Xianyu launches "seafood perfume"; 1 point gives away wooden fish; Adidas uses shoe boxes as shoes... This is how you should do April Fools' Day marketing!

April Fools' Day is a great opportunity for brands to show their creativity and humor, but how to play it properly, both to enhance interaction with consumers and not to risk touching the public's sensitive nerves, is a question that every brand needs to consider. This article analyzes six cases to show the marketing creativity and trends of brands on April Fools' Day this year. From Pizza Hut's spicy cheese pizza to NetEase Cloud Music's language system upgrade, each case is full of humor and creativity. Readers can get inspiration on how to find a balance in April Fools' Day marketing and understand how users of different ages react to April Fools' Day marketing. It is suitable for readers who are interested in brand marketing and creativity.

April Fool's Day is a time that many brands want to touch but dare not touch. If played well, it can build a closer relationship with consumers and create a small circle. If played badly, at best no one will pay attention to you, at worst you will easily get yourself into trouble.

But April Fools' Day is really worth brands' attention. There is a sentence in "Amusing Ourselves to Death": "All public discourse in real society is increasingly appearing in the form of entertainment and becoming a cultural spirit."

In recent years, national carnival, crazy literature... have become the cultural soil for this generation. Last year's "Wan Geng Festival" in Shanghai allowed us to see the strength of "fun people". Here, we do not lament that people have nowhere to release their selves, nor do we criticize the deconstruction of culture. We only talk about the phenomenon and the power that brands can borrow based on the current situation.

People need behaviors to release themselves, and consumption behavior is one of the most important behaviors. For consumers, brands need to play with them, go crazy with them, and express emotions through consumption; many brands also have a tendency to go "crazy", which is called emotional marketing in a professional sense.

April Fools' Day is the best time to go crazy, because consumers are more tolerant and receptive to brand advertising on this day than at other times. Morketing takes stock of 6 cases to see how to play this year.

1. Today: Products from the most evil are the right ones

1. Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut is an old player in time-node marketing. On February 24, World Anti-Coriander Day, it launched a red oil cilantro pizza. When April Fools' Day arrived, it immediately launched a three-day limited-time product - spicy cheese chicken pizza. It looks like a crust from the front and it looks like a crust from the back. Where is the stuffing? It's inside. Well, the same is true for pies. Pizza Hut has mastered the localization of pizza. The "pie" also contains the childhood favorite Weilong spicy strips.

2. 70% sweet

On April 1, 7fentian launched soy sauce milk tea. Soy sauce!? Milk tea!? Tea!? It was also a collaboration with Taitai Le. Although both are in the food industry, these two products are completely unrelated. They sound like dark cuisine. Even the April Fools' Day launch makes people feel like a joke.

3. 1 point

1DianDian, after being complained about disappearing last year, finally caught up with marketing. This April Fool's Day, wooden fish returned. If you spend more than 29 yuan and buy the "Fools Are Not Foolish, Happy +1" package, you can get a random wooden fish. With homophonic puns on one hand and metaphysical marketing on the other, if you don't play in such a competitive tea beverage track, you will really be left behind.

4. Adidas

Speaking of high-end Adidas, it is one. Recently, Adidas launched a real shoe box on the "Confirmed" application.

According to the product description, the Box Shoe blurs the line between product and packaging. This "sneaker" is essentially a traditional blue Adidas box with perforations and thick laces at the forefoot. There is also a flap at the midfoot so you can secure your foot inside the shoe. Because the style code is AF0104 and the release date is April Fools' Day, many people think that this product may be an April Fools' joke from the brand, but Edison Chen's retweet made the release of this pair of shoes credible.

2. Just talk: Don’t take what the Internet says seriously

1. Xianyu

On March 29, Xianyu released the "Xianyu "Seafood Market" series of perfumes on Weibo, the first release of the fresh and fishy smell." The four perfumes - Seafood Market°5, Kunlun Boiled Shrimp, No Man's Land Clams, Sage and Conch, correspond to well-known perfumes such as Chanel No. 5, Kunlun Boiled Snow, No Man's Land Rose, Sage and Sea Salt, etc.

The carefully designed perfume bottles, paired with some Chinese characters that give a wonderful experience, and the stories of legendary perfumers, Xianyu, which has long been known as the "seafood market", does not hesitate to play with its own memes.

The product poster design looks pretty good, but if you look closely, the bottle cap of °5 from the seafood market is a fish. Similarly, the bottle cap of Kunlun boiled shrimp is a shrimp, and the bottle cap of No Man's Land clam is a clam. Blah blah, okay, I won't say more.

The essence of copywriting is to keep the adjectives unchanged and change them into nouns. Just looking at the adjectives such as "otherworldly", "alienated", "fragrant", and "lazy", it seems that you have imagined the scene of spraying perfume on the coast and under the snow-capped mountains, how elegant and stylish. But when paired with nouns, "fragrant clam soup" and "lazy seafood market", sometimes you have to sigh that beauty comes from human imagination.

Even more sublime is the introduction of the "perfumer". The perfumer of No Man's Land Clam, YING HU, "is studying aquaculture at an internationally renowned perfumery school. Her early upbringing experiences have endowed her with many genius ideas. Relying on her childhood experiences of catching seafood and working in the back kitchen of a food stall, she has created imaginative works such as "No Man's Land Clam" and has become famous in the world of perfume. "A netizen commented: "Who understands my funny point."

Of course, Morketing did not find these products on the platform, so Xianyu also replied to friends who were as curious as Morketing, saying that without doing a few "heart-eye exercises", it is really hard to tell whether what is said is true or false.

2. NetEase

NetEase Cloud Music had a April Fools' Day event, saying "Cloud Village has upgraded its language system to bring you a brand new listening experience." It released multiple posters; Youdao Dictionary's April Fools' Day marketing event featured cosplays of Xiaohongshu, NetEase Cloud Music, and McDonald's; NetEase Yanxuan released a creative video of the anniversary celebration of the "NetEase Yanxuan AI "Heart" Machine Conference" on April 1. It has to be said that NetEase has the gene for doing things.

Xianyu and NetEase are typical platforms for young people. In 2023, Xianyu will have 300 million users, 60% of whom are born in the 1990s and 35% are born in the 1995s. The age distribution of NetEase Cloud Music is mainly concentrated between 18 and 35 years old, with young people aged 20 to 24 as the main group, accounting for about 43%. Youdao Dictionary, needless to say, is an application that serves students. The marketing of these platforms is naturally as interesting as possible.

3. Conclusion

Finally, let's talk about precautions - moderation, moderation, and moderation. First of all, you can't ruin your character, and secondly, you can't turn a joke into fake news.

A few years ago, Volkswagen's mistake of changing its US business name to "Voltswagen" can be regarded as a negative example. Volkswagen (VWAGY.US) accidentally released a press release on its website in advance, announcing that its US business would be renamed from Volkswagen to Voltswagen. The new name will highlight the electrification transformation of the Volkswagen brand with the unit of electric current, Volts.

The company's stock price soared as the market looked forward to the company's electrification prospects. But soon Volkswagen announced that the so-called name change plan was just an April Fool's Day joke to attract attention to its efforts in electric vehicles. However, the effect was counterproductive, and the company's "fake news" was widely criticized on social media, prompting Volkswagen's US subsidiary to apologize in a hurry to "put out the fire."

Author: Morketing

Source: WeChat public account "(ID: Morketing)"