographed sequences built around the campaign's central song.
The casting strategy is deliberate. Phei Yong serves as a Watsons ambassador and anchors the ensemble, while the inclusion of figures such as Amber Chia — one of Malaysia's most recognisable personalities — and the Kuan siblings extends the video's reach across different audience segments and social platforms simultaneously. Phei Yong, quoted by The Star on 23 January 2025, described the production as "packed with fun, energy and meaningful moments that beautifully capture the festive spirit with a signature catchy tune and memorable dance moves." That framing is not incidental: the campaign's creative brief appears to have prioritised repeatability, engineering a visual and sonic hook that rewards multiple viewings rather than resolving in a single narrative arc.
The song title "Sim Leng Leng" translates loosely as "beautiful" or "shining beautifully" in Hokkien, a dialect widely spoken among Chinese Malaysians, which threads the brand's beauty retail identity directly into the linguistic texture of the festive content. The multilingual execution across the video — incorporating Mandarin, Malay, and English — mirrors the trilingual social media copy deployed at launch, ensuring the campaign's cultural register is accessible rather than exclusive. The animation contribution from Thrillion Studio introduces a visual dimension that separates the production from standard celebrity-fronted retail advertising, elevating the overall production value and extending the asset's life as shareable digital content in the Malaysian market.
The "Happy Beautiful Year 闪靓过靓年!" music video recorded 26,653,708 views, 2,044 likes, and 295 comments, according to data cited by clapboard.com. The platform, measurement date, and the organic-to-paid split underlying these figures are not publicly documented, and therefore the numbers should be read as indicative of reach rather than as a controlled performance benchmark. No verified third-party attribution study or sales-lift data for this campaign is publicly available.
What the view count does confirm is meaningful scale. In the context of Malaysian branded content — and specifically within the health and beauty retail category during Lunar New Year — a view total exceeding 26 million represents a substantial content reach figure for a single campaign asset. Separately, The Star reported that Watsons Malaysia recorded a brand ad-awareness increase from 40.7% on 26 December 2024 to 50.7% by 23 January 2025, a ten-percentage-point uplift across the campaign's opening weeks in Malaysia. This metric, while covering only the first portion of the promotional window, suggests that the music video format achieved its primary objective: elevating brand salience at the most competitive moment in the Malaysian retail calendar.
The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on three reinforcing elements: a celebrity ensemble with cross-demographic reach, a song designed for involuntary recall, and a prize mechanic that converts passive viewing into active loyalty participation. Each element serves a distinct commercial function, and their combination represents a disciplined festive retail strategy rather than an opportunistic execution. Clapboard scores this campaign 66 out of 100, reflecting strong cultural alignment and content reach, offset by limited publicly verifiable outcome data and a creative approach that prioritises accessibility over distinctiveness.
Watsons Malaysia's "Happy Beautiful Year 闪靓过靓年!" is a Chinese New Year campaign launched in January 2025 built around an original music video. The video features six Malaysian celebrities performing choreographed routines to the song "Sim Leng Leng" and is supported by a loyalty contest with a total prize pool of RM1,888,888, per watsons.com.my.
The music video stars six Malaysian public figures. Watsons ambassador Phei Yong leads the ensemble alongside Jestinna Kuan, Perry Kuan, Mskuan, Danny Lee, and Amber Chia, all of whom perform choreographed sequences in the video. Their combined social media presence extends the campaign's reach across multiple audience segments in Malaysia.
The music video recorded 26,653,708 views, according to clapboard.com. It also received 2,044 likes and 295 comments. The measurement date and the split between organic and paid distribution are not publicly documented, so the figure reflects overall content reach rather than a controlled performance outcome.
Watsons Club members spending a minimum of RM80 with any Visa card in-store or online through 31 January 2025 were eligible for a daily cash prize of RM8,888, per watsons.com.my. The total prize pool reached RM1,888,888, as reported by pamper.my, with the number eight chosen for its auspicious Lunar New Year associations.
Moss Motion directed, designed, and produced the campaign music video, with character animation handled by Thrillion Studio, according to mossmotion.com. The agency responsible for the broader campaign strategy has not been publicly disclosed. Production credits beyond Moss Motion's role are not documented in publicly available sources.
The 2025 campaign marked a deliberate format shift from narrative film to music video. Marketing-interactive.com reports that the 2024 "Enter the Dragons" campaign centred on a fictional family story, while the 2023 edition focused on health and beauty as a foundation for relationships. The 2025 edition replaced storytelling with a performance-led, song-driven format built for social sharing.
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