Instead of talking about the “big” reunion, it is better to focus on the “small” perfection in Mid-Autumn Festival marketing

As festival marketing continues to upgrade, how brands can capture consumers’ emotional needs has become the key. This article takes the Mid-Autumn Festival as an example to explore how brands can achieve brand-effect integration through in-depth insights and innovative marketing strategies.

In the second half of the year, there are many festivals and brand marketing begins one after another.

Among them, Mid-Autumn Festival is quite special for Chinese people. After all, the only two festivals that can make people feel a little bit of "family reunion" are Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinese New Year.

So, I also see that many brands have put a lot of effort into this festival.

The underlying logic for creating good content has always been this: capture the most universal and deepest public sentiment, find emotional resonance, and conduct a holiday gifting campaign.

But because marketing has entered the 3.0 stage, many things have changed: channel fragmentation, growth drive, digital measurement, etc., which forces traditional courtesy marketing to change.

Although the emotions are still those popular emotions that can impress most people, how to find more profound insights and translate them into actual business growth through content is the key point for brands to do Mid-Autumn Festival marketing.

You should know that Chinese people love to give gifts during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Generally, the demand starts 15-30 days in advance, which gives brands and platforms a period of time to get a head start.

This year I noticed that Douyin Mall hit a very good emotional point: instead of talking about the "big" reunion, it is better to focus on the "small" perfection.

Based on this point, the platform promoted the emotional point of "there are always small imperfections in life, but we still yearn for small perfection", planned the Mid-Autumn Festival consumption in advance, and launched the "Golden Autumn Reunion Gift" category theme event, providing brands with a good opportunity to get a head start during the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Generally, during the Mid-Autumn Festival, snacks and pastries, and grains, oils, rice and noodles are the two categories that are most likely to explode in volume, and their strategies can also provide a good reference for other categories. So this year, I talked to the representative brands of these two categories, Hu Jihua and Daoxiangcun, to find out how they understand consumers and how they combine the "Golden Autumn Reunion Gift" event to integrate the gift marketing of the Mid-Autumn Festival into a product-effect combination.

01 Use “little emotions” to break through categories and turn daily necessities into holiday gifts

As a daily necessity and non-memory consumption product, the sales of peanut oil are mainly concentrated during the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Spring Festival. However, it faces a serious problem of homogeneity - with so many peanut oils on the market, why should I choose you?

Ms. Fan, the brand manager of Orchid, told me that what consumers value most when choosing peanut oil is the "fragrance" of the peanut oil flavor. In order to make the brand more differentiated, Orchid upgraded its brand in 2018 and added the ancient method positioning. At the same time, Orchid continues to practice the craftsmanship spirit of "only making peanut oil" in the industry, and is determined to become a professional peanut oil brand, combining intangible cultural heritage ancient techniques and traditional culture to enrich the marketing content of ancient method peanut oil.

Based on the industry situation that the sales of peanut oil products are focused on the two festivals, Hu Jihua deeply combined its core product Hu Jihua ancient method small-pressed peanut oil with the "gift + reunion dinner" scenario, further combining the function of peanut oil with the usage scenario. In terms of marketing direction, Hu Jihua continues to consolidate the gift scenario of "giving Hu Jihua ancient method reunion dinner is more fragrant".

Mid-Autumn Festival is of great significance to Hu Jihua. At the point when the brand is about to explode, Douyin Mall is one of the indispensable channels, because it is a platform that understands users very well, which means new groups + new opportunities.

Hu Jihua's traditional peanut oil and "Golden Autumn Reunion Gift" category activities have entered the Mid-Autumn Festival gift scene, keeping to the right path and being surprising. The right path is that Hu Jihua only produces peanut oil professional brand image, consolidating the core advantages of the brand. The surprising thing is that in addition to being highly promoted on traditional media, it also uses the platform to integrate resource advantages to achieve full-link conversion of dynamic sales within the site.

On the product side, in order to better meet consumers' desire for "gifts that are both economical and prestigious", Hu Jihua's traditional small-pressed peanut oil has carefully designed the gift box.

For the closest friends and family, Hu Jihua has made large-sized two-packs for family stocking; and for the young group living alone for self-use and gift-giving, Hu Jihua found that they prefer small volumes and pay attention to the appearance of the gift box, so it launched the "Good Things Peanuts" Hu Jihua Ancient Method Small Squeezed Gift Box with beautiful meaning.

On the content marketing side, we opened up the path of “influencer recommendations - live streaming - hot promotion of conversion groups - secondary investment and conversion”, added new urban seniors and new white-collar workers, and increased product orders.

After opening up the gift-giving scene horizontally, Hu Jihua Peanut Oil, a traditional method of pressing, jumped out of the marketing framework of the traditional grain and oil category, breaking through the restrictions of the crowd and category. In this process, Douyin Mall is like a bridge connecting users and brands. In this event, Hu Jihua Peanut Oil, a traditional method of pressing, completed the whole chain from "product development-exploitation by influencers-brand explosion", and accompanied the small perfection of life with a perfect gift.

02 Digging deep into the emotional connotation of IP, the joint gift box combines tradition and fashion

What attracted my attention most during this Mid-Autumn Festival was the joint gift box between Daoxiangcun and "Black Myth: Wukong".

I remember that last year there was a hot search "Everyone loves Sun Wukong". This image is undoubtedly a treasure trove for a traditional brand that is eager to renew its brand and attract more young users.

Just like the shocking birth of Monkey King Wukong in the original Journey to the West, the first 3A game in China, Black Myth: Wukong, was launched on August 20 and caused a sensation at home and abroad. When the game became popular, Daoxiangcun launched the Black Myth: Wukong co-branded gift box mooncakes on Douyin Mall on August 28, which were sold out immediately after the first release.

People in the industry know that negotiating with IPs to collaborate on joint projects is a long and tiring process.

Zhou Dongsheng, general manager of the e-commerce division of the marketing center of Daoxiangcun Food Group Co., Ltd., told me that they had paid attention to this IP as early as when the game trailer was released and began to contact and negotiate with the game company.

Daoxiangcun, as a time-honored Chinese brand originated in Suzhou and has been passed down for 2 and a half centuries, dared to bet on this game. On the one hand, it likes the original novel "Journey to the West" very much. On the other hand, "Journey to the West" has a very good mass base. The open-minded mental state of one of the protagonists, Monkey King, in the film and television drama is very popular among young people.

It is said that brave people enjoy the world first. The popularity of the game this year has laid a very good foundation for traffic and sales for the joint gift box of Daoxiangcun and "Black Myth: Wukong". The Daoxiangcun brand designed an offline pop-up store for this purpose, attracting many consumers to check in.

This is far from enough. In order to attract more young consumer groups, Daoxiangcun uses Douyin Mall as the first launch channel for new products and the core channel for expanding online hot spots, and supplies 80% of the joint gift boxes to it.

The reason for this choice is that Daoxiangcun believes that after Douyin Mall has opened up the content field and the shelf field, it will be able to maximize the realization of business through multiple explosive links such as short video content planting, post-watching search, live broadcast, product cards, etc.

In this event, the platform and Daoxiangcun jointly created the hot topic #Mooncake version of Black Myth Wukong, and invited the cross-dressing beauty experts @楚淇 and @小黄同学 to shoot cross-dressing videos, using "biting mooncakes" as the trigger action to transform into popular characters in the game. At the same time, the grass-growing evaluation expert @牟牟呀 was also invited to taste and evaluate the mooncake gift box. Among them, Chu Qi's Wukong mooncake cross-dressing video received more than 200,000 likes, and the topic #Mooncake version of Black Myth Wukong is too cool, which ranked TOP 1 on the grass-growing list.

With the help of high-quality resources in the whole region, through the combination of star map seeding + marketing account promotion + brand people, goods and places, Daoxiangcun achieved both product and effect during the key node of this year's Mid-Autumn Festival, and also completed the penetration of young people and game crowds. It has to be said that Douyin Mall has become an important platform for IP content interaction.

In addition, the platform also promoted other interesting topics around the hot topic of Mid-Autumn Festival mooncakes. For example, around the time-honored mooncakes, it invited the experts of agriculture, rural areas and farmers @潘婆佬, food experts @拉月小九, @江江厨房美食 and others to create the hot topic #老祖宗严选月饼如何绝.

In terms of visual content presentation, the intangible cultural heritage craftsmanship, the production and restoration of Su-style mooncakes, and the authentic materials of traditional mooncakes are fully displayed, which arouses users' appetite and also evokes the good memories of the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival and traditional Mid-Autumn mooncakes caused by mooncakes. Among them, the videos of Grandma Pan and Layue Xiaojiu received 140,000+ and 120,000+ likes respectively, and the topics also ranked 7th on the Douyin hot list and 1st on the grass list, with user interactions reaching 338,000+ times and exposures of 997.7W+ times.

In order to focus on the Mid-Autumn Festival gift-giving scenario, the platform has collaborated with many celebrities and experts in appearance, couples, and comedy dramas to create the topic #Who can refuse this moon-watching trip?

"Dada" is a new type of social relationship that has become popular this year. It represents a companion in a specific scenario. It does not require high-intensity emotional communication, but provides spiritual support like friends. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, which emphasizes reunion and companionship, these popular celebrity partners brought full emotional value to users, and the topic naturally received a lot of attention and discussion. On September 5, the day the topic was launched, it rushed to the top 5 of the Douyin hot list and the top 1 of the grass-planting list, with 20.6W+ interactions and 1147.1W+ exposures.

The exposure traffic obtained by these hot search topics will be linked to the "Golden Autumn Reunion Gift" event page through post-view search, thereby driving traffic to all merchants participating in this event.

03 Afterword

In recent years, I have had a very obvious feeling that those big things are beginning to become less effective, such as big advertisements, big slogans, and big emotions. Instead, some very small things: small content, small intelligence, and small infiltration are more easily accepted by people.

This is why I particularly like these two small emotions that are more relevant to individuals that Douyin Mall cut this year.

Hu Jihua's traditional method small-pressed peanut oil, a daily necessity, has acquired emotional value worth remembering through a reunion dinner, thus achieving perfect interpersonal relationships with relatives and friends.

Daoxiangcun mooncakes have broken away from the misunderstanding that traditional mooncakes are only shared with elders, and have found a younger and more creative group who eat the same mooncakes while playing "Black Myth: Wukong", achieving a perfect fusion of tradition and fashion.

Both brands have avoided low-price competition with similar brands through state-of-the-art emotional insights, breaking through category restrictions and raising their business ceilings.

Of course, Douyin Mall has made many attempts in this year's Mid-Autumn Festival activities.

For example, the "Golden Autumn Reunion Gift" category activities can be transformed into online garden parties, so that the Mid-Autumn Festival can be created to better attract the emotional values ​​and relaxation of contemporary young people, combining the spiritual needs of young people with the reunion attributes of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

After the emotional hotspot of "a perfect harvest" during the Mid-Autumn Festival penetrated the crowd, the platform linked up with many celebrities and influencers to support the Mid-Autumn Festival activities of Douyin Mall, jointly created hot search topics with merchants, combined with the flagship products of different brands, customized channel hot products, and produced Mid-Autumn Festival posters to convey the "courtesy" mentality.

Through unboxing videos, short drama implants and other forms of product promotion, in-depth product promotion and pre-embedded blue search terms are carried out to allow brand products to display their benefits in more concrete scenarios and more precise emotions, and to explain the value of brand products in a more three-dimensional and vivid way. Users will directly enter the event venue and store through relevant topic words to carry out conversion.

Douyin Mall has a complete one-stop link of planting grass-explosion-follow-up sales, and is an indispensable explosive position for brand marketing during major festivals.

It provides a strong acceleration for brands. On the one hand, cooperating with the platform can improve efficiency a lot compared to internally taking advantage of node popularity and setting themes; on the other hand, many traditional brands and some rigid demand brands have the problem of narrow and aging audiences. Co-creation with the platform can expand the brand audience and help business boom.

Choosing a festival that occupies an important emotional position in the hearts of Chinese people can not only bring daily little beauty to consumers, but also achieve brand and effect integration. I think this is the value that marketing originally hopes to bring to this industry!

Author | Mozhi

Editor | Doris