Halen's campus companionship experiment is rewriting the default answer for campus marketing.

In an era where young people's attention is highly fragmented, it's no longer news for brands to enter campuses. Music festivals, roadshows, flash mobs, and sponsored performances almost form a mature and high - frequency "campus marketing template". However, the more mature the template, the clearer the problem becomes: What exactly does the brand leave behind after the event?

Halen's four - session companionship practice by sponsoring the Douyin Campus LIVE program chose a slower and harder - to - quantify path: Taking "cute companionship" as the entry point, it integrated the brand into the real campus life of young people, becoming a memorable youth segment that can be retold.

If we consider these four campus companionship practices as a whole, it's more like a reverse experiment: In an era when traffic anxiety prevails, can a brand break away from short - term stimulation and return to the "relationship" that requires long - term construction?

The Shift from "Entering the Campus" to "Integrating into the Campus"

For a long time, traditional campus marketing was essentially a form of "attention leasing".

Brands enter campuses during peak traffic periods such as the start and end of the school year, leveraging the highly concentrated attention of students to achieve a concentrated exposure and create topics, and then quickly leave. The core of this logic is not to build relationships but to achieve a phased occupation at the lowest cost.

The effect of this approach is obvious, but the impact is not long - lasting. After the event, the brand disappears from students' daily experiences, often leaving only a vague impression rather than a memorable memory.

In the flood of information, what young people truly lack is something that can be deeply bound to their lives and accompany them for a long time.

Halen's campus companionship practice is a response to this problem. It doesn't regard the campus as a traffic field that can be quickly converted. Instead, it re - interprets it as a living field where relationships, emotions, and memories are continuously generated.

In such a field, a brand is more likely to be truly accepted only when it lets go of its dominant stance. This requires the brand to stop being obsessed with "being seen" and try to integrate into the daily lives of young people, gradually moving from being accepted to being familiar and trusted.

From its own development path, this is not an isolated decision of the brand.

Whether it's the long - term exploration in cultural circles such as Chinese traditional culture and anime, or the emotional foundation established around cute IPs and public welfare activities, Halen has always been verifying the same question: How to become a "companion" in young people's growth process rather than a short - term intruder.

These explorations are scattered in different scenarios, and the campus has become a key node where they converge and are systematically verified. This marks the brand's strategy shift from single - circle penetration to in - depth participation in the core life stage of young people. This is not only a strategic adjustment but also a pre - placement of values to win emotional recognition before young people generate consumption needs.

The Methodology of Cute Companionship: A Warm Core with Diverse Expressions

The difficulty of campus companionship is not just about "organizing an event" but whether the brand can be a reasonable presence. Young people are already immune to deliberate marketing. Only those natural and sustainable "presences" can cut through the noise and be truly accepted.

This is the "warm core" that Halen has always adhered to in its four campus companionship practices: Using the most sincere companionship to become an irreplaceable "youth partner" in young people's minds. Instead of overly interfering with students' rhythms, it deeply understands the unique cultures of each young group and becomes a part of their youth stories in the most sincere way.

Under this premise, the four campus companionship practices across different cities and with different university atmospheres are strung together into a continuous path:

Starting from Shenzhen University, it first verified the feasibility of "cute companionship" in a high - density and fast - paced young environment; at Xi'an Jiaotong University, it achieved local adaptation in a campus context with more cultural depth; then at Jilin University, it transformed the companionship concept into practical care to address specific environmental challenges; finally, at Tongji University, the expectations accumulated in the previous stops naturally converged into a more relaxed campus resonance.

The importance of this progressive process does not lie in "what was done" at each stop. Instead, it lies in calibrating the same sense of warmth with real feedback at each stop. Although the responses are different, they jointly verify one thing: Natural companionship is more easily accepted.

It was in this way that the IP "En'en" completed the transformation from a brand symbol to a cute campus friend. On the playground of Shenzhen University, on the sycamore avenue of Xi'an Jiaotong University, in the snow at Jilin University, and under the ginkgo trees at Tongji University, it was pulled by students for group photos, hugged, and written into WeChat Moments captions. In these interactions spontaneously initiated by students, "En'en" is no longer a brand symbol to be memorized but a natural and warm segment in their campus lives that they are willing to share.

This is also the most practical test of "cute companionship": Whether young people are willing to bring you into their own narratives.

Judging from the results, this methodology has been verified: The four events covered the core groups of multiple universities in total, with a total online exposure of tens of billions, a continuous increase in the number of online and offline participants, hundreds of hot searches on Douyin, and a cumulative increase of more than 30 million in the brand's 5A customer assets.

More importantly, Generation Z users have always been the main group for interaction and communication. Brand - related searches, discussions, and spontaneous content have continued to ferment during the event period, quickly completing the consumer journey from reach, conversion, to trust.

This is the core of Halen's successful methodology: It transforms campus companionship from one - off performances into a relationship investment that can be cumulatively rolled over, allowing each appearance to continuously add value to the existing familiarity.

For the brand, this is a more time - tested approach. It gives up short - term memory points and instead manages a relationship structure that can be magnified by time. In an era when young people are becoming more and more immune to marketing, this kind of stability has become a scarce resource.

When Companionship is Remembered: The Leap from Short - Term Buzz to Long - Term Emotional Assets

Currently, most campus marketing activities often stop at data analysis and narrowly define "value" by data. Exposure, interaction, and conversion are of course important, but when they are regarded as the only answers, the brand will fall into a misunderstanding: Only pursuing superficial hype.

The result is that the buzz is getting louder, but the memory is getting thinner.

Halen's campus companionship practice provides another path: Regarding the buzz as the starting point to enter the life narrative. What is truly accumulated are three types of assets with long - term significance:

First, it precipitates into a companionship relationship that can be repeatedly confirmed. The brand repeatedly appears in students' daily lives: being encountered, recorded, and shared, without asking for a response. It doesn't rely on a single strong stimulus to gain attention but on multiple appearances to build familiarity. Thus, companionship is no longer just a "one - time emotional touch" but a presence that can be repeatedly confirmed.

Second, it is sublimated into a memory symbol co - created by users. When "En'en" is spontaneously written into students' WeChat Moments, short videos, and daily narratives, it becomes an emotional anchor: cute, relaxed, warm, and shareable. The key to this transformation is not how delicate the IP is but whether it can enter real life. "En'en" has achieved the leap from a "brand asset" to a "campus public memory symbol", which makes it, as an IP, not only belong to the brand but also to the shared youth of students.

Finally, it is internalized into a mental position with emotional preference attributes. It's not hard to find that traditional marketing often stops at "being recognized and selected", but the ultimate goal of the companionship path is to anchor the brand as an emotional dependence in adolescence from a consumption option. This kind of memory - based recognition has the strongest time - compounding effect and constitutes the real brand moat.

Taking a broader view, the industry significance of this path is clearer: In the era of stock competition, it's the ability to be embedded in a generation's collective memory and cultural narrative. What young people tend to remember in the long run are not the loudest brands but those that have truly appeared in their lives and are bound to a certain youth experience.

Therefore, the greater inspiration of this campus practice to the outside world lies here: When everyone is chasing short - term benefit explosions and presentations, another more difficult but more worthwhile path is to invest resources in long - term relationships. Be a part of their stories, not a passing guest at marketing nodes.

When a brand is written into youth, it gains the power to cross cycles.