Can the 9.9-point Snow King animation help Mixue Ice City fight for another hundred years?

The animation work "The Snow King Arrives" has achieved great success, and the IP image of Mixue Ice City has once again set the market on fire. This success will bring Mixue Ice City a broader development space and also provide a reference for consumer brands to build IP images. Let's take a look.

On August 25, the well-known tea brand Mixue Bingcheng launched the animation "Here Comes the Snow King" with its IP "Snow King" as the protagonist. The first three episodes were broadcast online, and one episode will be updated every Friday afterwards.

Three days after its release, the total number of views of the first three episodes on Bilibili has exceeded two million. At the same time, the opening score of 9.9 on the site is probably the well-deserved first place among new Chinese animation series.

Judging from the three episodes updated so far, "Here Comes the Snow King" mainly tells the story of the Snow King and the rebels who lost their scepter during the struggle, and thus embarked on a long journey to find the scepter. Along the way, the Snow King made many good friends, made drinks together, upgraded and fought monsters together, and finally took the adventure of taking back the scepter.

Stills from "The Snow King Arrives"

However, since each episode is only 5 minutes long excluding the opening and ending credits, the narrative efficiency of each episode is extremely limited. With such a long duration, it is obviously difficult to expect it to tell any complex or profound stories. Overall, it is still a very children-oriented anime work. For adults, it is more like a hardcover version of the Mixue Bingcheng series marketing advertisement.

This may be precisely the uniqueness of "Here Comes the Snow King". After attracting enough adult consumers with ultra-low prices and ultra-high coverage, it is time to focus on the cultivation of the next generation of consumers and the longer-term content layout.

The life cycle of popular online beverages is too short, and if the "Snow King" image can truly become an IP with history and story, it will probably allow this milk tea consumer brand to truly exist across cycles.

1. Consumer brands play with IP, and animation becomes the strongest aid

If you ask people to pick out the most memorable daily consumer brand image, Ronald McDonald would probably be in the top three.

In 1960, McDonald's exclusively sponsored a children's program called "Bozo's Circus" and let the actor who played Bozo in the program advertise, which achieved good advertising benefits. Later, the program was discontinued and McDonald's decided to create its own brand character, so Uncle McDonald was born.

The image of Ronald McDonald is full of fun and humor - dressed as a traditional circus clown, with a yellow jumpsuit, a red and white striped shirt and socks, bright red shoes, yellow gloves, and red hair. This has brought him closer to consumers.

Image source: McDonald's official website

Later, in order to attract more children to consume, McDonald's added several cute friends to "Uncle McDonald" such as the Hamburger Thief, Little Fifi, and Slippery Dudu. In the official CM setting, they all come from a place called "McDonald's Paradise", which is full of French fries, trees full of apple pies, and volcanoes full of milkshakes instead of magma.

At the same time, McDonald's also filmed an animated film based on the stories of these four people, called "The Weird Adventures of Ronald McDonald". Of course, in addition to this original animation, Ronald McDonald has also made many cameos in various famous animations, greatly enhancing his presence.

For Chinese consumer brands, the most well-known and longest-lasting case of building a brand IP image is probably the "Haier Brothers" animation launched by Haier Group.

Just the phrase “When there is thunder, it is going to rain. Oh, thunder” can probably evoke childhood memories for most people born in the 90s.

"Haier Brothers", which was born in 1995, had a total of more than 200 episodes when it was finished. It can be said to be one of the few IP images in China with a very long life.

Stills from Haier Brothers

Relying on the marketing wave brought by the Haier Brothers, Haier did dominate the domestic white appliance market for a long time. Whether it was air conditioners or refrigerators, there was always a place for Haier in Chinese families at the beginning of the century.

Among the new consumer brands that have emerged in the past few years, Three Squirrels has also tried to actively build IP to establish a successful brand image.

Since 2018, the "Three Squirrels" series of animations have been launched one after another. When the three squirrels were listed on the Hong Kong stock market in 2019, three squirrel puppets named Xiaomei, Xiaoku and Xiaojian also went on stage as representatives to complete the bell ringing ceremony.

However, the influence of this IP has always been limited, and its subsequent development has been quite weak. After the launch of "Three Squirrels: Squirrel Town 2" in 2020, there has been no additional progress in the entire IP in the past three years.

Stills from "Three Squirrels"

Therefore, for Mixue Ice City, putting the image of the Snow King into the animation is not a groundbreaking choice. It’s just that in the past, companies animated IP images more for the company itself, rather than simply to create a celebrity image with independent brand awareness.

But in this era where traffic is demanded from everything, it is hard to say that Snow King's animation is just a pure corporate brand marketing behavior. We can even see the shadow of a consumer brand deliberately creating a traffic star. This is obviously the unique value of brand IP in the new era , and it also brings more possibilities to Snow King IP.

2. The peak of the Snow King may not have arrived yet

In the long run, if a company simply relies on brand IP for marketing, the consequences may not be very good.

After years of silence after the broadcast of "Haier Brothers", in 2018, Haier Group re-produced "Haier Brothers Space Adventure" with a more modern sense of technology and in line with Internet communication.

The content was changed to a lot of space technology, holographic projections, all kinds of cool equipment, and very strongly hinted at the properties of many new home appliances, which can be called a pure advertising film. Not only was the modified character image considered to be a great ruination of childhood, but the 5-minute instant noodle animation also could not support any narrative. In the end, this new image disappeared in the wave of the Internet amid a chorus of criticism.

Stills from "Haier Brothers' Space Adventure"

From this perspective, "The Snow King" is obviously a success. As long as it is not deliberately promoting products, netizens are actually quite tolerant of these companies that start making animations halfway.

For example, the two seasons of the animation "I am Jiang Xiaobai" produced by the liquor brand Jiang Xiaobai had over 100 million views in three months, and received a score of 9.6 on Bilibili and 8.3 on Douban. It can be said that the 9.9 score that "The Snow King Arrives" has maintained on Bilibili further illustrates this point.

More importantly, the Snow King today was already a traffic expert who could provide emotional value and social topics before he became an animated character.

Since the first launch of the "Snow King" IP image in 2018, Mixue Bingcheng has carried out multi-faceted construction around the "Snow King" IP, including pre-packaged food, cultural and creative peripheral products, and online IP development, accumulating a huge base of popularity for the Snow King.

Whether online or offline, Snow King has repeatedly become the king of topic creation.

Starting from the line "You love me, I love you, Mixue Ice City is so sweet", the brainwashing lyrics made the image of the Snow King popular. Later, whether it was the topic of the Snow King getting "tanned" from picking mulberries, or the Snow King theme song in various international languages, the IP king of the milk tea industry further attracted traffic.

Weibo screenshot

In addition to these official large-scale events with time node significance, the more popular accounts of Mixue Bingcheng on various social media are almost all accounts specially opened for the Snow King. For example, the number of fans of "Mixuebingcheng Snow King" on Xiaohongshu is almost twice that of "Mixuebingcheng" . Relying on a large number of personalized IP dynamics, it is strongly integrated into the daily life of consumers. Many people do not feel that they are watching a brand marketing account, but rather that they are really chasing a virtual idol.

It can be said that with such strong image-building and topic-building, "Here Comes the Snow King" is hard to be considered as a content created purely by a consumer brand for corporate marketing. Instead, it is more like a content carrier that is necessary for the image of the Snow King itself to further expand its content coverage.

Because the content materials generated by daily short videos and marketing activities are no longer sufficient to support fans' needs for secondary creation and meme-playing, therefore, animations with larger scale and further creative potential will inevitably appear.

Even the collaboration between Mixue Bingcheng and the producer Haochuan Animation was seen as a sign that the plot had been laid early on.

Because the Snow King once appeared in the second season of "Dali Temple Diary", another popular work produced by Haochuan Animation. However, many people only thought that he looked similar before. It was not until "The Snow King Arrives" was officially announced to be produced by Haochuan Animation that more people remembered that the two parties had been secretly in collusion for a long time.

Some netizens even discovered that a series of domestic animation characters in this animation, including Li Bing from "Dali Temple Diary", Bu Baichi from "I Don't Eat in Futility", Pipi from "Where the Beasts Are", as well as "Snow King and Aju" who were signed by Snow King's previous charity donations, appeared in the cartoon as Easter eggs.

Whether it is the various easter eggs or the various topics about CP pairing that started after three episodes , "The Snow King Arrives" has clearly become a content work independent of the brand with its own vitality and creativity, which is precisely the external manifestation of the vitality of the Snow King IP.

Stills from "The Snow King Arrives"

It can be said that for Mixue Bingcheng, its products have never been its strongest link. The invisible supply chain serves as the backing to support its low-price strategy for 20,000 stores across the country.

In the highly inward-looking new consumer beverage market, Snow King, which has its own traffic and topic-making capabilities, is undoubtedly its strongest offensive spear. Especially in this era when various emotional values ​​are urgently needed to drive consumer impulse, Snow King's harmless image has undoubtedly become the greatest common denominator.

Just like no one would haggle over a 10-yuan cup of "technical stuff", it would probably be inappropriate to make overly harsh comments in the face of a cute white snowball with a big smile on its face.

If the Snow King's animation can eventually bring out more story-telling images, it would not be a bad idea to shoot a big movie during the Spring Festival and build an affordable theme park to compete head-on with Disney. After all, consumers are now tired of the routine. As long as the quantity is large and the supply is sufficient, Mixue Ice City's IP business can also sweep everything.

Author: Uncle Yi Team

Source public account: Yiyuguancha (ID: yiyuguancha), the telescope and sonar of the pan-entertainment industry.