Turning rejections into solutions

Tiew Hue Fen
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Rejections can generally dampen one’s spirit but occasionally, it may just bring out the best in you. That’s exactly how Tiew Hue Fen discovered her capacity to innovate marketing strategies and emerged the champion of her Wings Cohort at the recent Elken Leadapreneur Accelerator Series (Cycle 3).

The 32-year-old Assistant Marketing Manager at Elken Sdn Bhd single-handedly built a powerful digital marketing campaign and became an amazing social media influencer with her ‘Strong is Beautiful’ tagline. Strong is Beautiful is a digital platform initiated to increase awareness and popularise products and lifestyle from Elken among younger consumers.

Hue Fen was able to sway the vibrant world of social media into a money-making platform through her campaign that went live in March 2019. She then went all out to influence behaviour and perceptions that were to eventually market her company’s skin care and health food products via Facebook, Instagram and website.

Within 3 weeks of going live, Strong is Beautiful had engaged 540 users, made 1,400 post engagements and received over 3,000 positive feedback. Hue Fen’s postings on the business’ social media accounts also fetched 13,000 organic impressions and recorded over 4,000 organic reach.

But the victory didn’t come as easily. When Hue Fen first started her Leadapreneur stint, she wanted to introduce a 30-Day Weight Loss campaign that was inspired by her own experience, but upon presenting, her stakeholders were unimpressed. Just when she thought she’d try again, her next two ideas were also shrugged off.

Despite sheer disappointment, Hue Fen went back to the drawing board, as she wasn’t willing to give up without a fight and Strong is Beautiful landed as a result of her determination and passion.

The campaign inspires the younger generation to take ownership and transform of their lives, health and dreams through proper nutrition intake and body care. It also serves as a reminder for them to ‘be strong’ in defining their own lives.

The lifestyle-oriented campaign was also targeted at influencing young minds with a well-structured content that impacts consumption behaviour among potentials customers. Through the social media influence, Hue Fen was able to increase awareness on the company’s products particularly among young users.

Using the potent combination of convincing content and visual marketing strategies, Hue Fen brought Elken to the people and in the process, achieved her One-Woman Digital Marketing goal, where she successfully built a sustainable campaign and is in the process of putting together her dream team consisting of various digital marketing experts.

In retrospect, it was her moments of discomfort that led her out of her comfort zone. She knew she could not solve a problem she didn’t understand, so she took it upon herself to study the weak links faced by her business and figured that she could try and improve potential customer engagement via the digital platform.

Thereon, it was a head-on dive to learn and grow through the powerful art of story-telling. Her online marketing strategy was not only well received but it opened up other opportunities of growth within her company as the Social Media division noticed her strength and expressed their interest in engaging her for future campaigns. 

Interestingly, her greatest lesson did not come from achieving a professional milestone but rather the journey that got her there. Hue Fen realised that she was able to use her experience to improve the outcome of her actions.

Apart from discovering her own capacity, Leadapreneur, according to Hue Fen had taught her how to change every challenge into an opportunity – a lesson befitting a leadapreneur!

Congratulations Hue Fen for becoming a Champion of the Accelerator!