Marketing strategies for taking advantage of the Mid-Autumn Festival!

The Mid-Autumn Festival is approaching, and major brands have launched various marketing campaigns in order to gain more traffic and attention. Many brands have even linked online and offline marketing scenarios to promote the rapid conversion of commercial value. In this article, the author summarizes the Mid-Autumn Festival marketing strategies of various brands this year. You may want to take a look.

The annual Mid-Autumn Festival is a good opportunity for brands to gain publicity and sales.

In order to seize this rising channel that cannot be missed, many brands have started warming up their marketing campaigns since July. Of course, in an environment where many brands are focusing on the Mid-Autumn Festival and competition is extremely fierce, conventional and routine marketing methods are bound to bury the brand. It is more difficult for marketing to stand out and break out of the circle, and the incremental marginal value brought by marketing will also decrease accordingly.

In addition to telling stories about family and reunion, gaining insight into social sentiment and the trends of the times and innovating gameplay in an innovative way may be another strategy for brand marketing. Emphasizing creative gameplay while also clarifying the direction of communication will still be the "general" strategy for brands to ensure maximum efficiency in marketing.

This Mid-Autumn Festival, what unique marketing strategies have the popular brands used? How did they discover marketing shortcuts and achieve rapid conversion of traffic into commercial value?

1. No longer limited to emotional marketing

The Mid-Autumn Festival is a festival that symbolizes reunion. In order to cater to the traditional atmosphere of this festival, most brands launch marketing activities with the theme of "family and reunion".

There is nothing wrong with this method, but the essence of brand marketing is topicality. Among a multitude of emotional cards, overly homogeneous themes cannot stir up a splash in the market, and there is a high probability that the brand budget will be wasted. Of course, this does not mean that we should blindly "sensationalize" and launch curious marketing activities. Everything will backfire if we fail to grasp the "degree" of curiosity, which may cause the brand to fall into a public opinion storm.

Marketing methods that are too normalized or too novel are not the best way to "break out of the circle". In essence, this is "chasing" hot spots. After a wave of marketing activities, it is difficult for the brand to retain substantial users and brand assets.

In fact, using differentiated gameplay, citing macro-social issues or drawing creative inspiration from traditional culture is one of the preferred options for node marketing.

For example, more and more brands are using Mid-Autumn Festival as a starting point to try to touch on larger cultural topics. This not only highlights the social value of the company, but also serves the brand's long-term development plans. In this way, node marketing is no longer an independent single-point strategy for the brand, but becomes a part of brand image shaping and deepening of connotation. This is actually a reflection of the relative maturity of the brand's macro marketing strategy.

A typical brand case is Wufangzhai. This Mid-Autumn Festival, Wufangzhai teamed up with ByteDance Charity and the China Cultural Heritage Protection Foundation to customize the Yongle Liufang glutinous mooncake gift box to support the restoration of precious Chinese ancient books such as the "Yongle Encyclopedia". The gift box contains a puzzle of the "Hu" character volume from the Yongle Encyclopedia, which not only allows consumers to experience the restoration of ancient books, but also awakens consumers' awareness of cultural protection.

Wufangzhai's move is not just to use traditional culture to elevate its brand during the Mid-Autumn Festival. As a time-honored brand, Wufangzhai has been following the national trend in recent years, and its publicity has focused on themes such as "cultural protection and inheritance". ByteDance Charity has been promoting the restoration of the Yongle Encyclopedia since June. It can be said that the "protection of ancient books" activity not only takes into account the characteristics of the two brands, but also successfully strengthens the brand symbols.

2. Novel mooncakes cater to young people

Mooncake gift boxes have become a routine formula for brands’ Mid-Autumn Festival marketing, but in addition to the regular flavors, a variety of new and novel flavors have now emerged on the market. From a deeper perspective, with the continuous iteration of mooncake marketing, product taste is no longer the only pursuit of some brands. To a certain extent, mooncakes have transcended the product framework and become a medium for brands to communicate with young people, playing a role in innovating brand image.

The "White Paper on Generation Z Consumption Power" once pointed out that satisfying the demands of "socializing, personal setting, and pleasing oneself" is the consumption motivation of Generation Z youth, and the satisfaction of expanding social circles, finding identity recognition, and enjoying life in the moment is also the psychological pursuit of young people. It is precisely because of the personalized needs of young people that brands are constantly exploring how to achieve "unexpected" results.

This year, many mooncakes with unique flavors are all over the market. Heytea has teamed up with coffee brand Seesaw to launch the "Steal a Moon for You" gift box, which includes "milk tea" flavors such as Heytea cheese, Green Tea and coffee; Hema Workshop has launched a Sichuan pepper beef flavored mooncake, which is inspired by Sichuan-style cold pot skewers and includes traditional Sichuan ingredients such as beef tripe and bean skin.

Attracting the attention of young people with a curious attitude is one of the strategies that brands use to gain attention. In addition, many brands follow the health and national trend concepts of young people today and launch mooncakes with packaging and flavors that suit young people's preferences.

For example, Mint Health focuses on the "health brand" and creates low-sugar mooncakes that use appropriate amounts of sugar alcohols and trehalose instead of traditional white sugar. Zhiweiguan and Liangzhu Culture have launched molds that include patterns of gods, humans and animals, trident-shaped objects, jade plaques, jade birds, and symbols carved on pottery.

Whether it is a creative pursuit of novelty or a fusion of health and national trends, mooncakes have become a secret weapon for brands to create topics; the annual mooncake marketing has also become one of the opportunities for brands to try to trigger word-of-mouth communication among young people and even become a social topic among young people. With the help of mooncake marketing, the brand has gained recognition and identification among young people, which naturally helps accelerate the brand's transformation towards youth.

3. Increase offline investment to cover all scenarios

In order to adapt to the fragmented media environment, integrating multiple online and offline channels has become a major trend. This Mid-Autumn Festival is no exception. In addition to commercials, more and more brands will try to touch upon multiple media forms and extend to multiple scenarios to strengthen the depth of the brand marketing matrix.

For example, in addition to inviting Wang Yibo to launch an advertising blockbuster, the brand Laiyifen also launched a creative H5, using interactive mini-games and prize incentives to attract traffic to the brand's official flagship store and mini-programs, and to consolidate private domains. At the same time, Laiyifen has also created offline pop-up stores and offline store activities, and carried out creative event marketing offline to create topics and increase the interaction time between users and brands to achieve the goal of increasing sales.

However, although the layout of all online and offline marketing scenarios has become a trend, the Mid-Autumn Festival still has its unique features.

Unlike e-commerce shopping festivals such as Double Eleven and 618, the Mid-Autumn Festival is a traditional festival. Therefore, in addition to the omni-channel layout, offline scenarios are also particularly prominent. Since July, the food, beverage and catering industries have begun to increase their outdoor advertising efforts. According to data from CTR Media Intelligence, the overall outdoor advertising expenditure of the food industry in July this year increased by 146.1% year-on-year, and the overall outdoor advertising expenditure of the beverage industry increased by 77.7% year-on-year.

As the Mid-Autumn Festival approaches, the intensity of outdoor advertising continues to rise. According to reports from outdoor media insiders, Hong Kong Maxim's Mooncakes began to place outdoor large-screen advertisements, building elevator advertisements, shopping mall advertisements, bus advertisements, subway advertisements and high-speed rail advertisements in August this year, in order to truly integrate into consumers' life scenes and establish a deep psychological connection. September is still the peak month for food and beverage advertisers.

Holidays themselves are a super IP, which brings its own topic traffic and is an opportunity for brands to create national symbols and increase brand memory points. The unique immersive atmosphere, traffic aggregation effect and display effect of offline outdoor media can help brands reach people of all classes and age groups. It can not only enhance the brand's marketing atmosphere, but also deepen the brand's awareness in the public's mind. It is an indispensable way for brands to enhance their national popularity.

4. New Concepts

Node marketing is time-sensitive. Seizing the opportunity and gaining maximum popularity in a short period of time is the only way for a brand to win. Breaking away from the framework of Mid-Autumn Festival marketing, taking advantage of recent popular concepts, and contrasting with the traditional festival impression with innovative gameplay have become the distinctive features of this year's brand sprint for Mid-Autumn Festival marketing.

For example, to welcome the arrival of Mid-Autumn Festival, Alipay launched the "My Emperor Sleeps Forever to Celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival" series of NFT works. NFT is one of the hottest concepts at the moment, and the Alipay Mid-Autumn Festival series NFT skins can be purchased by users only needing 10 Alipay points and paying 9.9 yuan to the NFT issuer.

Of course, in addition to NFT, many popular concepts including hyper-realistic digital humans and the metaverse also appeared during this year's Mid-Autumn Festival.

Tmall Super Brand Day launched a customized mooncake gift box featuring the hyper-realistic digital person AYAYI and a customized NFT digital mooncake. The official is also trying to link it with the metaverse to elevate the concept contained therein: "The NFT digital mooncake uses two main design elements, polyhedron and acidic metal. The polyhedron represents the current real world, while the liquid acidic metal symbolizes the metaverse."

Whether it is NFT, hyper-realistic digital people or the metaverse, their essence is virtual art objects. From the perspective of brand marketing, this can also be regarded as a brand proposition, reflecting the brand's aesthetic view of innovative elements. Of course, the Mid-Autumn Festival is actually more of an opportunity in these two marketing activities. The above methods can be used for any festival. The brand introduces new concepts to show off its technology and innovation muscles, keep up with the trend, and enter the discussion scope of hot topics and concepts.

5. Overseas brands usher in a cross-border boom

As Chinese consumers have an increasingly powerful voice in the global consumer market, how to please the Chinese market has become an essential proposition for the growth of overseas brands. But just as luxury brands’ New Year limited edition products were always ridiculed in previous years, it is not easy for overseas brands to properly integrate traditional Chinese culture into their products.

This Mid-Autumn Festival, some overseas brands learned from their experiences and lessons and chose to cooperate with Chinese cultural IPs or catering and hotel brands.

Cultural institutions are the eye-catching protagonists in this type of cross-border collaboration this year. For example, the Shanghai Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have teamed up with the brand Laiyifen to launch a mooncake gift box inspired by the museum's collections. The Louvre Museum has collaborated with Haagen-Dazs China (company) to launch ice cream mooncakes with themes of art goddesses such as Venus and Mona Lisa.

The use of cultural and artistic IP is to ensure that overseas brands understand the Chinese heart and reasonably use national style elements, while joint cooperation with local catering and food brands is more to avoid product errors. Compared with Chinese brands that are willing to try exotic flavors and use innovative methods to conduct Mid-Autumn Festival marketing, overseas brands are actually relatively conservative. However, compared with local brands that are more concerned about discussion, avoiding cultural shock and negative comments is the primary consideration for overseas brands.

Considering the trend in recent years that overseas brands are keen on choosing local Chinese spokespersons, it can also be seen that overseas brands are letting go of "stereotypes" and trying to accelerate their integration into the Chinese market environment. This is actually one of the signs that overseas brands are accelerating their localization transformation.

In general, although there are many traditional festivals every year, since the connotations of each festival are different, consumers' demands and habits will also vary. Brands that can grasp universality and identify differences will always be able to break through the smoke of node marketing wars and come out on top.

However, when doing marketing at any point, brands should understand an underlying logic - even if Mid-Autumn Festival marketing is a marketing drama that brands will experience year after year, consumers and the times are rapidly iterating, and the unchanging marketing routine is by no means a panacea. Only by fully arming all major marketing touchpoints with the weapons of innovation and content can we become the consumers' first choice.

Author: Rui Ling

Source: New Marketing Engine