What should brands learn from Jia Ling to impress female users?

Have you seen "Hot and Spicy"? How did this movie achieve such an impressive box office performance? Read this article to learn Jia Ling's marketing strategy!

"I instantly had respect for Jia Ling!"

“I saw selfish and plump female characters in the movie!”

"Hot and Spicy: The People-Pleasing Personality Made Me Cry..."

The annual Spring Festival movie war is coming to an end, and "Hot and Spicy" directed and starred by Jia Ling has undoubtedly become the number one winner. According to statistics, "Hot and Spicy" has been on the hot search 1,812 times in 8 days since its release; the total box office has exceeded 3 billion yuan.

Although the film received mixed reviews and the opposing sides debated fiercely, judging from the results, it is undeniable that "Hot and Spicy" is a successful commercial film. Coincidentally, Jia Ling's previous Spring Festival movie "Hello, Li Huanying" also won the box office championship during the Spring Festival that year amid controversy.

If we regard movies as products, then Jia Ling has undoubtedly played the dual roles of product manager and marketer. In this article, Daofa will analyze "Hot and Spicy" from the perspective of brand marketing, bringing in the following questions.

How does "Hot as Hell", which has been rated as a "plain water" movie, stand out from the Spring Festival period through topic marketing?

What does the user psychology behind the high level of attention reflect? How can brands learn from it?

After "excessive" marketing, why was "Hot as Hell" able to escape the "traffic backlash"?

01 Why is "Hot as Hell" so popular during the Spring Festival when so many stars gather?

Stepping out of the role of moviegoers, we look at "Hot as Hell" as a commercial project and review the film one by one from both product and marketing perspectives.

To borrow the evaluation of self-media Zhibei Xiaofu, "Jia Ling: the most successful product manager of boiled water movies". With a remade script, familiar casting, and mediocre performance, it is difficult to say that "Hot and Scorching" has artistic value at the dramatic level. So why is it so popular?

Because it has found its core user group - women, and successfully made them "enjoy the viewing experience".

Throughout "Hot and Spicy", except for Lei Jiayin, all other protagonists are women, and none of them are "good women" in the traditional sense. Zhang Xiaofei plays the role of a younger sister who has an affair and has a child, Li Xueqin plays the role of a best friend who has a mistress, and Yang Zi plays the role of a relative who does whatever it takes to get rich. But the show does not accuse these.

This setting made netizens comment that "this was the treatment only men had in men's movies in the past."

Not only the character setting, but also the emotions expressed in the film are closely centered around the pain points of contemporary women. In order to express the inspirational and positive energy shell, Jia Ling created a heroine who changed her pleasing personality by losing weight.

"Weight loss" and "people-pleasing personality" are both natural traffic words. On Xiaohongshu, where 70% of users are female, the #weightloss# related topics have been viewed 28.4 billion times. Changing the people-pleasing personality and loving yourself are also the core themes of women's independence today. It can be said that "Hot and Spicy" is tailor-made for them.

So how can we convey the selling point to arouse their interest in going to the cinema? Let’s take a closer look at the marketing actions of “Hot and Spicy”.

Looking back at Jia Ling's two films, both "Hot and Spicy" and "Hello, Li Huanying" were scheduled for the Spring Festival. For movies, the screening channels are basically fixed. The biggest influence on the number of moviegoers is the release time. According to statistics, the Spring Festival, summer vacation, Double Holidays, and National Day are the times when the cinemas are most crowded. Choosing the Spring Festival is equivalent to guaranteeing the bottom line for the movie box office.

But on the other hand, good timing also means fierce competition, and you must find a sufficiently solid "gimmick" to stand out. This is why the topic of "Hot and Spicy" was "Jia Ling lost 100 pounds". First of all, being fat has always been a memory point that Jia Ling is well known to the audience, and the thin Jia Ling can give the audience a strong sense of contrast; secondly, the topic of weight loss is deep enough, the audience is large enough and the tolerance rate is high. After all, weight loss is true and false, and it is not easy to be criticized as "the goods are not the same as the pictures".

In order to maximize the traffic brought by the topic, "Hot and Sour" shows us a set of ambiguous techniques of "pre-embedded suspense - teasing from time to time - revealing the answer after watching the movie".

As early as January 11, Jia Ling posted on Weibo that she had disappeared for more than a year and lost 100 kilograms in order to film "Hot and Spicy". However, she did not show any pictures of her successful weight loss, which successfully aroused the public's curiosity.

Later, Jia Ling's friends Zhang Xiaofei, Yuan Hong, Yang Di, Sha Yi, Dong Yuhui and many other friends inside and outside the circle revealed in different public occasions that Jia Ling's extraordinary perseverance in losing weight moved and shocked them. At this time, Jia Ling still kept her image secret.

The mystery was not solved until the movie was released on February 10. By then, the audience had been curious for a month.

Doesn't it sound like a test from a bad man or a bad woman? You retreat and I advance, and when you are about to forget me, I will poke you again. But the test period cannot be too long, after all, people's patience is limited. One month is just right.

After the mystery was revealed, the content of the dissemination changed from being dominated by the producers to being spontaneously disseminated by users. The topic was no longer limited to weight loss. After seeing the before-and-after weight loss comparison photos of ordinary people and the fierce debate on gender rights that were all over the Internet, the official style of the painting began to change to "Everything is still in time, love yourself now."

In addition to the accurate grasp of the topic, the series of operations of the film company in the publicity and distribution channels are also worth mentioning. Taking advantage of the Spring Festival movie viewing by the whole nation, "Hot" achieved maximum exposure through the combination of "official media endorsement + live broadcast + mass social media".

Before the release, the film's promotion was mainly concentrated on social media, focusing on young people who love surfing, which is also where the first batch of seed users are most likely to be. After the first day of release, official media such as Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily, and CCTV 6 praised the film one after another, driving the film's popularity to spread to a wider audience.

02 Use projection psychology to trigger traffic, and then use controversy to settle traffic

In the history of film, it is common to use the changes in actors' weight and body shape as a gimmick to promote a film. In 2001, Andy Lau and Sammi Cheng's "Slimming Man and Woman" and in 2015, Leonardo Dicaprio's "The Revenant" used the star's dramatic changes in weight and body shape as selling points to attract audiences to buy tickets to see what was going on before the film was released.

From a psychological perspective, the reason why such gimmicks can provide stable traffic across cycles is that they satisfy the public's voyeurism of others, especially when it allows the public to project their own desires, expectations, and even hatred onto others. The reason why people pay attention to "losing 100 pounds" is because they also desire to lose weight successfully and then realize the real expectation of controlling their body and life, just like Jia Ling.

"Hot and Spicy" used this kind of projection psychology when it was planting other selling points during the grass-planting period.

Taking the secret crush version of the trailer as an example, Jia Ling and Lei Jiayin are the main characters, and the specific scene is "the first date with the secret crush". Jia Ling, who has not yet successfully lost weight, walks with her secret crush Lei Jiayin, "secretly takes a picture of his back" and "is cautious not to stand side by side with him", showing the inferiority and shyness of the secret crush to the audience.

During the Ace vs Ace period, Jia Ling and Jerry Yan once co-starred in a scene about an ordinary chubby girl secretly in love with a male god, which became the highlight of that episode. Hot and Spicy is just a copy of the successful content.

In terms of the selection of promotional platforms, this segment focuses on Douyin, where entertainment consumers aged 15-35 gather. They are close to their youth, and such scenes and content can resonate with them. On major platforms, they are the main force of interaction in entertainment and lifestyle content, and related content also has the opportunity to spill over to other platforms.

Not long after the trailer was released, some people on Douban groups and Weibo posted clips and plot outlines, which led to a series of discussions, including "You have a crush on Lei Jiayin. What's there to be inferior about? You're fat. He's not handsome either", "During the New Year, I really don't want to see this kind of woman working hard to lose weight and make herself better just to chase an ugly, old, fat middle-aged man."

If you have followed the entire process of "Hot as Hell" from promotion to release like the Knife Analysis analyst, you should not be surprised by the negative reviews mentioned above.

We have no way of knowing whether the controversial remarks related to Jia Ling's weight loss and the heroine's emotional line were part of the team's plan, but what we can see is that these controversies have brought lasting exposure and discussion.

During this process, many people were "tortured" from being passers-by to being fans of the movie. "Which movie doesn't have marketing?", "The theme of "Hot" is not weight loss", "The emotional drama actually has a very small proportion, and Le Ying is beautiful alone in the end." Those who hate "Hot" and those who like "Hot" have different opinions, and the argument lasted from before the New Year to after the New Year. As a result, the movie stabilized its traffic and maintained its popularity.

There is a classic saying, "Black and red are also red." If the product quality is up to standard, controversy is not necessarily a bad thing. Opposing opinions can help like-minded people find each other, and the process of arguing allows passers-by to spend time and energy, and then become loyal fans. In the era of decentralization, the most terrible thing is mediocrity that pleases everyone but wins no one. This is also the reason why likable family-friendly movies are no longer popular.

03 “Excessive” marketing did not backfire, “Sincerity is always the ultimate skill”

From the perspective of artistic value, Jia Ling's two directorial works "Hello, Li Huanying" and "Hot Hot" may indeed be plain movies, but the two themes of mother-daughter love and personal transformation are integrated into her own life experience and life story, making it difficult for the audience to judge her works only from the perspective of commercial films.

Sincerity is a universal value. Why is it still effective? In our opinion, the public's admiration for sincerity cannot be separated from the context of the times. At the end of last year, Merriam-Webster Dictionary announced the word of the year for 2023: Authentic. Merriam-Webster Dictionary said that Authentic was also a hot search word in previous years, but due to the influence of hot topics such as artificial intelligence technology last year, the search volume of this word surged.

People’s admiration for Authentic can be seen in every field.

Britney Spears and Prince Harry both revealed their real life experiences in their autobiographies, the hit movie "Barbie" defined real people, and the BeReal tag that advocates not using beauty filters became popular on social networks.

The editor of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary mentioned in an interview with the media: "We regard 2023 as the year of the crisis of authenticity. Can we believe that a student's thesis was completed by himself? Can we trust the statements made by politicians? Sometimes we can't even believe the information we see or hear with our own eyes. When people are more and more skeptical about the authenticity of things, they will pay more and more attention to its authenticity."

Another blessing of Jia Ling is her special status. As the only female director in the Spring Festival period, and even the world's best-selling female director, Jia Ling herself has become an iconic figure.

For those who believe that this year will see the beginning of the "Nine Purple Fire Luck, the middle-aged women's era is coming", Jia Ling's success is the verification of this legend, providing people with positive and optimistic emotions in this era full of uncertainty. Looking at the entire film industry, there will never be another Jia Ling and Big Bowl Entertainment.

04 Analyst Comments

The Spring Festival period is like Double Eleven, which is the node with the strongest consumption mentality among target users throughout the year. Even county residents who usually have no habit of watching movies will set aside some budget for cinemas.

The Spring Festival movies are also like brands. They are no longer just family-friendly movies, but are starting to create products centered on segmented groups and refine selling points. The top three movies on the box office chart this year, "Hot," "Speeding Life 2," and "Boonie Bears: Reverse Time," are all aimed at three different groups: women, men, and children.

Jia Ling and her two works target the growing female audience. According to the Lighthouse Spring Festival movie market insight report, female users accounted for 63% of the 2024 Spring Festival, reaching a new high since statistics were collected. As the female audience continues to grow, the demand for content has also changed, but there are only a handful of works in the content market that write about women's stories and express women's voices. If Jia Ling doesn't make this money, who will?

Author: Raorao, Li Zi; WeChat public account: Knife Skills Research Institute