As every Chinese holiday, mid-autumn festival brought its load of themed WeChat campaigns. Here are 3 which caught our eyes.
VIVI DOLCE
Success factors:
- Active WeChat groups
- 61-days crowdfunding
- Viral campaign
- KOL
VIVI DOLCE is a Beijing based gelato startup brand. For the Moon Festival, it launched… a gelato mooncake!!
- Viral Campaign
The campaign itself tells the story of a girl’s life: first date at age 16; meeting the love of her life at age 28; visiting parent’s place with kids at age 33. A “standard” path of a Chinese women. At the end of the campaign, users are asked to enter their phone number, and share the campaign with friends. Even the action call is very weak: bring your friends to watch the moon together.
So what made this campaign a success? It broke the rules in a smart way.
If you clicked on the fine prints, you could see the hidden rule: if you share the campaign with 68 of your friends, you will get a mooncake. And there is another hidden link that take users to the ranking of the most influential users.
These “viral” calls to action are usually forbidden by Tencent terms of use, which is the reason why they have to be hidden.
So how can a subtle campaign like this even got viral?
The answer is WeChat groups.
The main channel used to spread this campaign was via WeChat groups. In every group, there is a group organizer that shared this campaign and explained the “68-shares in exchange of a box of mooncake” rule. This way users not only clearly understand the purpose of the campaign, but also could directly engage with the group organizer to ask for clarifications thus create excitement within the group.
Below is a picture of users re-sharing the campaign in the group, and showing off the prize they get.
Usually a WeChat viral campaign only lasts for a couple of days and then die out. But this campaign lasted for more than a week. Since group members kept showing off their prizes, it created more incentive for other users to participate in the campaign.
Spreading campaigns via WeChat groups is a perfect way to go under the WeChat radar which blocks any incentivized sharing campaign. It’s also a great way to engage your customers to share your product with their friends.
Here is the QR code to the campaign:
But that’s not all!
VIVI DOLCE also tried other creative ways to promote its gelato mooncake.
2. JD Crowdfunding
They listed their moon cake on JD.com’s crowd funding website. For 98 RMB, users can get 2 mooncakes, and for 288 RMB, you can get 7 mooncakes. Over the course of 60 days, over 409 users participated in the crowdfunding pledged over 157,000 RMB to purchase the mooncakes.
As shown in the picture above, crowdfunding is increasingly picking up steam in China and becoming a method to sell products and market your brand (it can also be used to market existing products). Many F&B companies are selling fresh products on JD crowdfunding platform. It’s a great way to tell the story of your product, and to be discovered by new potential customers.
3. KOL promotion
VIVI DOLCE also collaborated with Lady Penguin, a popular wine subscription club, to launch its mooncake and pairing it with a sparkling wine. This kind of deep collaboration with a KOL is great to introduce the product to a highly qualified audience.
Durex encourages you to… last longer
Success factors:
- Mixes traditional element with humor
- Simple but efficient design
- Minimalist campaign
Durex has long been a leader in terms of creating brilliant campaigns in the Chinese market. Once again, the most famous condom producer stood out with an incredibly simple but efficient campaign.
Durex hijacked a poem by Su Shi (a Song Dynasty – 11th Century – Chinese Poet) which reads “但愿人长久，千里共婵娟” (We wish each other a long life so as to share the beauty of this graceful moonlight, even though miles apart.)
By changing the 4th character to “但愿人持久”, the poem becomes “We wish each other to last longer…”.
The pun is helpfully paired with a picture of the changing phases of the moon… or is that just a never-ending stack of condoms?
Prepare yourself to scroll for a while…
Still there? Good. Let’s say a few more words about this campaign.
The beauty of Durex campaigns is that they have very low production costs (the above picture could be produced by any designer with a reasonable mastery of Photoshop). The true value is in the creativity of the copy.
The company moreover has a distinct voice, and manages to use traditional symbols without seeming to simply follow the trend of the day, giving them a new and fresh spin.
Tang Dynasty Hip Hop
Success factors:
- Mixes traditional and modern elements
- Incredible quality of production
- Clever link between the campaign theme and the product
For this story, the search engine Sogou adapted the story of the poetry contest between Li Bai and Du Fu during the Tang Dynasty. In the H5 campaign, both poets compete… in an English “freestyle” battle, instead of traditional Chinese poetry.
The purpose of the campaign is to promote Sogou’s translation App.
The level of production in this campaign is outstanding. But what makes it stand out is a good choice of topic: it is not simply taking random traditional elements to put them forward during the Chinese holiday. There is a tight connexion between the story which is being told and the product (the App that the poets can use in order to translate their poems into English)
This is a great campaign, there is no doubt about it. But it is interesting to compare it to the Durex campaign above.
Both campaigns use the same principle of mixing and hicking traditional elements with modern concepts. However, while the Sogou campaign might have cost a few million RMB and a countless number of meeting, the Durex campaign could have been done within a few hours by a good designer.
This is a useful reminder that the principles highlighted in these massive campaigns are not restrained to very large corporations: they can be translated to smaller, leaner projects.
You can access the campaign via this QR code:
Forbidden City
The Forbidden City launched another creative campaign that focused on promoting to a younger generation audience.
The campaign used an incredibly simple comic effect, and internet slangs to tell a message from the Chinese emperor: I granted your Moon Festival vacation to go home, and you should bring back these delicious mooncakes to your family.
Picture credit: H5_ARTDeck
The campaign plays on the contrast between a modern comic style and traditional mooncakes to appeal to a young Chinese audience.
Here is the QR code to view the campaign:
Conclusion
A long picture poster, combining Chinese poetry with hip hop, viral marketing campaign via WeChat groups, JD crowdfunding, and KOL promotions… Holiday promotion on WeChat is getting increasingly competitive. Brands should be willing to promote (simultaneously) via different channels in order to stand out from the crowd.