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Xiaomi Indonesia Brings Romi Home for Ramadan 2023
Xiaomi Indonesia's 2023 Silaturahmi campaign is a two-episode digital and film narrative that follows fictional character Romi through the post-COVID Ramadan season, enlisting JKT48 members to celebrate togetherness, forgiveness, and acceptance across the Indonesian market under the hashtag #SilaturahmiSamaXiaomi.
Ramadan 2023 carried a significance that no campaign brief could manufacture. For the first time in two years, Indonesian Muslims were free to gather, travel home, and observe silaturahmi — the practice of renewing family and community bonds — without the constraints of COVID-19 restrictions. Xiaomi Indonesia recognised that emotional weight and built an entire creative platform around it. Published on April 20, 2023, according to Ads of the World, the campaign was produced entirely in-house by Xiaomi Creative Dept and classified across Digital, Film, and Integrated media categories.
At the centre of the work is Romi, a recurring fictional character in Xiaomi Indonesia's Ramadan communications. His return is not a continuity device alone — it functions as a mirror for the audience's own deferred homecomings. Across two episodes, Romi prepares to reunite with family while six members of JKT48, namely Shani, Feni, Adel, Oniel, Flora, and Indah, according to the AKB48 fandom archive, weave through the narrative as guides, companions, and emotional counterpoints. The full campaign title, Ramadan Saatnya Silaturahmi Sama Xiaomi, positions the brand not as a product showcase but as a facilitator of reunion. The underlying commercial hook — Xiaomi's Festival Ramadan Hemat promotional event — is present but subordinated to the human story. In Indonesia, where Ramadan advertising is one of the most competitive creative arenas of the calendar year, that restraint is itself a strategic choice.
Xiaomi Indonesia entered the 2023 Ramadan season operating against a difficult market backdrop. Indonesia's smartphone market contracted in 2023, with IDC reporting a 1.2% year-over-year decline to 34.6 million units shipped, while Counterpoint Research estimated a steeper 6% drop in shipments, reflecting differences in methodology and channel coverage. In that environment, price-led promotional campaigns were the default posture across the category.
Xiaomi's own position, however, offered reason for a different approach. The brand shipped 5.1 million units in Indonesia in 2023, up 3.5% year-over-year, according to Counterpoint Research — a counter-cyclical performance that signalled growing consumer affinity rather than pure price sensitivity. Samsung led the Indonesian market with 6.9 million shipments and a 20.0% share, per Counterpoint Research, while OPPO held 19.1% share with 6.6 million shipments. Against those two dominant competitors, Xiaomi's path to differentiation in a crowded Ramadan advertising period was less about unit economics and more about cultural resonance.
The strategic insight behind Silaturahmi is precise. Two years of COVID-era Ramadans had created a reservoir of suppressed longing for the kind of physical, unhurried family reunion that silaturahmi demands. The 2023 Ramadan season was the first genuine opportunity to release that feeling at scale. Xiaomi Creative Dept identified that the most credible emotional territory for a technology brand in this moment was not innovation or aspiration but enablement — the idea that Xiaomi products and platforms could help facilitate the reunion rather than star in it. The Festival Ramadan Hemat promotional mechanic provided the commercial foundation, but the campaign's tone was set by the story of Romi, a character whose own journey home gave the audience a proxy for their own.
Muhammad Rizqi Tri Azhariyadi served as creative director on Silaturahmi, credited as a full-time creative and freelance creative director, according to Ads of the World. The production was handled entirely within Xiaomi Creative Dept, making the creative ambition of the output — a two-episode, musically-guided narrative drama — a notable commitment for an in-house team.
The defining formal choice in Silaturahmi is the use of music as a structural and emotional engine rather than as a tonal backdrop. The story of Romi is guided by song in a way that aligns with the melodramatic traditions of Indonesian Ramadan storytelling, where sentiment is expressed directly and collective memory is activated through familiar musical registers. This treatment allows the campaign to move through emotional registers — anticipation, reunion, grief, acceptance — without the tonal whiplash that can undermine shorter-form advertising content. The two-episode format, classified across Digital, Film, and Integrated channels, per Ads of the World, gave the creative team room to develop Romi as a character rather than a symbol, and to allow the presence of JKT48 members Shani, Feni, Adel, Oniel, Flora, and Indah to feel earned rather than promotional.
JKT48's inclusion is a culturally calibrated decision. As one of Indonesia's most prominent idol groups, the members carry audience familiarity and affective associations that are particularly strong among younger Indonesian consumers — a demographic central to Xiaomi's growth strategy in the market. Their function within the narrative is relational rather than endorsement-driven, which preserves the emotional integrity of Romi's story. The campaign's two media assets, as documented by Ads of the World, represent a deliberately compact content footprint that prioritises depth of engagement over breadth of exposure.
Silaturahmi earned a Clapboard Score of 70 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its emotional brief with discipline and cultural specificity, though one whose documented reach remains modest relative to its creative ambition.
On YouTube, the campaign recorded 8,467 views, 589 likes, and 40 comments at the point of documentation, according to Ads of the World. The like-to-view ratio of approximately 7.0%, as calculated by Ads of the World, is a meaningful signal. Industry benchmarks for YouTube branded content typically register engagement ratios well below that threshold, which suggests the audience that did encounter Silaturahmi responded with genuine investment rather than passive consumption. The comment volume, while numerically small, points to a segment of viewers moved enough to articulate a response — consistent with the campaign's stated aim of triggering personal memory and emotional recognition.
No third-party verified sales attribution data for the Festival Ramadan Hemat promotional period connected to Silaturahmi is publicly available. What the structural evidence does support is that Xiaomi Indonesia's counter-cyclical unit growth of 3.5% year-over-year in 2023, per Counterpoint Research, occurred during the same period in which the brand made a deliberate shift toward emotionally-led Ramadan communication. The correlation is not causation, but the pairing of audience engagement quality and commercial performance suggests the campaign's approach was directionally sound for the Indonesian market. Xiaomi Creative Dept's decision to foreground acceptance and the remembrance of deceased loved ones alongside reunion gave Silaturahmi a tonal range that separated it from purely celebratory Ramadan campaigns across the Electronics category.
Silaturahmi is a two-episode digital and film campaign published by Xiaomi Indonesia in April 2023. Created by Xiaomi Creative Dept under the hashtag #SilaturahmiSamaXiaomi, it follows fictional character Romi through a post-COVID Ramadan reunion story featuring JKT48 members Shani, Feni, Adel, Oniel, Flora, and Indah.
Romi is a recurring fictional character in Xiaomi Indonesia's Ramadan advertising. In the 2023 Silaturahmi campaign, Romi serves as an audience proxy navigating homecoming, forgiveness, and acceptance — themes chosen to reflect the first unrestricted post-COVID Ramadan season in Indonesia after two years of social restrictions.
Six JKT48 members appeared in the Silaturahmi campaign. According to the AKB48 fandom archive, they were Shani, Feni, Adel, Oniel, Flora, and Indah. Their roles within the two-episode narrative were relational rather than promotional, preserving the emotional integrity of Romi's reunion story throughout both episodes.
Muhammad Rizqi Tri Azhariyadi served as creative director on Silaturahmi, according to Ads of the World. He is credited as a full-time creative and freelance creative director. The campaign was produced entirely in-house by Xiaomi Creative Dept and published across Digital, Film, and Integrated media categories in Indonesia.
The campaign recorded 8,467 views, 589 likes, and 40 comments at the point of documentation, according to Ads of the World. Its like-to-view ratio of approximately 7.0% indicates strong audience engagement relative to typical branded content benchmarks, suggesting viewers who encountered the campaign responded with genuine emotional investment.
Silaturahmi continues Xiaomi Indonesia's practice of building Ramadan communications around Romi as a recurring character, shifting the brand from product-led promotion toward culturally grounded storytelling. In a 2023 Indonesian smartphone market that contracted year-over-year according to IDC, this emotional positioning distinguished Xiaomi from Samsung and OPPO's more conventional category advertising.
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