It is a fiercely competitive era for consumer electronics. For Michelle Wee, General Manager of Marketing at Hisense, cutting through the noise means stepping away from technical jargon and leaning into human experiences.
Wee caught up with Mediaweek for our CMO Spotlight.
Moving beyond the spec sheet
MW: What’s the piece of work from the past 12 months that best captures how your brand wants to show up right now?
Michelle Wee: Without hesitation, it’s the work where we stopped talking about ‘product specs’ and started talking to real Australian lives.
In 2025, Hisense shifted part of its marketing focus toward campaigns that connect product ownership with real-world lifestyle moments. We moved beyond just technical specs and price messages and instead emphasised meaningful experiences at home.
A good example of this was Australia’s Hisense Experience Campaign, where customers who purchased select Hisense products were able to win premium prizes such as travel experiences. The campaign made Hisense more than a product choice. It became a brand associated with lifestyle opportunity. Customers weren’t just buying a TV or a fridge, they were participating in something bigger: a chance at a memorable experience.
The experiential approach worked alongside broader global platforms, such as the “Own the Moment” FIFA campaign, by focusing not just on big events but also on personal moments at home that matter.
MW: Where is your marketing budget working hardest today?
Michelle Wee: We invest heavily in ‘consideration’, ultimately helping our customers close the gap from thinking they’re going to buy a new fridge to purchasing it. Performance Digital Ads, SEO, and Partnerships & Sponsorships are helping us build a brand top of funnel. Retail Integration with Displays and POS helps us win customers when they head into stores to touch and feel their new TV, Fridge or Washing Machine, and ultimately make their purchase.
We also stretch our marketing budget ensuring we continue to enrich our database to encourage repeat purchases and build true brand advocacy.
The power of cultural relevance
MW: What’s changed most in how you balance brand and performance?
Michelle Wee: We believe the line between brand and performance has disappeared. Brand is performance. Performance needs brand. The biggest shift has been patience, letting brand ideas breathe, then engineering them to perform rather than squeezing them dry from day one.
We tailor our product offerings to local market needs, making premium tech accessible to local consumers. Sports sponsorships and marketing initiatives that raise brand awareness, such as the FIFA World Cup, NRL partnership and local campaigns, help build emotional and cultural relevance beyond just product specs. This combination of global brand strength and local engagement helps Hisense maintain brand trust while delivering products Australians recognise.
As a brand we position ourselves around these core pillars: strong performance, quality, innovative technology, and value, without the premium price tag. This tiered approach means consumers can choose between good value everyday products or feature-rich premium devices depending on their needs. A solution to every problem.
MW: Which channel, platform or partnership is currently over-delivering for you?
Michelle Wee: Sport and entertainment partnerships continue to punch above their weight because they give us cultural relevance at scale. When Australians are emotionally invested, that’s when Hisense shows up best.
Hisense’s sponsorship of FIFA World Cup tournaments, including 2018, 2022 and the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup, and its Official Partner role with the FIFA Club World Cup 2025, provides a global scale including valuable local exposure too. These partnerships drive brand salience on a massive stage.
As a brand we don’t just place our logo against these tournaments. We tie products directly to the experience of watching the games. For example, campaigns encourage viewing matches on Hisense smart TVs and projectors with immersive visuals and audio, and entertaining your friends in the comfort of your home with Hisense Smart Fridges and Small Appliances. This reinforces the message that our products enhance the match-day experience at home.
In Australia, Hisense’s long-term partnership with the National Rugby League (NRL) is arguably one of our most effective activations. A relationship that began in 2020 included stadium branding, digital integrations and social media exposure. The partnership also included the NRL Women’s Premiership and major events like State of Origin and Magic Round, increasing visibility across all major rugby league demographics.
A more tactical but highly performance-driven channel for Hisense ANZ has been our expanded work with MikMak. In a recent case study, deeper integration with MikMak’s commerce tools across paid media delivered significant performance uplifts: a 12x increase in brand traffic, an 8x increase in search conversion and a 3x rise in overall purchase intent.
These improvements show direct impact on sales activation from digital campaigns.
While not strictly a ‘channel,’ Hisense’s collaboration with audio specialist Devialet to co-engineer higher-end audio and TV products is strategically important. It signals premium positioning in home entertainment and helps differentiate products against competitors in quality-focused segments.
AI and the agency of the future
MW: What role does creativity play in your commercial strategy right now?
Michelle Wee: Creativity plays a strategic and increasingly central role in our commercial strategy. It’s not just decoration or superficial advertising, but a way to differentiate our brand, generate emotional engagement, and connect products to real-life experiences in meaningful ways.
We have moved beyond feature-focused ads to campaigns that resonate emotionally and culturally with Australian audiences. For example, our EcoVision campaign creatively repositioned a product range of eco-friendly appliances not around technical specs but around everyday family life and connection. The visual identity, messaging and art direction highlight comfort, sustainability and emotional moments, helping the brand feel relevant and relatable.
This shows creativity isn’t just about art, it’s about purposeful positioning that amplifies brand meaning and aligns with consumer values. Essentially, creativity has shifted from a tactical add-on to a core strategic driver that helps us stand out in a crowded consumer tech market, making our marketing more engaging, meaningful, and performance-aligned across platforms and partnerships.
MW: How are you using data, tech or AI in a way that genuinely improves the work?
Michelle Wee: We have built AI-driven technologies directly into our products, which materially improves how they work for our customers. These innovations remove repetitive decisions, making our products feel more effortless, and deliver genuine convenience gains rather than gimmicks.
Beyond customer-facing tech, Hisense is also embedding AI throughout its manufacturing and supply chains which translates into fewer defects, faster throughput and lower waste, improving overall business performance.
MW: What does a ‘good agency partner’ look like for you in 2026?
Michelle Wee: In 2026 a ‘good agency partner’ isn’t just about doing advertising, it’s about being a strategic ally that moves the business forward across brand, performance, platform, data, creativity and culture.
A strong cultural fit matters as much as technical skills when it comes to agency partners. We need open communication, clear expectations and transparency in pricing, performance and decision-making. This helps build trust. Partners should challenge respectfully, bring constructive push-back and joint problem-solving rather than rote execution. A shared sense of purpose is key, and that means investing in collaborative planning, continual optimisation and shared success metrics.
We look for partners who really get Hisense’s long-term ambition, not chasing quick wins, but building consistent brand equity aligned to our global message, “Hisense, More Than a Brand.” That means turning commercial goals like market share growth, category expansion and sponsorship impact into clear, measurable plans, and acting as true growth partners who can advise on investment, channels and creative choices, with a strong line of sight to revenue and real business outcomes.
At the same time, data, tech and AI are now non-negotiable. Our partners should use advanced analytics and AI-driven tools to inform targeting and optimisation, integrate insights across all platforms, and provide transparent reporting that makes performance easy to understand and act on.
Finally, because Hisense marketing spans everything from brand and performance to sponsorships, retail and commerce, we want partners who can deliver end-to-end capability under one connected strategy, drive real synergy across channels, and stay flexible as priorities shift throughout the year.
Redefining premium value
MW: What’s the toughest call you’ve had to make in your role?
Michelle Wee: In a category crowded with constant promotions, specs-led messaging and reactive marketing, the pressure to do more, more campaigns, more channels, more partners, is real.
The most difficult decision I’ve made recently was to simplify: to step back from fragmented activity and refocus investment on fewer, bigger, higher-impact initiatives that genuinely build brand equity and drive performance.
That meant making some tough calls on agency models and partnerships to ensure they’re future-fit rather than tied to legacy ways of working. It meant prioritising strong brand platforms and premium moments like FIFA and major sport over tactical clutter, and backing creativity and long-term storytelling even when short-term performance pressure is high.
At the same time, it required shifting how we work internally to be more disciplined, data-led and integrated. This is a change that isn’t always comfortable in the moment but is critical for long-term growth. The challenge wasn’t just the decision itself but bringing teams and partners on the journey with the brand and aligning our stakeholders around a clearer, more focused vision for what we stand for in ANZ, and how marketing contributes to real commercial growth.
Ultimately, it was a call about leadership and conviction: choosing clarity over complexity, impact over activity, and long-term brand strength over short-term wins.
MW: What’s one misconception about your brand or category that your team is actively trying to unpick through marketing?
Michelle Wee: One of the biggest misconceptions is that Hisense is ‘good value’ but not genuinely premium or innovative.
Historically, the category has trained consumers to equate premium with a small number of legacy brands, and value with compromise. That’s no longer true and it’s a perception gap we’re deliberately challenging through our marketing. The goal isn’t to abandon value, that’s part of our strength, but to redefine what value means: not cheaper, but more for your money without compromise.
Ultimately, we’re working to shift Hisense from being seen as a smart alternative to being recognised as a confident choice, a brand people choose because it delivers premium experiences on its own terms.
MW: Looking ahead, where will your next big marketing bet come from?
Michelle Wee: In ANZ it will come from doubling down on experiences, not just exposure, and turning moments of attention into moments of belief. That means owning the ‘big screen, big moment’ space, turning products and platforms into media and building long-term brand meaning, not just short-term noise.