Inventory of marketing cases of big-name manufacturers in Q1 2021

Spring is here and summer is approaching. In the first quarter of 2021, many brands seized this golden period and launched various marketing activities, including some excellent cases that achieved remarkable results in popularity, reputation, creativity and other aspects. Now, let’s take a look at the brands that had great marketing success in the first quarter. What is the secret to their respective success?

1. "KFC x Genshin Impact" joint event

From March 8 to March 28, KFC launched a series of joint activities with the game "Genshin Impact". The event launched a limited edition "Teyvat Fun Bucket" package and character badges. Players who purchased this package can also use the code to redeem the exclusive Wind Wings in the game.

It is common for KFC to collaborate with game IPs. "Onmyoji", "Identity V" and "A Hundred Scenes of Jiangnan" are all its partners. However, this collaboration with "Genshin Impact" has once again raised the popularity limit of the collaboration activities.

Judging from the overall trend, the online popularity of the event continued to remain at a high level, and reached peak levels of "going viral" on several occasions. In addition, the proportion of netizens' emotional expressions towards the event also reached a high positive value of 70.9%. It is a bit regrettable that KFC's estimation of the scale of the event was not very accurate, resulting in a serious shortage of limited packaging and the event effect triggering the local epidemic prevention red line, which aroused 11.6% of negative emotions.

The secret of success - the choice of partners:

①Super high game native popularity

The huge success of the collaboration with "Genshin Impact" is largely due to the high popularity and money-making power of the game itself. According to the "Genshin Impact" revenue report released by Sensor Tower, since the product was released globally on September 28, 2020, it has attracted more than 1 billion US dollars in revenue on mobile devices alone in 6 months. It ranked third in global App Store and Google Play revenue, second only to Tencent's "PUBG Mobile" and "Honor of Kings", becoming the highest-grossing RPG mobile game.

②Game attribute bonus

In addition to the high popularity of "Genshin Impact", its game features of a complete world view structure, plot and character settings are destined to make its players have strong empathy and strong circle stickiness, which distinguishes it from games such as "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite" where players pay more attention to the gameplay itself. Therefore, Genshin Impact players will have significantly stronger attention and participation in the joint activities.

③ Second dimension memes go viral

As a popular catering brand, KFC has made linking with game IPs one of its regular ways to build emotional connections with young users, but this also means that the activity is limited to a smaller context.

However, in the "Genshin Impact" collaboration, a new gameplay has been added: "Players go to the store and shout the slogan 'Meet in another world, enjoy delicious food', and they will have the opportunity to win the collaboration medal", which impacts the barriers between the second and third dimensions to a greater extent. The subsequent emergence of jokes such as "2D players are socially dead" and "two-spined newt barrel" also helped the event go viral. Even passers-by who are not familiar with the 2D world are willing to come and see the excitement of the 2D world.

2. ukiss x Dr. Dingxiang #It is red and also armed#

International Women's Day has always been a big day for many brands that target female consumers. How to play a good marketing card at this time is a headache for many brands.

The beauty brand ukiss has given a good answer. It has teamed up with the internet celebrity "Dingxiang Doctor" to launch the campaign #It's Red Makeup and It's Armed#. In public spaces where young girls often appear, such as university bathrooms, there are many deceptive illegal egg-selling advertisements that say things like “Donate eggs with love, will not interfere with your studies and is not pornographic” and “High-paying part-time job, recovery in a week”. Faced with this phenomenon, the two parties jointly launched a plan to send 1,000 expired lipsticks to netizens, and invited netizens who received the lipsticks to cover up the "egg donation" advertisements they saw around them, turning the lipstick into a "weapon" that can protect girls.

Judging from the effectiveness of the event, although the investment in the event was only 1,000 near-expiry lipsticks, which were not costly, the spread and popularity it caused was many times higher than the number of 1,000. It not only attracted many netizens to participate in forwarding, but also achieved the effect of re-dissemination in multiple circles, and these communication circles just happened to face the brand's audience directly - the female group.

The secret of success - capturing social topics:

In mid-January, the surrogacy incident involving celebrity Zheng Shuang triggered a series of discussions on the illegal surrogacy industry, and boycotting "egg donation" advertisements was one of the branches.

After ukiss captured this social topic, it applied it to marketing activities based on facts, taking advantage of the popularity of the social topic. Through cooperation with health science blogger Dr. Ding Xiang, the social significance of the event was strengthened and extended, directly reaching the target audience and improving brand favorability.

3. Tmall Super Brand Day #A Poem for Women#

In addition to ukiss, Tmall Super Brand Day also performed well during International Women's Day. During the Tmall Super Brand Day event, female KOLs such as Li Yinhe, Jiang Fangzhuo, and Bo Bangni launched the interactive topic #To Women's Ten Thousand Lines of Poetry#, which ultimately received 200 million readings and 35,000 discussions.

Tmall Super Brand Day released a short film, using the concept of "AZ" to link 26 partner brands, combining the brand names with 26 sentences that promote feminine spirit, interpreting the brand values ​​through discussions on "women's issues" in the hope that the audience will resonate. This plan well combines festival momentum, topic value and brand implantation, realizing the economic benefits of this marketing.

The secret of success - the combination of KOL matrix:

“Even good wine needs no bush.” After planning an event that creates holiday topics and embeds brands, Tmall began to work hard on the event’s communication path.

Not only did we select sociologist Li Yinhe, screenwriter Bai Bangni, and writer Jiang Fangzhou, three female KOLs who often participate in discussions on social topics, as the main communication partners, we also invited them to express their views and make calls on the topics. It also collaborated with popular entertainment bloggers with high traffic, such as "Wind-chasing Boy Liu Quanyou", "Gu Dabaihua", "Thought Focus" and "Sketch Man", to attract a wider range of people to pay attention to the event.

By combining vertical KOL and horizontal KOL in a dual-channel manner, a complete communication matrix is ​​formed to ensure the dissemination and reach of the event in both directions.

4. Alipay “Are you there?”

Alipay first appeared as a payment software. When establishing its business layout in all aspects, one thing it has never slacked off is the strengthening of user interaction.

Alipay naturally did not miss the opportunity of Valentine's Day on February 14 and launched the "Are you there?" campaign within the software. When users search for the keyword "Are you there?" in the Alipay search box, they will receive personal songs pushed by Alipay. At the same time, a few "seductive" dialogues will pop up on the animated page of the music playback.

The secret to success – spontaneous sharing of power:

Interestingly, although the interaction was launched following Valentine’s Day, the activity did not cause much dissemination and response on February 14. Instead, a few days later, with the release of related blog posts by several entertainment KOLs, the popularity was triggered and reached its peak.

Although the "Are You There?" activity was only presented through a simple H5 page, in the era of online social networking, songs have become a popular social currency. People express their emotions and display their identities through sharing and communicating with them. Therefore, netizens will be happy to actively share the "Are you there?" activity and encourage other entities to participate, which is similar to the popularity of NetEase Cloud Music's annual report. According to statistics, the types of blog posts in the "Are you there?" activity are mainly original posts published by netizens, accounting for 51%.

5. Synthesize Wangzai Battle

The popularity of the dark horse game "Synthesize Watermelon" at the beginning of this year is obvious to all. When everyone was happily "eating watermelons", Want Want was very sensitive to this wave of popularity and integrated it into its marketing.

The official account of Want Want Group, "Want Want Club", launched a small game called "Cooperation with Want Want Battle". The "Grapes, Cherries, Oranges, Lemons, Kiwis, Tomatoes, Peaches, Pineapples, Coconuts, and Watermelons" that netizens had been dreaming about were replaced by Want Want's own "QQ Candy, Small Steamed Buns, Langweixian Cat Claws Candy, Senbei Snow Cakes, Milk Candy, Want Want Milk, Want Want Gift Pack", which attracted the attention of many netizens.

The secret of success - "8G surfing" is to follow the hot spots:

The time period when "Synthetic Watermelon" became popular on the Internet coincided with the early period of the Spring Festival, which is also the period for purchasing New Year's goods. Following the popularity of "Synthetic Watermelon", Want Want soft-implanted its various products, including the classic New Year's product "Want Want Gift Pack", into the mini-game. The product promotion effect was achieved well, and many netizens left messages to Wangzai saying "I became greedy while playing with it", which shows the effect of promoting products.

Wangzai, with his own social image setting of "8G Surfing", and his good activities and communication with netizens even played a role in optimizing the online reputation. According to the statistics of the micro-business information system, after the game was released, Want Want's positive brand reputation increased from 73.1% to 86.6%, a total increase of 13.3%.

6. Zhihu’s 10th Anniversary

Anniversary is always a special day, and the same is true for brands. 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of Zhihu, so Zhihu must not miss this good opportunity to both strengthen the relationship ties with existing users and consolidate the user base, as well as expand its influence and attract new users. A series of marketing activities were held for nearly two months around the theme of the tenth anniversary.

The secret of success - long-term operation, breaking through the circle layer by layer:

① Review of ten years - showing the accumulated strength

For this long-term marketing, Zhihu first cooperated with many media including Global Times and China Daily Online to release a video of major events from 2011 to 2020 - "Upward Answers", kicking off the event. And "Upward Answers" is embedded as the content of the activity section [Ten Years and One Moment]; eight sections are jointly created, including [Ten Years of Curiosity] ("Ten Years and One Hundred Questions", a selection of 100 good questions from Zhihu in the past ten years), [Ten Years Looking Back] ("Ten Years and Ten Tops", a selection of the ten best contents of Zhihu in the past ten years), and [Ten Years of Trajectory] ("My Ten Years of Zhihu Calendar", a review of personal data memories on Zhihu).

The inventory of these diverse core contents not only demonstrates the content influence accumulated by Zhihu over the past ten years, but also completes a historical dialogue with old users, strengthening the emotional connection between the two parties.

②Solgan upgrade (where there is a problem, there will be an answer) - reaffirm the brand's essence

On January 6, 2021, Zhihu fired its second marketing shot with the promotional song "I'll Answer Questions When They Come Up" produced in collaboration with creators such as Wu Tiao Ren. It promoted dissemination through the rich and high-quality form of music MVs and created an atmosphere for the tenth anniversary event. At the same time, in preparation for the "Zhihu 2012 New Knowledge Youth Conference" to be held on January 13, Zhihu regarded this conference as a "thank you gift" and invited "answerers" from various fields to give keynote speeches. At the same time, a new brand promotional video - "Where There Is a Question, There Is an Answer" was released, which echoed the promotional song and the conference, once again strengthened the newly upgraded slogan, and reiterated Zhihu's emphasis on the important user group of answerers and the guarantee of the platform's content quality.

③ Questions and Answers for Our Generation——Rising Platform Role

On January 16, Zhihu launched its third activity - "Q&A with Our Generation", and released the first short film in the series "Answers on the Roadside". The short film initiated a discussion around the question "How should the elderly cross the digital divide? How can society help them better integrate into the smart era?" Afterwards, discussions were organized on a number of social public issues, including "How to better protect young people in the online world?" and "Personal feelings in the data age and traffic boom."

"Our Questions and Answers" is like an elevation of Zhihu's own role, demonstrating its role as a question-and-answer tool in promoting healthy social and cultural communication. It also directly expresses the platform's concern for society to the audience and interprets a higher level of brand value.

④Answer Adventure Night——Harvest and Breaking the Circle

To conclude its 10th anniversary event, Zhihu chose to end with a situational theater evening "Answer Adventure Night". Since January 18, Zhihu began to gradually release previews for the gala, including the official announcement of many popular guests such as Wang Yuan, Zheng Yunlong, and Meng Hetang. Fans immediately brought the topic of the gala to a climax.

At the party, Zhihu incorporated many content elements from previous activity sections into the program, harvesting the traffic and content laid out in the early stages to jointly shape the topic effect of the party. In the end, it reached 450 million readings and 629,000 discussions on social platforms alone, successfully breaking the circle.

Author: I love learning

Source: I love learning