Why can Luckin Coffee and Moutai’s marketing campaign sweep the circle of friends?

The Maotai-Luckin joint-branded Maotai-Luckin latte coffee has become the focus of the marketing world for a while. This article deeply analyzes the reasons for the success of the Maotai-Luckin joint-branding. If you want to know how to achieve a win-win situation for the brand through joint marketing, you might as well read this article.

On September 4, Moutai and Luckin Coffee launched a co-branded coffee. The cup sleeve and paper bag both have a very obvious Moutai style, with the words: "Chinese people's first cup of sauce-flavored latte" and "Fine wine and coffee, I love this one."

In an instant, Luckin's sauce-flavored lattes were sold out, with users queuing up in long queues. Not only did the brand gain a lot of attention and increase sales in a short period of time with the help of this wave of marketing methods, but more importantly, marketers were concerned about why the joint venture between Luckin and Moutai was so successful. The screen-sweeping event that had not occurred in the marketing circle for a long time miraculously happened again. How did Luckin and Moutai do it?

1. The seemingly different audience groups have highly overlapping marketing goals of “breaking the circle”

The target groups of the two brands must be different.

Luckin Coffee's target audience is coffee lovers who pursue cost-effectiveness, while Moutai's target audience is high-end business people. At first glance, the two target customer groups are very different, but in the long run, Luckin wants to break through the current audience boundaries, that is, break the circle, and enter the "Starbucks" group targeting higher-end business people, divide the cake of competitors, and expand and penetrate the market. Then it is a wise move to carry out a higher-level brand collaboration and leverage the power.

On the other hand, Moutai understands marketing strategies and has a long-term vision. Its current audience is obviously relatively older. Through this event, it can be seen that it has begun to subtly educate those born in the 1990s and even the 2000s to adapt to Moutai. Brand education takes time.

Just as some users have said themselves: "Young people's first cup of Moutai, middle-aged people's first cup of coffee." The fact is certainly not that exaggerated, but the metaphor is that Moutai's audience is more mature, while Luckin Coffee's customer base is younger. Isn't this a good opportunity for Moutai itself to take a younger route?

For a long time, liquor has been labeled as "business" and "traditional" in the minds of consumers. With the trend of younger consumers, how to make young people break the inherent impression of liquor, let liquor enter the young consumer group, and let the liquor industry maintain sustainable consumption capacity is a "must-answer question" facing the liquor industry.

In recent years, Luckin Coffee has covered a wide range of young audiences, has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and its product strength has been well-known. Moutai can also take this opportunity to broaden the audience, further rejuvenate the brand, and occupy the minds of young consumers, which will lay the foundation for the brand to find its growth curve in the future.

2. Creative design is classic but unique

Creativity is still the soul of marketing. In recent years, marketers have been gradually confused by the bombardment of concepts such as artificial intelligence and big data. This joint marketing has once again verified the importance of creativity. In addition to the refreshing concept of the joint brand between two very special brands, the joint design of the two brands is highly stylistic. The cup sleeves and paper bags have very obvious Moutai style, which is also what professionals in the marketing circle talk about with relish.

The pricing is also unique, 9.9*2=19, which is a double entendre. Many netizens joked that after all, it has Moutai added, so 19 yuan is not expensive.

3. Combine topic hype with joint marketing to bring marketing events to the extreme and trigger spontaneous publicity from users.

Any successful marketing event must not only rely on attracting attention and spending a lot of advertising money. This time, the brand launched a combination of marketing.

Some hotly debated topics include

“How many drops of Moutai are put in each cup of Luckin Coffee? Want to know if drinking Maotai coffee will be suspected of drunk driving? I like this blush design for some reason. How did they do it? I want to know what Starbucks, Costa and Tims are thinking at this moment.”

The heated discussions among users in major communities, WeChat Moments, and social platforms have obtained a large amount of free traffic and attention for the brand, which can convert coffee users who do not drink Luckin Coffee in a short period of time and enhance the brand influence of Moutai, killing two birds with one stone for the brand.

4. Moutai’s move to co-brand a coffee brand is part of its large-scale co-branding, which has a scale effect

From the perspective of building external influence, this event was a sensation and had the effect of sweeping social media. Internally, especially for Moutai, this move was only one link in its joint activities. Its success laid a successful foundation for its subsequent series of joint activities, and by referring to the successful practice of this time, it brought about economies of scale in internal marketing and operations.

As early as May 19, 2022, Moutai officially announced the opening of the country's first ice cream flagship store, launching two flavors of original Moutai ice cream and vanilla Moutai ice cream, with a tasting price of 39 yuan per serving. From Moutai's cross-border entry into the ice cream track to the launch of sauce-flavored coffee with Luckin Coffee, it can be seen that this is a series of events carefully planned by Moutai, but this event has achieved unprecedented success, which is like adding wings to the creation of its future series of internal marketing activities, and achieving twice the result with half the effort.

It can be speculated that Moutai may launch a series of joint products such as Moutai milk tea and Moutai yogurt in the future. With the experience of this time, more cross-border brands will rush to cooperate with Moutai in the future.

From the news events I saw this time, most of the articles focused on Moutai. From Luckin's side, this event killed two birds with one stone in terms of boosting short-term coffee sales and building Luckin's high-end brand. Luckin is also the big winner of this marketing event.

Isn’t this what the most successful marketing events are like? They are full of positive energy, or at least have no negative aspects. They are not just about sensationalism to attract attention, but about building products and being creative, which can trigger spontaneous discussions and free dissemination among users, thus creating a win-win situation for the cooperating brands.

Author: Zhu Jingyu

Source: WeChat official account: "Jade Digital Marketing (ID: Jade_Digital)"