The advertising communication effect from Meituan’s “Kangaroo Ears” IP

In the public's mind, food delivery riders are always seen as hurried figures. In order to solve the problem of the last mile of delivery, riders regard speed as the first priority, and their contact with consumers is only one or two seconds during the delivery of the food. When a takeaway order is completed, customers are often impressed by the convenient and fast service, clean and delicious meals, but the guy who personally delivers the takeaway to the door quickly fades from our memory.

Recently, a pair of cute kangaroo ears have been added to the helmets of Meituan riders, which are both adorable and cute, and they wobble when they walk. How attractive are these ears? Some people ordered takeout through Meituan in order to see the rider with kangaroo ears. Some people registered as Meituan delivery boys in order to own the kangaroo ears. Some people even bought the same ears online.

Just imagine, when you are hungry and anxiously waiting for your meal, you see the delivery guy running around wearing kangaroo ears. Wouldn’t you be instantly melted by cuteness and full of humor?

On Weibo and Douyin, you can see a competition between Meituan and Ele.me deliverymen with a variety of decorations on their heads. The topic of "Delivery Boy Skin War" has also been on the hot search list on Weibo. As of now, the topic has received 370 million views and 36,000 discussions. It has also spawned many related topics and users' spontaneous secondary creations, interactions and dissemination, which is very lively. Meituan’s marketing content has almost no cost, but has achieved the same communication effect as an investment of tens of millions.

1. Redefine the ear

Meituan’s logo is designed as a kangaroo, which borrows the characteristics of the kangaroo: “big bag, can hold many items, and runs fast”, symbolizing Meituan’s advantages of rich product categories and fast delivery speed. So Meituan’s ears are actually an extension of the kangaroo logo.

Meituan regarded this pair of kangaroo ears as an important IP, and released a set of posters full of technology based on Apple’s promotional copy and layout design, which caused a sensation. We also designed an ear headband peripheral for ordinary users and put it for sale in the official gift shop. It can not only meet the needs of ordinary users to wear it in daily life, but also has the effect of making people look taller and cute.

Figure 2: Meituan redefines the ear

The public was amused by Meituan’s creative posters and cute peripherals, and was also moved by the purpose of this event: for every kangaroo ear headband sold, one yuan will be donated to the Kangaroo Baby Charity Project to help the children of food delivery riders across the industry with serious illnesses, accidental injuries, and education difficulties.

Meituan, which calls itself a "kangaroo ear processing factory", is down-to-earth and understands human nature. It uses entertaining ears in charity fundraising programs to redefine ears for the public. Through a series of marketing actions, Meituan has continuously enhanced the intrinsic added value of Kangaroo Ears, allowing the IP image of Kangaroo Ears to continue to penetrate into various scenarios and groups of people, and ultimately successfully penetrate into the minds of consumers, gaining the favor of customers and becoming the most profound memory symbol of Meituan for customers.

2. Meituan Takeaway Customer Profile

Meituan Waimai is an online food delivery ordering app under Meituan Dianping, which was officially launched in November 2013. It communicates between service providers and users through platform connection. Its main function is online ordering and supporting food delivery services. Later, it also added errand running, self-pickup, flash purchase and other businesses. Affected by the epidemic, Meituan Waimai accelerated against the trend. On August 8, 2020, Meituan Waimai announced that the daily order quantity exceeded 40 million.

Figure 3: Meituan Takeaway Daily Order Growth Trend

Meituan’s food delivery customers are mainly young people, with little impact on gender. They are concentrated in first- and second-tier developed cities, and their spending power is at a medium-to-high level.

Figure 4: Gender and age distribution of Meituan takeaway customers

Figure 5: Geographical distribution of Meituan’s food delivery customers

Figure 6: Distribution of consumption capacity and willingness of Meituan takeaway customers

The main characteristics of these users are that the cost of living in big cities is high, work pressure is relatively high, working hours are relatively busy, the pace of life is relatively fast, and there is less time for self-cooking. The most typical takeout scenarios are companies and residences.

Figure 7: Usage scenarios of Meituan takeaway customers

The service provided by Meituan Takeout is ultimately delivered by delivery riders, who complete the last mile from the restaurant to the user. There is a term in marketing called: touch point. Touch point refers to the product-related features that the end customers of the product come into contact with. The rider’s food delivery process is the most direct contact point between Meituan and users. Customers’ satisfaction with delivery directly affects their perception of the Meituan platform, and riders play a crucial role in customer satisfaction.

The core essence of customer resonance.

In psychology, resonance is defined as the tendency to have the same or similar emotional reactions when stimulated by the emotional expressions of others. When the message sent by the sender is passed to the receiver, the receiver simultaneously generates the same idea or thought, thus causing resonance.

Customers are faced with massive amounts of information every day, and most of them will automatically divide information into two types: information that is related to me and information that is not related to me. The latter is the information that is automatically filtered first. The role of resonance is to help customers label the information as something that is relevant to me. Increase the presence of information to customers to avoid the information being automatically filtered out.

Only through the expression of emotions and thoughts can people resonate with each other, or have similar experiences, or the people and things around them, or capture the users' minds, or bring the users into a situation. No matter what method is used, a connection with the users must be established.

The essence of resonance is to establish a relationship between the product's stories, situations, ideas, scenes, and characters and users based on the commonalities and characteristics, personality and emotions, habits, behaviors, age, hobbies, culture, thoughts, and character of the customer group, thereby awakening the user's sense of resonance and generating resonance.

Meituan Takeout’s young customers are the natives of mobile Internet. They grew up in an era of material abundance and are willing to accept new things. However, the pressure of work and life makes them feel lonely and anxious. They have different interests and hobbies, and once there is a trigger point and they resonate with the users, their desire to express themselves will be fully released on the Internet. Maybe the trigger point is the soft and cute ears, maybe it is the public welfare nature of Meituan ears and Meituan’s support for disadvantaged groups, or maybe it is the brand they like when Meituan ears are co-branded, or maybe Meituan ears contain a touching story.

3. Customer Resonance Thinking

Irresistible cuteness . There is no doubt about the spread of cuteness. In the Internet age, it is a universal key to attract traffic. The cute kangaroo ears image is cute in itself, catering to the emotional needs of contemporary young people who are keen on cute culture. The attribute of cuteness can easily stimulate the sense of closeness and protectiveness in human genes. Even if you are not a Meituan user, when you see the cute kangaroo ears and the iconic Meituan yellow walking through the streets of the city, you will smile knowingly and be moved by the childlike innocence coming towards you.

Users fully participate in co-creation and dissemination . The popularity of Kangaroo Ears is essentially due to the brand’s successful collaboration with user UGC (user-generated content). Kangaroo ears not only have enough topics to talk about, but also trigger users' sense of identification. Ultimately, both riders and users can use their creativity and imagination to produce a large amount of content. For example, some users followed the CP of McDonald's and Meituan and created Q version comics. This kind of spontaneous user voice and inherent creativity, on the one hand, enables interaction, dialogue and co-creation between the brand and users, and on the other hand, further enhances the user's deep understanding and preference for the brand. Meituan also gives users appropriate positive incentives, and ultimately achieved a communication volume of over 100 million.

Continuously optimize and iterate to output content. Since 2016, Meituan riders have had the opportunity to obtain kangaroo ear helmets. In early 2018, Meituan updated Reuters photos of kangaroo ears and ear helmet peripherals on its official Weibo. The earliest design was more like a kangaroo mask, which was inconvenient to wear and was only piloted in dozens of cities. Later, the kangaroo helmet was simplified to have only two ears, which was more convenient and flexible, and also attracted more attention. Meituan continuously updated the material, elasticity, and curvature of its products, eventually evolving them into the current kangaroo ears. Meituan has been continuously iterating and optimizing the meaning of ears, combining current hot topics to create content that is interesting, has brand value and social care, including Meituan’s "Contactless and Safe Delivery" short comics during the epidemic, climbing Mount Everest to deliver medicine, and writing inscriptions on the back to support the college entrance examination, which warm people's hearts.

Multiple brands collaborate to increase topics and create ear IP . Following the IP marketing idea, Meituan has successively carried out cross-border joint cooperation with industry brands such as SAIC Maxus, Burger King, China UnionPay Financial, Atour Hotel, Hippocampus Photo Studio, and Nayuki Tea, launched topic marketing on Women's Day, World Book Day and other nodes, and launched a variety of creative marketing methods to drive the audience's cognition and favorability; convey positive energy values ​​and establish value recognition with cooperative brands; multi-angle and continuous content output, accumulate IP influence, and effectively empower brands.

Break through the barriers between social media platforms and online and offline communication . Since Meituan encouraged users to re-create the image of Meituan's kangaroo ears, and held the "Meituan Rabbit Ears DIY Competition" on Weibo, it has cooperated with illustrator Wu Baduo and recently participated in the 2020 ChinaJoy, extending the three-dimensional topic to the two-dimensional world, breaking the dimensional wall of creative content, and the highly interactive and highly penetrating UGC content attributes, breaking through the separation of social media platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili. The Meituan takeaway brother has become the eye of the storm, causing passers-by to compete to watch and take pictures, and upload them to online media platforms, thus breaking the online and offline communication boundaries and barriers, and forming a closed-loop social marketing link.

Financial brands have always been known for their coolness and dignity, and therefore they often seem alienated from consumers. If you can truly understand the customer's heart, communicate with the customer emotionally, and be a true listener and participant in marketing activities, you can impress the customer and establish emotional resonance and identification.

Currently, Xiaozhao Miao is a relatively successful IP. By understanding users’ life scenarios, it arouses users’ inner emotions step by step, thus making customers resonate. When customers see the little meow, they immediately think of friendly, attentive service and discounted fresh food. China Merchants Bank has also carried out in-depth content cooperation with Mango TV's slow variety show "Please Listen to Friends", listening to the joys, sorrows, and sorrows of young people from multiple dimensions such as work, love, friendship, and life. In this way, when customers see China Merchants Bank, they will easily regard it as a listener, bringing them closer.

As can be seen from Meituan’s kangaroo ears, how to enrich product connotations and tell good product stories to resonate with customers and encourage them to spontaneously re-create and spread products is still a direction that banks need to explore further.

Author: Wangzai6497

Source: Wangzai6497