The collaboration between Ba Wang Cha Ji and The Lost Tomb is a complete failure: Is the second dimension difficult or is it that the brand doesn’t know how to play it?

Last month, Luckin Coffee and Moutai launched a joint venture, which won both good reputation and sales. But the joint venture of Bawangchaji failed. What is the reason? This article tries to analyze the specific reasons for us, hoping to help everyone.

Ba Wang Cha Ji finally ushered in her first IP collaboration.

In the joint event with Tomb Raiders, which was officially launched before the National Day and Holidays, Overlord Tea Princess was on several hot searches, and had a "great chance of winning" among its peers who were racking their brains to launch marketing campaigns for the National Day and Holidays. Unfortunately, most of the hot searches were negative, with people shocked by the buy-one-get-one-free rules, complaining about the peripheral derivatives, and insulting the brand for "not being able to afford it". Under the relevant entries, the core fans of the IP "criticized before buying" and were full of resentment.

Now, the first week of the joint launch has passed. The official Weibo account of Bawangchaji still has two contents facing the majority of Daomi (the nickname of the Tomb Robber Notes IP fans) at the top. One is a lucky draw post saying "Thank you for your tolerance and support for this event", and the other is an apology statement saying "Sorry! We messed up this time!" The words are very heartfelt.

However, in the comment section, there are a lot of condemnations from IP fans. From ugly peripheral graphics, high barriers to entry, insufficient stock, disputes over plagiarism by artists, to malicious targeting of core fans in marketing communications... Despite the brand's emergency public relations and constant rule adjustments, Bawang Tea Princess is still mired in negative public opinion, having played a good hand badly.

This scene also reminds people of the previous joint cooperation between Heytea and Genshin Impact, Shanghai Auntie and Love and Night, and KFC and Haikyuu! It seems that all brand activities that are jointly launched with popular two-dimensional IPs will face controversy and criticism from the core fan base for various reasons.

Are fans of the 2D world really that difficult to deal with?

Doujiao observed that, in fact, this joint event was different from the previous ones. The warm-up period was quite long, up to two months. At the same time, the early word-of-mouth was mainly positive. From being called upon by IP fans on social platforms to actively join forces with fans, to launching a network-wide solicitation for fan artists to customize the outer packaging during the warm-up period, Bawang Tea Princess has won wide acclaim.

However, as the official activities were launched, a number of problems were exposed, such as unclear insights into the consumption habits of IP fans, insufficient estimates of popularity, and frequent fan minefields, which gradually backfired on the high expectations. The final word-of-mouth crash was a typical result of insufficient brand preparation and a lack of in-depth understanding of the cooperating IP.

For brands that are eager to win the favor of young users and establish positive influence, this kind of strong circle cooperation with high licensing fees needs to be treated with caution.

1. Start with a high starting point: pampering fans, teasing IP, preheating and soliciting, is Bawang Tea Princess good at playing?

As a novel that was serialized in 2006, completed in 2011, and has continued to have derivative content updates for more than a decade, the "Grave Robbers' Chronicles" IP can be said to be a well-deserved long-term top stream in the field of domestic novels, and has a wide influence among the domestic ACGN audience. Among the tens of millions of book fans, a large number of young female users with strong purchasing power also constitute its solid core fan base. There are nearly 2 million fans in the "Grave Robbers' Chronicles" super topic on Weibo alone. The annual celebration of IP fans on August 17 has also repeatedly appeared on hot search topics, and even promoted the cultural tourism economy of key locations in the novel such as Changbai Mountain and Hangzhou, which shows its influence.

But before this collaboration, The Lost Tomb had never conducted any licensing cooperation with tea brands. " On the one hand, the IP cooperation fee of The Lost Tomb is relatively high in the industry. On the other hand, tea brands now prefer to cooperate with newer two-dimensional IPs, and also prefer animations and games with ready-made element libraries and character images, which are better for material design. " A person close to the IP of The Lost Tomb, Nanpai Fanyu, told Doujiao.

The gap created the enthusiasm of fans. As various tea brands launched joint ventures, there were many fans leaving messages in the joint solicitation areas of various brands asking for cooperation. In a solicitation post on the official Xiaohongshu account of Overlord Tea Princess in July, the proposal of Tomb Raiders ranked first with 23,000 likes.

Bawang Cha Ji seized this wave of traffic. On July 18 this year, the brand started to flirt with the IP party online on the official account of Xiaohongshu, and quickly cooperated with the important fan nodes of Tomb Raiders around August 17. This cooperation is a small-scale offline cooperation. Bawang Cha Ji combined its own Zhejiang store celebration event with the 817 Rice Festival event, and launched brand promotion in the form of offline purchase of two cups to participate in the lottery to win a Tomb Raiders folding fan.

While testing the waters offline on a small scale, Bawang Tea Princess also announced the main dish of the collaboration: According to the brand official, the packaging bag appearance of this collaboration will be collected online and selected from the fan creations of Tomb Raiders Notes, and decided by everyone's vote. The final participating painters will also receive bonuses and signature rights from the brand. This kind of solicitation cooperation is unprecedented in various previous two-dimensional IP collaborations. At one time, many Daomi painters signed up to participate, and there were many packaging design drawings of different styles, which also made the large-scale online collaboration "hot before it was released", raising fans' expectations to the maximum.

Listening to the audience's opinions to launch joint ventures, obtaining the first tea beverage authorization for a popular domestic novel IP and conducting a small-scale offline trial, and using fan creation to expand the influence of joint activities to achieve early warm-up and build circle reputation, all of these gameplays hit the "cool points" of Daomi, and effectively solved the problems of the novel IP's lack of a clear image and the difficulty in satisfying the tastes of all two-dimensional fans.

What’s even more rare is that putting the collection activity in the foreground also effectively avoids the phenomenon of “leaking” materials that is common when popular IPs are linked. Previously, whether it was the joint venture between Genshin Impact and Heytea or the joint venture between Light and Night and Shanghai Auntie, there had been cases where employees secretly released cooperation information or even sold derivatives before the official announcement, which not only disrupted the normal communication rhythm of the activity, but also easily caused reputation disputes due to the leakage of false information.

On the contrary, this kind of open solicitation method has prolonged the event warm-up period. For the two-dimensional audience who value fan creation, it is also an effective way to activate the fan base and expand influence.

At this point, the collaboration between Overlord Tea Princess and Grave Robbers' Chronicles had a very good start.

2. The main dish went bad: ugly surroundings, insufficient gifts, and user expulsion, Bawang Tea Princess stepped on three major minefields

However, the honeymoon period was quickly terminated after the official appearance and rules of the joint model were announced on September 28, and the reputation of the event has since taken a sharp turn for the worse. After reviewing the reasons, Doujiao found that the brand had severely stepped on the three minefields of IP audiences in the core peripheral design, buy-one-get-one-free mechanism and marketing communication.

First of all, with the release of the peripheral products, the term "Ba Wang Tea handle picture is ugly" quickly became a hot search. The so-called handle picture refers to the visual set of pictures of the cup body and the peripheral products that are given away for purchase in this joint cooperation. These are two different sets from the outer packaging pictures that were previously publicly collected, and were finalized internally by the brand and IP parties.

This set of main visuals was not specially designed for this collaboration, but was created by an artist several years ago. It has outdated aesthetics and the core character settings cannot meet the expectations of fans. That is why it is not recognized by the current IP user group. " Grave Robbers' Chronicles is different from other novel IPs. The official does not have long-term fixed artists, but there are a lot of cases of purchasing copyrights and commissioning works from doujinshi artists. This collaboration is to buy at a low price in the early stage and store it in the material library, and then use it when the authorized cooperation is carried out. " said the above-mentioned insider.

However, such a large-scale offline collaboration did not use new pictures or works by highly praised artists in the circle, but used old pictures with mixed reputations, which naturally aroused dissatisfaction among the core fans. The previous public solicitation activities became evidence of the brand's "lack of aesthetics", and many fans said, "It's better to leave it all to secondary artists."

This also serves as a reminder for novel IP licensing cooperation: For IPs that lack official comics or animation images, you must be very careful in the key appearance design and peripheral drawing. Either the right to speak is completely delegated to the users, or painters with high recognition in the circle are selected for corresponding commissioned works. All of these require more preparation and patience, otherwise it will be difficult to meet the demands of the core fan group.

At the same time, the unreasonable buy-and-give mechanism has also exacerbated fans' dissatisfaction. According to the official rules, the Polaroid cards corresponding to different characters are single random gifts. You can only get one when you buy two cups of milk tea, and you cannot specify the character. At the same time, derivatives such as folding fans and laser tickets can only be obtained by purchasing different three-cup packages at the corresponding theme offline store. If you want a character stand, you need to add 49 yuan on top of the above.

Some fans quickly did the math. Excluding the uncertainty of offline stores and the randomness of some gifts, fans need to buy at least 13 cups of milk tea and spend 300+ to get a full set of peripherals. Such a price is extra high compared to the previous two-dimensional catering collaborations. Previously, when KFC collaborated with the Japanese comic IP "Haikyuu Shonen", it launched two packages of 45 yuan and 65 yuan, and the peripheral cards were given as a whole set. When Cha Baidao collaborated with the otome game "Undetermined Event Book", the supply of peripheral derivatives was sufficient and the characters could be selected by themselves. Even if you want to collect them, it only costs about 100 yuan. When Heytea collaborated with Genshin Impact, although it was controversial, it only took 8 cups to collect the whole set of peripherals.

"It is difficult to accept the price increase of individual peripheral products, which makes me have very high requirements for quality. My psychological expectation for the cost of a full set of co-branded products is around 100 yuan, and I hope the rules are as simple as possible so that online ordering and delivery can be achieved to avoid long queues offline." Kuro, a veteran 2D user, told Doujiao.

Previously, considering the volume of the joint venture, many catering brands would set up offline check-in points and offline limited peripherals to enhance topic marketing and attention, but the high enthusiasm of ACG users also led to negative public opinions such as night queues, crowds, and word-of-mouth backlash caused by hunger marketing. Therefore, this year, a large number of brands and popular ACG IPs have tried their best to follow the rules of sufficient peripherals, simple rules, and online automation to complete the online private precipitation of new users.

On the other hand, for Ba Wang Cha Ji, both the gift settings and the complicated purchase rules have resulted in a high threshold, which has also led to an overwhelming number of negative reviews from users.

After realizing that it was “out of control”, Bawang Tea Princess quickly apologized and adjusted the buy-one-get-one-free rules, but a new problem followed: after lowering the threshold, users placed orders in droves, and the “peripheral” inventory was insufficient. After the joint launch on October 3, the buy-one-get-one-free peripherals in many stores across the country were sold out on the first day, and the second-hand trading market began to see high-priced resale.

"Who still uses hunger marketing nowadays? As long as the rules are simple and the price is reasonable, I can just keep buying and collecting in multiples. Many sisters around me want to stock up on 10 sets or more. But has Overlord Tea Princess given us this opportunity? We underestimate the purchasing power of rice too much." said Yaya, a 10-year old fan of The Lost Tomb.

Obviously, for a large number of IP fans who pursue the collection of derivative products, insufficient inventory has greatly affected the subsequent purchasing enthusiasm during the event period, greatly shortening the brand's joint popularity cycle.

To add fuel to the fire, Bawang Cha Ji set a rule in the joint order-sharing topic activity: "No content involving sensitive IP (such as CP hype/selling homosexuality: Pingxie)" has been allowed, which hits the mark for a large number of core fans.

For a long time, the fujoshi group centered around fans of Pingxie (the nickname of the CP fans of Menyouping and Wu Xie in The Lost Tomb) has always been the key user group of the The Lost Tomb IP. The number of fans of Pingxie super topic on Weibo is as high as 766,000, which is more than 1/3 of the fans of the super topic of The Lost Tomb. In the official content of the original author Nanpai Sanshu, relevant content has been released many times, acknowledging the role of CP fans.

However, in this collaboration, naming the core audience group and prohibiting it is undoubtedly a "war" with the fan group. Some netizens joked that this is tantamount to "miHoYo does not want ACG players, Disney does not want Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and Marvel does not want Iron Man." Such a strange rule quickly triggered a boycott from the core fan group. Although Bawang Cha Ji quickly adjusted the rules to delete this item, the lost user reputation has been gone forever.

Disliked designs, unavailable peripherals, and expulsion from fandom, the multiple disappointments contrasted sharply with the previous high expectations, and also led to a large number of IP fans attacking the brand. In the past three days, negative topics about the collaboration have continued to ferment, with local store staff insulting IP fans and peripheral pictures suspected of plagiarism and reference appearing one after another, and the situation has become increasingly difficult to control.

Finally, as the issue ferments to this day, a large number of negative controversies have appeared in the entries associated with the brand name. The IP fans that the core goal is to win over have also become the backbone of the siege on the brand, leaving the brand in a mess.

Overall, the respect for IP fans made the collaboration of Ba Wang Cha Ji get off to a great start, but the lack of understanding of IP fans also made Ba Wang Cha Ji have a "difficult to comment" ending, with both criticism and popularity flying.

This has once again sounded the alarm for a number of tea brands: in the pool of joint selection, popular two-dimensional IPs have high traffic, but also have high thresholds. Their traffic and influence in the circle are no different from those of top stars. If they play well, they will be "rich as hell", but if they are not well prepared, they will be cursed. It is necessary to study the preferences and characteristics of IP fans in detail and do enough preparation to "gain both fame and fortune" and taste the sweetness on the tip of the knife.

Author: A Guan

Source: Spicy