The number of followers increased by more than 480,000 in 30 days. Why have millions of "old friends" fallen in love with "Cloud Monkey"?

This article explores how Wang Tiezhu, the "snow pancake monkey" of Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park, attracted more than 480,000 fans in just 30 days through his unique performance and interactive style, and became a hot phenomenon in the cultural tourism industry. At the same time, the article also points out the importance of how the cultural tourism industry can continue to provide high-quality tourism products and services to maintain and develop its competitiveness after using the celebrity effect to attract traffic.

1.25 million people have fallen in love with “Cloud Monkey Raising”.

From clothes, pants, shoes, bags to grandma wigs, bridal fans, fart pads, nose hair trimmers...

In the live broadcast room of Snowcake Monkey (Wang Tiezhu), there is nothing that netizens cannot "feed" you, only things you can't think of.

This "monkey" is an actor who plays the role of Sun Wukong in Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park. At the beginning of this year, he quickly became popular with short videos about refusing tourists to feed him snow cakes, such as "No, this thing is too dry." Within 30 days after becoming popular, his Douyin account gained more than 480,000 followers. It also attracted many tourists from Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei and other places to "check in" in Changchun to feed him. According to Phoenix.com, since the establishment of the Journey to the West project, Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park has received more than 200,000 tourists, and the proportion of tourists from outside the region has reached 60% since the beginning of this year.

Some tourists who cannot come to the offline scenic spot to feed the monkeys have chosen to "feed them online" in order to experience the interaction with the snow monkeys. Now, the dual live broadcast of feeding the monkeys in the offline scenic spot + online delivery every day has made the popularity of the snow monkeys high. Its Douyin live broadcast room often ranks first in the Jilin hourly list, with more than 100,000 online viewers. As of now, @雪饼猴 (王铁柱) Douyin account has more than one million fans.

Among all the actors in Changchun scenic area, why is only Snow Pancake Monkey so popular?

1. Graduated from the dance class of 1999, he became a celebrity with millions of fans by performing monkey roles

"I keep eating this snow cake. I'm angry. I won't eat it anymore."

"I am no longer picky about food. A few days ago, a kid slapped me in the face, saying that I was a picky eater."

According to the Snow Cake Monkey, his fame came from a video of a beautiful woman feeding him. He ate 10 snow cakes in a row, and then the tourist continued to feed him snow cakes, so he began to refuse. Thus, the above funny conversation took place.

Image source: TikTok screenshot

After the tourists posted the video, the humorous nature of the Northeastern dialect and the lifelike performance of the Snow Cake Monkey gave the image of Sun Wukong in Journey to the West a modern touch, attracting many locals to feed the monkeys, and creating more and more "famous scenes" of feeding. For example, when encountering a little boy who forgot to take a photo after feeding, the Snow Cake Monkey directly called out: "What are you doing here? Don't you want to take a photo with the monkey?" When a tourist left his phone behind, the Snow Cake Monkey turned into a lost and found office to contact the owner, "Your phone fell on the Five Elements Mountain, did you know that, baby?" When a beautiful fan came to confess her love, the Snow Cake Monkey high-profilely defended the male virtues and said bluntly: "No, I have a family, and my wife is an orangutan."

In addition to ordinary tourists, celebrities who love snow pancake monkeys from all over the country also came to Changchun Zoo and Botanical Garden to cooperate with them, further realizing cross-circle communication. For example, the post-00s beauty expert, @香香元Hyeongwon-, because she likes snow pancake monkeys very much, specially changed into a wedding dress and came to the scenic spot with flowers to meet the snow pancake monkey. The topic of snow pancake monkey being proposed has been played nearly a million times. @香香元Hyeongwon- said: The reason why I wore a wedding dress is to express the sense of relaxation and freedom of young people's madness in the present. That night, the snow pancake monkey also invited @香香元Hyeongwon- to his live broadcast room for a joint live broadcast.

Image source: TikTok screenshot

Another celebrity from Taiwan, China, @黃熙CC醬, is also very impressive. @黃熙CC醬 is a beauty expert with more than 70,000 fans on Douyin. She has flown from Taipei to Changchun many times to feed the "monkeys". In the videos she posted about the snow cake monkey, the highest number of likes exceeded 60,000. At the same time, the gentle Taiwanese accent of the Taiwanese girl and the Northeastern dialect of the snow cake monkey also formed a sharp contrast. The hilarious conversation between the two triggered secondary dissemination by fans. For example, "Blueberry, Strawberry, did you miss me today?" and "Oh my god, I've been thinking about you all the time."

With the popularity of snow monkeys, more and more tourists who go to scenic spots to feed them have spontaneously edited funny clips of the feeding into videos, and circulated them many times on platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu. All the fans converted through short videos have gathered in Wang Tiezhu's Douyin live broadcast room. Some tourists who cannot come to offline scenic spots to feed, in order to experience the interaction with snow monkeys, spontaneously "cloud feed". Therefore, with snow monkeys as the center, a dual feeding mode of offline scenic spots + online express delivery has been formed to undertake a continuous cycle of public domain traffic.

2. Why can Snow Monkey stand out among the NPCs in the scenic area?

After Snow Pancake Monkey became popular, its "under the skin" actor Wang Tiezhu (stage name) also entered the public eye.

The reason why Wang Tiezhu, 25 years old this year, can appear in the public eye with the character of Snow Pancake Monkey is inseparable from an active interview after graduation. At that time, Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park was recruiting actors for the role of Sun Wukong for the Journey to the West theme performance, and went to Jilin Art Institute. Wang Tiezhu, who was just graduating at the time, had always been very interested in performances related to the Journey to the West theme, so he decisively went to the interview site. Unexpectedly, he was the only one who came to the interview. So Wang Tiezhu "stood out directly" and started his "actor career" in the scenic area.

In fact, Wang Tiezhu has always had a close relationship with "monkey opera". At the age of 6, he began to understand and learn "monkey opera" and Errenzhuan with the encouragement of his father. He was only 11 years old when he played the Monkey King for the first time. In 2012, Wang Tiezhu participated in the "Errenzhuan General Mobilization" program of Jilin Satellite TV in the image of Monkey King, and won the championship in the children's group. In 2018, the 17-year-old Wang Tiezhu also appeared on the CCTV stage in the image of the Monkey King. Today, with the help of short videos, Wang Tiezhu has once again become popular on the Internet in the image of Monkey King.

So, why can Snow Monkey stand out among the many NPCs in the scenic area?

First of all, it is inseparable from Wang Tiezhu's performance skills. He has been learning "monkey performance" since he was a child. He imitates the movements, expressions and even dubbing of Sun Wukong, which are very similar to the 1986 version of "Journey to the West". Wang Tiezhu once said in a live broadcast: I listen to Journey to the West in the middle of the night. After listening to Wang Tiezhu's imitation of Sun Wukong's golden sentences: "Eat, eat, eat, you only know how to eat" and "I'm so annoyed", many fans left messages saying: "(This is) the most monkey-like monkey after Liu Xiaolingtong." "No wonder he was selected at the first round, he is simply Sun Wukong in the world." Some fans also posted relevant clips of his performance on their social media.

Image source: TikTok screenshot

With the spontaneous spread of a group of fans, the traffic brought by short videos + the image of Sun Wukong in traditional culture further magnified the fun and interesting content highlights of Snow Monkey.

Secondly, it is Wang Tiezhu's unique personal charm. Although he is a chatterbox, he always answers questions. Although he says he refuses snow cakes, he still eats them if they are fed to him. This gives tourists high emotional feedback and is highly interactive. For example, although he doesn't like snow cakes, he will still eat them if he sees tourists feeding them. Even when he is performing, if he sees tourists wanting to feed him, he will respond humorously: "We are fighting now, we will eat later."

In addition, Wang Tiezhu's own experience is comparable to the "eighty-one" difficulties that Sun Wukong encountered on his journey to obtain Buddhist scriptures, and it is full of inspirational colors. When he was a child, he lived with his elderly grandparents due to family changes such as his father's death and his mother's accidental illness. Even though he felt that God was unfair, he still faced life positively and optimistically. In order to get rid of his stuttering and get performance opportunities to supplement his family income, Wang Tiezhu made more efforts than others. His experience made all the fans call him "heartache". There was even a fan who photoshopped a family photo of Wang Tiezhu's parents, which made him cry in the live broadcast room.

It is worth mentioning that after obtaining the copyright of the 1986 version of "Journey to the West", Changchun Zoological and Botanical Park designed the Wuxing Mountain feeding interaction in the scenic area. The form is novel and interesting, and the interaction is strong, which has attracted many children and parents. Around the Spring Festival this year, many children fed the snow pancake monkey their own New Year's money. After the snow pancake monkey became popular, fans who could not come to feed it in person directly innovated the "cloud feeding" method to participate in the interaction remotely.

There are many celebrities like Snow Cake Monkey who have driven the local cultural tourism economy "single-handedly", such as "Wang Po" in Kaifeng, "Fang Xuanling" and "Du Ruhui" in the Tang Dynasty City that Never Sleeps in Xi'an, "Guan Chang" in Jiayuguan, and "Sister Doll" in Xi'an, etc. They have all become unique labels for local urban cultural tourism. The videos of celebrities have become a window for netizens to understand various places. Through social media and content platforms, the immersive experience and additional experience of netizens have been magnified, opening up new ideas for the construction of cultural tourism in the new era. Today, the three elements of celebrities + short videos + traditional culture have become a benchmark for driving the high-quality development of new cultural tourism formats.

But in the long run, using celebrities + short videos + traditional culture to bring in traffic is only the first step in cultural tourism marketing. Dai Bin, director of the Tourism Research Institute, once publicly stated that after celebrities bring local cultural tourism economy to the fore, there is still a lot of daily work to be done, such as how to create a market environment, market order, project construction, and product development. Although such follow-up work is not as eye-catching as the previous videos, it is also very important.

Therefore, how to truly work hard on tourism products and services, absorb the traffic, and build sustainable cultural and tourism competitiveness is a problem that all cultural and tourism bureaus and scenic spots need to think about and solve.

Who will be the next popular cultural and tourism celebrity?

Author: Xia Tian; Source public account: KOL User Manual (ID: 1093227)