Yi Yang Qianxi's small card is popular. Has Luckin Coffee's spokesperson marketing logic evolved again?

After Luckin Coffee officially announced Yi Yang Qianxi as its spokesperson, it recently launched a new package and gave away spokesperson cards. Let’s take a look at the situation behind Luckin Coffee’s marketing logic.

Recently, Luckin Coffee once again teamed up with Kweichow Moutai to launch a new product, the Year of the Dragon Sauce-flavored chocolate. However, compared with the last collaboration, the splash was not that big.

However, hard-working brands always reap various rewards. Even though the co-branding was not strong enough, the spokesperson's limited peripheral products stood out, making many fans of the brand spokesperson Yi Yang Qianxi ecstatic.

During the event, consumers who purchase exclusive packages can receive a series of spokesperson cards. Just looking at the event itself, one cannot help but admire Luckin's idea of ​​killing two birds with one stone, satisfying fans' needs while increasing store sales.

It is true that spokesperson marketing has long become an important part of brand marketing, but Luckin Coffee has already demonstrated with practical actions how to leverage the spokesperson effect to maximize brand benefits.

Through the Luckin Coffee Xiaoka case, TOP Jun tried to review Luckin Coffee’s spokesperson marketing logic and explore how it won the hearts of young people and became their first choice of coffee drinks.

1. Coffee Marketing [Horizontal Comparison] - Top Brands Have Spokespersons

Before focusing on Luckin Coffee’s endorsement route, TOP would like to talk about how the coffee industry has been opening the book on official announcements of spokespersons.

According to statistics from the self-media "Jiang Cha Cha", Luckin Coffee cooperated with celebrities 32 times in 2023. It had a unique vision to grasp the popularity, acted quickly and accurately, and used the popularity and quantity to forge a unique route of linking with celebrities.

Luckin Coffee has a unique vision in selecting spokespersons, but in the fiercely competitive coffee market, many coffee brands have also officially announced spokespersons in the second half of 2023. For example, Tims Coffee appointed Cheng Lei as its brand warmth ambassador, Lucky Coffee announced its first brand spokesperson Ju Jingyi, and Starbucks officially announced its brand happy holiday ambassador Fei Xiang, all of which are carefully selected spokesperson partners by brands.

These collaborations have gained a certain degree of discussion and attention within a short period of time, but in terms of topicality and dissemination, they are far less than the wave of fan support that was set off when Cudi officially announced Wang Yibo as the brand spokesperson at the beginning of 2024.

From the interactive data of social media, we can see that the number of reposts and comments on Wang Yibo’s Weibo post for Cudi has exceeded 1 million, and the number of likes has reached 5.13 million. The fighting power of offline fans has also made Cudi stores frequently sell out.

Prior to this, Luckin Coffee’s new product “Toasted Coconut Latte”, which was launched by Yi Yang Qianxi, also sold over 10.04 million cups in the first week.

When popular coffee brands turn their marketing efforts to spokespersons, attempting to leverage celebrity products to gain explosive traffic and relatively high sales conversions, it is inevitable that people will question: Is this really a shortcut for coffee brands to achieve brand growth?

But Luckin Coffee and Cudi have proved themselves with actual data - the high degree of fit between the brand and the spokesperson, and the strong combination, make it possible to achieve efficient cooperation.

However, brands also have to consider some drawbacks. First, the current "traffic stars" are updated and iterated at a very fast speed. All kinds of brands need to pay attention to whether the joint official announcement can break through the time limit and overcome the problem of type homogeneity, so as to obtain continuous traffic; second, when the struggle of "fan circles" rises to the brand level, can the impact of the barriers formed by fan culture on brand attitudes be ignored?

Ultimately, the added value of spokespersons is certainly important for coffee brands, but in the catering industry, it is always the products and services that can retain users.

It was with this kind of thinking that TOP, in reviewing Luckin's spokesperson strategy, discovered that it has clear future plans and ideas for brand image building.

2. Spokesperson Strategy [Vertical View] - Luckin Coffee has a way to build brand image

Luckin Coffee CMO Yang Fei once pointed out in his book Traffic Pool that "'Fans' are the most favorable traffic source for companies to build their brands in the era of self-media."

Looking at Luckin Coffee's celebrity endorsement history, after signing heavyweight celebrity endorsers in the early stage and switching to lightweight cooperation through flexible endorsement in the mid-term, Luckin Coffee has changed its cooperation strategy and officially announced a global endorser. Here, TOP would like to summarize the impact of each stage by increasing awareness, establishing brand image, and grasping emotional value.

1. Early stage: fit + popularity, quickly shaping brand tone

In January 2018, an advertisement featuring Tang Wei and Zhang Zhen holding a "little blue cup" appeared on the focus screens of major buildings and WeChat Moments. At that time, Luckin Coffee had just begun to expand its offline stores, but it had already tried to use the strong business capabilities and temperament of its spokespersons to establish the brand's positioning as "high-quality commercial coffee."

In the early days, it was rare for the coffee and catering market to select spokespersons, but with the charm and aura of the male gods and goddesses, Luckin Coffee successfully gained widespread favorability among the white-collar class.

At the same time as the spokesperson's image entered consumers' field of vision, the brand slogan "Who doesn't love this cup?" also came into play. With the rapid entry and expansion of offline physical stores, Luckin Coffee also left an initial impression of "high-end and high-quality" in the minds of users.

2. Mid-term: Cast a wide net + focus on interaction, use the human wave strategy to grab the topic

Luckin Coffee, which is looking for spokespersons to cooperate in the middle of the promotion, focuses on short-term endorsements + human sea tactics. While taking advantage of the short-term traffic dividend, it also relies on interactions with netizens and fans, trying to obtain the best topics and seize the communication effect with the least investment.

Specifically, popular celebrities and powerful sports rising stars are Luckin's favorite targets. The means of cooperation include but are not limited to celebrity-style poster promotions, seasonal product recommendation officers and brand spokespersons.

Whether it's the Russian model, singer and actor Liu Xuxiu who became popular in "Creation Camp 2021", or Liu Genghong who popularized home fitness because of his aerobics in the live broadcast room, or "Yue Zun" Wang Hedi who became popular because of "Cang Lan Jue"... Luckin Coffee can always quickly lock in the hottest celebrity actors or Internet celebrities to recommend products and keep up with the trends and hot spots that young people pay attention to.

In addition to celebrity posters, Luckin Coffee has also set its sights on talented sports stars in the past two years. Not only did it bet on the talented skiing girl Gu Ailing six months before the Winter Olympics, but it also worked with swimming champion Wang Shun, the Chinese women's basketball team and other athletes during important competitions. During the event, Luckin Coffee officials also publicly called out fans in various ways on social platforms, and cleverly interacted with fans through the comment area and super chats, using the national sentiment behind the joy of celebrating the event to win a wave of goodwill.

From the above, we can see that Luckin's mid-term "non-top-tier strategy" has successfully established a less utilitarian brand image in the minds of users and created a "people-friendly" brand by leveraging its reputation and cooperation with newcomers who have good popularity. At this stage, for Luckin, which fell into a financial fraud pit in 2020, it is obviously extremely important to rebuild the public's trust in the brand.

3. Late stage: strong alliance + emotional value, deep bundling and long-term operation

Last November, Luckin Coffee switched from short-term quick-announcement celebrity endorsements to official announcements of highly national global titles. The sudden strategic shift behind this was to capture the attention of the industry and young target groups and once again emphasize the brand's youthful tone; on the other hand, it was also to consolidate the brand's strategic position with more well-known celebrity endorsements in the face of a large number of homogeneous IP collaborations in the market, laying the foundation for focusing on fan economy after long-term deep bundling.

According to the fan portrait data from the artist analysis of Ent Marketing Think Tank, 55% of Yi Yang Qianxi's fans are aged between 18 and 24, which is highly consistent with the user portrait of Luckin Coffee, which is pursuing a more popular and younger route. In addition, the strong fan base and the fact that Luckin Coffee received over a million likes on the day of the official announcement also meant that the two sides were destined to empower and achieve each other.

From the official announcement of the cooperation the day before the birthday to sending birthday wishes on the birthday, from jointly launching the new winter product "Toasted Coconut Latte" to the online and offline broadcast of the 4 New Year surprises, Luckin Coffee has also played its own rhythm in deeply bundling spokespersons, grasping the consumption pain points of young groups from shallow to deep, and gradually activating the emotional value of fans.

The small card materials used in the official announcement of Yi Yang Qianxi are also one of the forms that young people like to see. In China, small card culture is mainly popular among KPOP fans, so the launch of this limited peripheral naturally attracted many fans to spontaneously summarize strategies and exchange and help each other. The core consumption concept of young people nowadays has shifted to "pleasing themselves", and they prefer consumer products that can bring "emotional experience" and are in line with their own "personality". In this regard, Luckin Coffee's extremely attractive peripherals have largely met the consumption needs of young people.

Another reason that cannot be ignored after the deep bundling is that Luckin Coffee is accelerating its expansion into overseas markets. At the end of October 2023, Luckin Coffee announced the official opening of its 30th store in Singapore, less than a year after Luckin Coffee went to Singapore. Therefore, selecting suitable spokespersons, especially familiar faces of new generation high-quality idols, will also help Luckin Coffee continue to sink into the domestic market and accelerate the further realization of overseas market expansion.

3. Integration of brand and business: "Traffic pool" thinking helps brand growth

Luckin Coffee has already fired the first shot in the coffee industry's spokesperson marketing by inviting Tang Wei and Zhang Zhen to strengthen its brand from the very beginning. Behind the packaging idea of ​​maximizing the brand's voice through spokespersons is Yang Fei, who is well versed in mobile Internet marketing routines and has been constantly thinking about brand marketing and operations.

In the early years, during the marketing promotion of UCAR, Yang Fei, then CMO of UCAR Group, chose to use the friendly and mature spokesperson images of Wu Xiubo and Hai Qing to root the brand image of business, safety, and high-end in the minds of users.

Later, in 2017, he proposed the "traffic pool thinking". When most companies focused on external traffic acquisition and pursuit of traffic monetization, Yang Fei keenly proposed traffic retention and utilization. This thinking has been guiding Luckin Coffee's growth path since then.

In his opinion, the core of the traffic pool is "product-operation integration", that is, to connect traffic and traffic pool. On the one hand, it is a way to obtain external traffic under the guidance of the traditional 4P theory, and on the other hand, it is the user operation section to achieve new users, retention, frequency increase and fission. Only by connecting brand-type growth and operational-type growth and achieving product-operation integration can we enter a positive cycle of growth.

From the initial design of the little blue cup + deer head, which was the first to capture the minds of users, to the brand slogan "Who doesn't love this cup" that appeared on posters with the spokesperson, to the cooperative spokespersons bringing young eyes and positive feedback to the brand, as well as the improvement of the brand's online membership system and the continuous expansion of offline stores... It can be said that every step of Luckin's marketing action has achieved the effect of single-point blasting and overall activation of Luckin's traffic pool.

IV. Conclusion

From the white-collar elite to a wider young audience, from brand personality shaping to more diverse image building, Luckin Coffee has always focused on the retention and use of traffic in its celebrity endorsement strategy to maximize the brand dissemination.

From the short-term human-wave strategy to the current long-term deep bundling, Luckin Coffee has also used the special nature of the New Year to demonstrate the application of emotional value and the effectiveness of brand communication: responding to fans' needs, gradually activating fans' enthusiasm, and then turning the traffic effect to the long-term operation of the brand. In the future, what surprises will Luckin Coffee bring and whether it will take action on overseas expansion routes? Let us wait and see.

Author: TOP Jun WeChat public account: TopMarketing