How should brands conduct Spring Festival marketing?

Compared with 2020, the 2021 Spring Festival marketing was lackluster.

In late January every year, major brands begin their Chinese New Year marketing campaigns. Spring Festival marketing is the first shot of a brand’s marketing throughout the year and has certain significance for the entire brand’s annual communication. In addition, the Spring Festival is also a period when public sentiment is quite concentrated and unified, and the probability of communication breaking the circle is relatively large.

But this year, whether it is a series of Chinese New Year advertisements for luxury goods, a series of New Year promotion activities for technology platforms, or the Spring Festival promotions for fast-moving consumer goods, none of them seem to have had a significant breaking circle or topic effect. The "What's Peppa Pig?" screen-sweeping craze during the Spring Festival a few years ago is no longer there. Last year (2019), Bilibili's "The Most Beautiful Night" New Year's Eve Gala (Douban score 9.1 points), this year (2020) New Year's Eve Gala only scored 6.7 points on Douban.

The reasons behind the lackluster marketing during the 2021 Spring Festival can be summarized in three points:

First, for international brands, telling Chinese stories and doing Chinese marketing well is still a challenge. Many international brands (especially luxury brands) are still not acclimatized to Chinese culture, and even have deep misunderstandings about Chinese culture.

Second, due to the impact of this year's epidemic, "staying where you are" has become the way for many migrant workers, students from other places, and overseas Chinese to celebrate the New Year. This has also disrupted the traditional Spring Festival marketing rhythm and theme, giving brands a sudden attack;

Third, some brands ignored the importance that Chinese people attach to the Chinese New Year and only engaged in social media memes. In the end, some brands failed because of this, while others were left in obscurity after users "voted with their feet."

Let's explain them one by one in detail:

1. Why can’t Chinese stories be told well?

For foreign brands and international luxury brands, localized marketing in China has always been a long-term marketing challenge. There are two relatively typical cases this year that can be mentioned:

The first is Apple’s annual New Year’s commercial. On January 29, Apple officially released the 2021 New Year short film "Anian", but whether from the perspective of social topic discussions or from the media's active exposure, it is obviously more dull than previous years.

Let’s first talk about the content of the film. The film takes the traditional element of the Chinese Spring Festival - the Nian beast as the starting point, and the theme explored revolves around parent-child relationships. Of course, the film is still shot with the new iPhone Pro Max model.

But if you compare it with Apple’s New Year shorts from previous years, you can see a clear difference in the popularity of the topic. Starting in 2018, Apple tried for the first time to conduct marketing promotions in the form of Chinese New Year short films, which later became an annual marketing practice. On February 1 of that year, the short film "Three Minutes" directed by Chen Kexin was released. It tells the story of left-behind children meeting their mother, a train conductor, on the platform during the Spring Festival. It triggered huge social discussions, and "Three Minutes" also became the first case of a screen-sweeping event during the Spring Festival that year.

But in the following years, the popularity of Apple's New Year videos continued to decline. On the eve of the 2019 Spring Festival, Apple invited Jia Zhangke to shoot and release "A Bucket", which still explores the theme of urban and rural areas, but the shooting style is more relaxed and everyday. Judging from the feedback from online social media, the film's memory point is not strong. On the eve of the 2020 Spring Festival, Apple invited Zhou Xun to star in the New Year short film "Daughter". The film explores the mother-daughter relationship, but apart from Zhou Xun's halo, it is difficult to see large-scale discussions on social media.

This year, "Anian" lacks highlights in external communication. The director of the film is Wang Ziyi, who was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. However, according to the online feedback from many netizens, the content and topic discussions of the film may be too straightforward and have obvious preaching connotations, and lack the sense of Chinese family culture atmosphere.

Judging from the search data of Baidu Index on the four film themes "Three Minutes", "Daughter", "A Bucket" and "Anian", the popularity of the film has also been declining year by year. It is worth noting that the daily search volume of the word "daughter" is relatively large, but during the 2020 Spring Festival, it still did not exceed the excellent results created by "Three Minutes" in 2018. Is Apple’s annual New Year’s short film really getting worse every year?

Image from Baidu Index

In addition to Apple, let’s take a look at Burberry. As a major representative of luxury brands, Burberry’s marketing actions can also reflect the marketing trends of international luxury brands.

Everyone should know that on the eve of the 2019 Spring Festival, Burberry was widely controversial with an advertising poster called "Modern New Year". It was called by the outside world that the New Year's poster felt like a "ghost movie". This should be the most serious public relations crisis Burberry has encountered in the Chinese market in recent years.

Perhaps having learned from the public relations lessons of that year, Burberry's 2021 New Year advertisement "Spring in My Heart" has become more refreshing, starring Zhou Dongyu and Song Weilong, but at the same time, it has not yet caused much public opinion.

Burberry's New Year film uses conceptual topics such as the four seasons and the five senses to explore a way of life that returns to an innocent state. The overall look and feel is different from traditional luxury goods, and the topics and copywriting are also younger. In fact, Burberry has also included many Chinese elements in the film content, but they have not yet triggered much discussion or resonance among users.

It can be seen that luxury brands are still looking for direction in the exploration of Chinese marketing. But what’s interesting is that Balenciaga, which is in sharp contrast to Burberry, caused widespread social controversy this year through a “rich gold” advertisement.

It is not clear at the moment whether the motivation behind this Balenciaga advertisement is based on the desire to be different from others in terms of self-aesthetics or to generate some social media traffic by sparking controversial discussions. All in all, luxury brands still have a long way to go in their Chinese marketing communications.

2. The impact of “staying in place for the Chinese New Year” during the epidemic

This year, the epidemic broke out repeatedly before the start of the Spring Festival travel rush at the beginning of the year, which also led to the country advocating that migrant workers "spend the New Year where they are" and "do not travel unless necessary", and many regions will also provide subsidies for migrant workers to spend the New Year in other places.

Image courtesy of the State Council Information Office

According to data from the Civil Aviation Administration, on January 30, the first day of the Spring Festival travel rush, civil aviation transport decreased by 46.7% compared with the first day of the 2020 Spring Festival travel rush, and approximately 540,000 passengers were transported, a decrease of 71.2% from the first day of the 2020 Spring Festival travel rush.

According to the Ministry of Transport, passenger flow during this year's Spring Festival travel season will decrease significantly. About 1.152 billion passengers will be transported nationwide during the Spring Festival travel season, with an average of more than 28.8 million passengers per day, a decrease of more than 60% compared to 2019 and more than 20% compared to 2020. However, judging from the actual passenger flow data in the first three days of the Spring Festival travel rush, the actual number of people travelling during the Spring Festival travel rush is expected to be less than previously predicted. This also means that the 2021 Spring Festival will be an extremely special case. A large number of white-collar workers, students, and overseas personnel will be stranded in other places, which will greatly weaken the traditional "family reunion" New Year's Eve dinner scene.

What is different from last year’s epidemic is that last year’s epidemic broke out after the rush of people returning home and before the rush of people returning to the city, while this year’s epidemic broke out before the rush of people returning home, which has greatly changed this year’s New Year’s pattern. According to the Baidu Map National Migration Index, the national migration data during the 2021 Spring Festival dropped significantly.

Image from Baidu Map Migration Big Data

For brands, marketing and communication themes therefore also need to change quickly, such as changing "family reunion dinner" to "Spring Festival for one person", etc., which caught corporate marketing off guard.

When we compare previous Spring Festival marketing themes, it is not difficult to find that "reunion", "getting together" and "Chinese tradition" can mostly achieve considerable social communication effects. Let us just give one example:

On January 17, 2019, "What's Peppa Pig?" quickly became a viral social media hit after it was aired. The film, starred entirely by amateurs, tells the story of an old man searching the entire village for Peppa Pig for his grandson. Behind the humorous rhythm of the plot, it explores the grand topic of left-behind children/elderly people and the urban-rural gap. Of course, the ultimate goal is the reunion of grandparents and grandchildren during the New Year.

Image from What is Peppa Pig?

"What's Peppa?" is not just a short film, it is also the lead trailer for the family-friendly Lunar New Year film "Peppa Pig Celebrates the New Year." In essence, it is still an advertisement.

3. The failure of Chinese New Year marketing

In fact, there are several Chinese New Year marketing failures every year. Behind these failures, it seems that it is just the immaturity of marketing techniques, but in fact it is the neglect of Chinese people’s New Year emotions.

The latest rollover case this year is Ford. On January 28, Ford posted a picture with the words "2021 China·Year of the Horse" on Weibo, which sparked complaints from many netizens. Interestingly, Ford later responded on Weibo that “Ford’s most famous horse”, the pioneering pure electric SUV MUSTANG MACH-E, is produced in China for the first time, which is referred to as the Chinese Year of the Horse. "The implication is "we wrote it wrong on purpose", which again caused complaints.

Perhaps due to the pressure from the large number of netizens' complaints, Ford subsequently deleted both Weibo posts. On February 1, Ford posted on Weibo: "The previous tweets about the domestic production of Mustang Mach-E were not rigorous in creative expression and imprecise in wording, which caused misunderstanding and confusion during the dissemination process. We humbly accept criticism and suggestions, and sincerely thank everyone for their concern, supervision and correction." But it has obviously become a public relations crisis.

Ford's original intention was probably to take a different approach and use a social media topic to promote the exposure of new products, but it underestimated the public sentiment of Chinese users during the Chinese New Year. This kind of failure is actually not uncommon among foreign brands.

Here we give another positive example, which is Pepsi-Cola's "Bring the Fun Home: Monkey King Family".

In 2016, the Year of the Monkey, PepsiCo continued with its traditional "Bring Home the Fun" marketing campaign theme and filmed the "Bring Home the Fun: The Monkey King's Family" sentimental advertisement with Liu Xiao Ling Tong. In addition, it also launched the "Happy Monkey King Commemorative Can" offline.

Image from PepsiCo

"The Monkey King" hit the traditional cultural memory of "Journey to the West" among Chinese users. The strong sense of identification made the advertisement go viral, the commemorative cans were repeatedly sold out, and it attracted a lot of free media coverage.

Needless to say, brand marketing should not enter the dangerous area of ​​mocking traditional culture for the sake of so-called social traffic, which can easily lead to a public relations crisis across the entire network.

4. How to carry out marketing during the 2021 Spring Festival?

Spring Festival marketing is a systematic marketing campaign. I would like to throw out some ideas and talk about some possible marketing breakthroughs.

Under the trend of "celebrating the New Year at home", some product categories are experiencing explosive marketing opportunities. For example, the retail of semi-finished dishes has seen rapid growth, and family hot pot is also rising rapidly. According to data from Taobao and Tmall's 2021 New Year Festival, snail noodles, self-heating hot pot, instant food, hot pot base, induction cookers, and Lao Gan Ma are all growing rapidly. In addition, "home items" such as medical beauty products, games, and mahjong machines have also ushered in sales opportunities.

Image from Taobao Tmall

Focusing on the "stay-at-home scenario" and digging deep into the "stay-at-home needs" may be a major marketing breakthrough. In terms of home marketing, there are actually some relevant brand promotion reference cases in the market. For example, RIO recently focused on the concept of "a little wine for one person" and gained a lot of brand reputation, which is also very consistent with the current living conditions of young people.

In addition, in response to the communication environment of "celebrating the New Year at home", Shi Youqu also suggested that brands could try more online communication methods, such as reaching customers through short videos, brand live broadcasts, etc.

According to the 47th "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report") released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), as of December 2020, the scale of online live broadcast users in my country reached 617 million, an increase of 57.03 million from March 2020, accounting for 62.4% of the total netizens. Among them, the scale of e-commerce live broadcast users was 388 million, an increase of 123 million from March 2020, accounting for 39.2% of the total netizens. It can be seen how huge the market space is.

Image from CBNData's "2020 E-commerce Live Streaming Ecosystem Report"

It is worth noting that after the update of WeChat version 8.0, WeChat Video Account is bursting with marketing dividend opportunities. Although the video account ecosystem is still in its early stages, phenomenal marketing opportunities are likely to emerge in the scenarios of Spring Festival greetings and red envelope social networking.

In June 2020, WeChat officially announced that the daily active users of its video account had exceeded 200 million. By September, according to calculations by Founder Securities, the peak daily active users had reached 350 million, and the estimated baseline level was 300 million. At the "WeChat Night" in 2021, Zhang Xiaolong did not disclose the relevant operating data of the video account, but it is obvious that it has huge dividends.

The 2021 Spring Festival can be said to be a very special year, which has forced brands to experience the test of marketing at the beginning of the year. However, behind the challenges, brands that dig deep into Chinese stories and video dividends may be able to achieve greater marketing breakthroughs.

Author: Shiqu Research Institute

Source: SocialTouch2020