In The People’s Park in Shanghai, parents gather to seek matches for their adult children, holding umbrellas in the rain, posting their details on paper, hoping for a connection. In China, a woman who is unmarried at 27 carries an official label: sheng nu. Leftover woman. Looking at that socially sanctioned and deeply personal scene, Kylene Campos saw the kind of human tension she has spent her career learning to recognise: the moment when a social norm has become so familiar that people have almost stopped seeing it as pressure at all.
SVP of Tapestry Asia, and previously Global Operations Leader and Chief Marketing Officer for SK-II at Procter & Gamble, Kylene has built her work around the person beneath the consumer label.
Often, that person is a woman carrying a social expectation. With SK-II, Kylene and her team turned the camera towards that pressure, creating the Marriage Market campaign, one of the most-watched pieces of branded content ever made in China.
That philosophy does not make for easy work. Before a story like Marriage Market could reach the public, Kylene and her team had to make it undeniable inside the organisation. The first step was clarity: the human insight had to be specific, truthful and deeply felt. When the team members themselves began to tear up on hearing it, Kylene knew the work had touched something real.
Start with where the tensions are. Telling stories in a human way takes courage.
She saw it again in Japan, through Pantene’s Hair We Go campaign. At the time, students were not allowed to dye, perm or colour their hair, a rule so rigid that some with naturally brown hair would dye it black to avoid being seen as rebellious. The campaign put a spotlight on that absurdity with such precision that the Tokyo Education Board changed the rule. A second strand of the same campaign turned to shukatsu, the annual job-hunting ceremony where candidates arrive in uniform conformity, black hair uniformly styled, individuality carefully suppressed. Here, too, Pantene created a movement: the right to show up as yourself, even on the most scrutinised day of your professional year.
For Kylene, courage in storytelling is not about making a brand appear bold. She says the SK-II work was about telling a human story that felt real to consumers and needed to be told. Her focus was on staying close to the truth of what people are living with, and handling that truth carefully enough that the audience recognises it without feeling that anyone has been turned into a symbol.
Women see the world with a lot more nuance, understanding and emotion. What I hope can change are the people who make those decisions on which stories get told.”
For Kylene, representation goes beyond who appears in the story. It is about who has the authority to choose the story in the first place. Who sees the tension and protects the narative when it becomes uncomfortable. That balance is where Kylene’s tenacity shows. The public sees the finished campaign, but what is less visible is the work of making a difficult story possible inside a large organisation: sharpening the insight, anticipating the risk, and giving leaders and legal teams enough confidence to stand behind it.
This is the stewardship in Kylene brings. A powerful insight is only the beginning. The harder part is helping everyone around it see what she sees: that the tension is real, that the story is worth telling, and that it can be handled with care. Her determination to hold steady in the face of doubt while decision-makers catch up to her vision for breaking down social norms one campaign at a time. That is also what she hopes HerMark will encourage in the industry, more women telling the stories that need to be told, and more women in the rooms where those stories are funded.
For her symbol, Kylene chooses a ripple. Impact that travels beyond the work itself, shaping culture, changing norms, reaching people the campaign was never formally targeted at. It is a modest image for what she has achieved: policy changes, movements sparked and creating space for women to be seen as they are. For Kylene, a story has connected when it begins to move without the brand pushing it. When people share it. When institutions respond. When someone gets to live a little differently because the pressure has finally been made visible.
HerMark is a visual and narrative study of women shaping the marketing, advertising, and communications industry. Branding in Asia is publishing the ongoing series in partnership with HerMark.
Learn more at hermark.world. Read more interviews from the series here.
