Brand Spring Festival Marketing War

There are less than 3 weeks left until the 2022 Spring Festival, and the marketing teams of major brands have already exerted their utmost efforts to make the final sprint for the brand at the end of the year.

This sprint generally has three goals:

1. It is a big year-end promotion for New Year's goods such as nuts, wine, and beverages.
2. For brands that are not so seasonal, Spring Festival marketing is also a good opportunity to create emotional resonance with users.
3. Big brands and big platforms use social concentrated seasons to increase user penetration through fission.

Regardless of the purpose, the Institute of Child Health Club believes that it can be absorbed and utilized by practitioners in our infant and child industry. Next, the Institute of Child Health Club will analyze the main strategies and tactics of major brands in Spring Festival marketing from three dimensions.

1. Cleverly turn Spring Festival promotions into IP

What is good marketing? The answers may be different in everyone’s mind, but one thing is for sure, it must be able to touch people’s hearts and arouse the desire to buy or use.

And being able to turn marketing into IP, to put it a little more exaggeratedly, can achieve twice the result with half the effort.

If you are not familiar with IP, then think about Melatonin. In the past, during holidays, especially during the Chinese New Year, you would be bombarded with Melatonin.

"Respect your parents with Melatonin" has been shouted for many years, making it a household name. Many people can even become automatic voice actors just by hearing the BGM. Therefore, the marketing of Melatonin has gradually formed its own IP, which makes this BGM jump in many people's minds from time to time when they go home to give gifts during the Chinese New Year.

In addition to Melatonin, there is another brand that has done a great job in marketing IP, and that is Pepsi.

PepsiCo holds a series of marketing activities called "Bring the Fun Home" every Spring Festival. It is understood that "Bring the Fun Home" is a valuable IP that PepsiCo has spent 10 years to successfully create. By integrating PepsiCo's products with China's New Year culture each time, it creates content that goes straight to people's hearts and thus wins the favor of consumers.

As a foreign brand, PepsiCo is well aware that no other festival holds as much importance in the hearts of Chinese people as the Spring Festival. The importance of the Spring Festival lies in the family culture: it embodies family affection, responsibility, belonging and inheritance.

Reviewing the marketing entry points of PepsiCo’s “Bring the Fun Home” campaign in recent years, we can see that:

For example, the 2018 drama "Thunderbolt Parents" takes the generation gap between parents and children as its insight point. Regardless of whether they were born in the 80s, 90s or 00s, they all had conflicts and disagreements with their parents during their rebellious adolescence, and how to deal with the relationship with parents has become a common topic for several generations. In the humorous and touching plot, the movie uses relaxing music and dance to resolve the misunderstanding between two generations, and interprets the New Year's meaning of "bringing joy home" - don't let friction and generation gap become obstacles to communication with family members, mutual understanding is the meaning of "home".

In 2021, in order to further restore the New Year for ordinary people, PepsiCo and the People's Daily client jointly launched "My Home is in China, Bring Joy Home", collecting and listening to the extraordinary stories of ordinary people, such as "Ways to Protect Hometown", "Sharing the Unique Hometown Culture", "Seeing Traditional Culture and Bringing the Taste of Hometown", etc., to set off the warmth of the "small home" with the dedication of the "big family".

In 2022, a well-known Spring Festival hit song "Congratulations" incorporates elements of rap, pop arrangements, and other elements. As the music sounded, a long scroll slowly unfolded. Pepsi-Cola spokesperson Jackson Wang, G.E.M., Li Xian, Mirinda spokesperson Wang Yuan, and Pepsi New Year spokesperson Liu Haocun appeared in turn, and energetically performed traditional New Year customs such as setting off firecrackers, giving out red envelopes, drawing sugar paintings, lion dancing, and welcoming the God of Wealth that are deeply imprinted in the memories of the older generation. With the unique creativity and expression of young people, they "painted" a Pepsi Spring Festival scroll full of New Year flavor.

It took PepsiCo 10 years to build an IP, and Safeguard’s “Wash Your Hands Before Eating” campaign started in 2015, and it has been 7 years today.

The origin of Safeguard's Spring Festival marketing was the voting campaign launched by China Newsweek on the Weibo platform during the 2015 Spring Festival for "a sentence that touched China during the Spring Festival." In a vote among more than 130,000 netizens, "wash hands before eating" topped the list with 26.3% of the votes.

For those who are homesick, during the Spring Festival, their parents’ words “wash hands and eat” contain their deepest care and emotion after the long journey. This is their mother’s catchphrase, a short and simple word. When you hear it, you know that the family is reunited.

For the maternal and child industry, we can also set a theme and, under the same theme every year, create new content, allowing time to give the brand more user expectations and joy.

2. Digging Deeply into the Implicit Needs of New Year Culture

After the ways of expressing the New Year culture of going home, having reunion dinners and raising glasses together have become the same, how to find different ways to express the Chinese New Year atmosphere and dig deep into the spiritual needs behind the New Year are increasingly testing the imagination of marketers.

Wanglaoji’s Spring Festival marketing this year has to be said to be eye-catching.

Many brands will launch co-branded, customized, and zodiac models during the Chinese New Year to express the "new" in the new year. Wanglaoji has also put a lot of effort into customization. However, unlike the zodiac customization that can be applied to any product, Wanglaoji has customized it based on its own characteristics.

At the beginning of the new year of 2022, Wanglaoji launched a totem model of hundreds of surnames. Ji no longer belongs only to the Wang family, but also to the Li family and the Zhao family. As a result, each family, such as "Bai Laoji" and "Guo Laoji", has its own customized Spring Festival beverage based on its own surname.

Review the merits of this marketing:

• While Wanglaoji is enjoying a huge sales boost, it has not yet deviated from the communication of its own culture, and its auspiciousness has been delivered to tens of millions of households through exclusive customization. Dove chocolate’s “Year after Year of Blessing” is similar to this.
• The Chinese New Year is a time for families to gather together, visit relatives and friends, and enhance family intimacy and cohesion. A drink that bears a family name is, to a large extent, like the national emblem of a small country, which invisibly brings everyone closer together.

The family surname culture where blood is thicker than water is exactly the entry point of Wanglaoji this time.

In addition to Wanglaoji, Qiaqia’s previous Spring Festival marketing was also remarkable. The scenes of the Chinese New Year are cleverly combined with the usage scenarios of Cha Cha.

Nowadays, many young people are most afraid of the following scenes when they go home: blind dates, questions about salary, and questions about grades.

When people return home, blind dates are inevitable during the Chinese New Year. This is when melon seeds come into use. When things feel awkward during a blind date, melon seeds are there to ease the awkwardness.

During the Chinese New Year gatherings, it is inevitable that your aunts and uncles will ask you about your car, house, salary, and this is also a good time to bring melon seeds to the table.

It can be said that through this marketing campaign, Cha Cha, who is no longer young, has successfully won the favor of a large number of young people.

3. Psychological attack: Divide 100 million together

During the Chinese New Year, the marketing drama of going to XX and sharing X billion together will begin. This method is indeed a very good way for large companies that need to increase their penetration rate.

Why is the marketing point of sharing 100 million yuan a good one? The reason is that for ordinary people, the astronomical figure of 100 million yuan finally becomes relevant to themselves.

In addition, sharing together means that you can call your friends and break the ice for the first time in this social activity.

Of course, there is another point. Most of the activities of dividing the 100 million yuan took place during the Spring Festival Gala, which made the Spring Festival Gala, which originally lacked interaction and creativity, add a new type of interactive social and value-added activity for the audience that night because of the division of 100 million yuan.

A typical example is Alipay’s collect 5 blessings and share 500 million yuan event. By having people working hard in big cities return home and spread Alipay’s social activities to their families, Alipay’s penetration rate in areas outside first- and second-tier cities has increased.

Of course, this kind of interaction to share 100 million yuan is mostly an activity that only large companies can afford. However, as practitioners in the maternal and child industry, our target audience is not everyone, so we don’t have to share 100 million yuan. What is important is to increase the brand penetration rate through social fission, and at the same time make the event design reasonable and interesting.

Author: Big Orange

Official account: Children's Research Institute Club