Luckin Coffee may have the fastest marketing team in China

This article deeply analyzes Luckin Coffee's recent series of marketing tactics and summarizes the core marketing ideas behind them. How Luckin quickly built its brand IP through product + communication strategy has great reference significance for all brand communicators.

In this era of information explosion, users' attention is extremely scattered. Countless marketing cases are staged every day, but only a few can really grab users' attention. However, Luckin Coffee may be an exception - the brand always finds ways to capture the public's attention and releases highly discussed "king bombs" at various nodes. From signing Gu Ailing as spokesperson before the Winter Olympics, launching a joint coffee with Coco Tree, the sad frog on Chinese Valentine's Day, the striped puppy on Valentine's Day, and He Guangzhi who signed a contract to "force" experience the product, etc.

In this extremely competitive summer season, Luckin Coffee’s marketing department, which is extremely powerful, has started to soar all the way. In just one month, it has created many cases that have gone viral, doing the work of other companies in half a year. In fact, at first glance, Luckin Coffee’s marketing tactics are not complicated. They are basically centered around the core keywords of joint ventures, endorsements, and cross-borders. However, if you look closely, you will find that all the brand communications have similar cores, and can work together to form a main line, allowing everyone to unconsciously enter the brand context built by Luckin Coffee. How did they do it?

1. Variable gameplay + unchanging core, always maintaining brand appeal

In the process of brand marketing, people often encounter such a problem: How to maintain the consistency of the brand core while providing freshness? How to make seemingly scattered communication leave a more unified experience? Luckin's solution is the "N+1" strategy. What changes are the communication touchpoints and communication methods between the brand and users, but what remains unchanged is the highly unified tone and core.

1. Keep up with the latest hot dramas and create popular products based on popular characters

Using celebrities to promote the brand is a very effective way, especially for a brand like Luckin Coffee that mainly targets young people. The appeal of new-generation celebrities cannot be underestimated. However, Luckin Coffee did not focus on the most "mainstream" and "big-name" core figures, but found a relatively popular and eye-catching one in the hit drama to catch up with this wave of hot spots with the fastest response speed.

"Fengshen" was just released on July 20, and Luckin Coffee recruited Yu Shi, who played Ji Fa, on July 31; "Longing" was just halfway through its broadcast, and the characters had just started to show their faces, and Luckin Coffee cooperated with Zhang Wanyi, who played Xuanxuan in the play; and when the crew was giving away coffee door-to-door, Tan Jianci also gave away Luckin Coffee... This kind of lightweight cooperation with the main theme of "timeliness" allows the audience to seamlessly connect the drama and their lives, allowing them to continue the touching feelings brought by the characters and stories in the same way as the characters, and also made the two items Lanyun Tieguanyin Latte and Velvet Latte popular.

2. Online sports spirit is used to interpret the brand proposition, short-term single point explosion, both literary and sports blossom

In the lightweight cooperation with "months" as the unit, Luckin Coffee is fast in selection, decision and execution, and can bring surprises to consumers in the first place. For example, before "Cang Lan Jue" became popular all over the Internet, Luckin Coffee joined hands with Wang Hedi to invite people to taste Geisha Dirty; after the broadcast of "Kuang Biu", Luckin Coffee took advantage of Women's Day to invite Gao Ye to be the "spokesperson" for one day; just after the hit drama "Long Season" was broadcast, Luckin Coffee struck while the iron was hot and officially announced Jiang Qiming; during the Chengdu Universiade, Luckin Coffee also cooperated with Wu Yanni, a popular athlete who won the silver medal in the women's 100-meter hurdles, to make black pineapple latte popular...

In the long-term heavyweight cooperation, Luckin can also find spokespersons who can empower the brand and give emotional value beyond the product function. Previously, after Luckin signed an endorsement contract with Gu Ailing, Gu Ailing became a star in the Winter Olympics and became an overnight sensation, becoming the top brand endorsement; now, 9 days after Luckin officially announced the endorsement of the women's basketball team, the women's basketball team reversed and won the championship. This endorsement metaphysics of "brands are not signed by whoever is popular, but whoever is signed becomes popular" is precisely to consolidate brand value and convey brand attitude through the connotation of sports competitions.

From this perspective, Luckin's bet on Gu Ailing and the success of the Chinese women's basketball team is not just "luck". The brand works very hard to dig into every hot spot, to see and present those spokespersons who can help the brand express its attitude, and to play a combination of short-term lightweight endorsements and long-term heavyweight endorsements. Just like Luckin's new brand proposition "Luck is in your hands" - luck will not fall from the sky, only down-to-earth and hard work can truly grasp luck. And Luckin's choice has also made more consumers tie Luckin to positive keywords such as "luck" and "hard work".

3. In the era of content consumption, continue to provide emotional value

Today's consumers are no longer satisfied with basic coffee products, but continue to explore coffee brands in terms of product quality, humanities and arts, aesthetic concepts, and trendy personality. It is not difficult to understand why Luckin Coffee chose to cooperate with art exhibitions and bands.

In 1956, Klein combined a colorless synthetic resin medium with ultramarine pigment to create the "ideal blue". From major art exhibitions to all walks of life, as small as luggage, clothing, mobile phone cases, accessories and other items, the "Klein Blue" trend has been blowing. As the official partner of the "Yves Klein - Beyond Time and Space" exhibition, Luckin not only created a co-branded cup sleeve for the work "Jonathan Swift (ANT125)", but also held activities such as providing free coffee and free tickets, using "Klein Blue" to extend the connotation of "Luckin Blue".

On the occasion of the return of "Summer of the Band", Luckin also cooperated with the Orange Ocean Band to bring a special edition of "Summer Soseki". In the eyes of many music fans, the songs of the Orange Ocean Band are the theme songs representing "summer" and "romance", which is highly consistent with the attitude that the brand's main summer promotion of Flash Orange Ice Extract wants to convey. The positive emotions that you want to harvest in summer will be infinitely magnified by a cup of Luckin.

2. Rhythmic and layered communication to establish a recognizable brand image

Looking back at Luckin's marketing layout within a month, we can see that the ultimate goal of each marketing campaign is not just to grab users' attention. What the brand desires more is to achieve long-tail value through a marketing campaign, so that users can have a certain degree of recognition of the brand image and brand value proposition. Overall, it has a strong sense of hierarchy.

Endorsement and co-branding attract short-term attention. In the era of redundant and fragmented information, Luckin Coffee maintains its appeal by constantly chasing hot topics and maintaining its sensitivity to various industries. The logic of the brand is not to discuss cooperation after a star becomes popular on the Internet, but to truly understand the preferences and vision of young people, follow their thinking and make more forward-looking choices, and accumulate the public's attention to the brand through one hot topic after another.

Visual emotions capture long-term attention. After gaining short-term attention, brands must think about how to create more value for the audience. In this regard, Luckin's approach is to dig deep into the brand connotation and shape a clearer brand temperament through layouts in art, sports, music and other aspects, so as to subtly seize the minds of users.

Hot-selling products attract users' attention. Unlike those superficial collaborations, Luckin's collaborations are very practical. In addition to the co-branded cup sleeves with high appearance and collection value, many related products have also received unanimous praise from consumers. When users' real experience and word of mouth become part of the communication, the brand image will be more complete and clear.

3. Final Thoughts

Compared with three years ago, Luckin Coffee has completely changed except for its original name. Perhaps from the beginning, the outside world was more likely to see Luckin's continuous screen-sweeping collaborations and endorsements, but when Luckin opened 10,000 stores, more and more consumers began to perceive the real changes in the brand.

If you pay a little attention, you will find that Luckin Coffee is using a very special new product launch model: creating limited new products + upgrading old products + launching new products + DIY of classic products in season, that is, "mixing the old and the new". Moreover, these products are not launched by Luckin Coffee on a whim, but are clearly calculated based on a digital R&D mechanism. So for consumers, they can buy different delicious new products from Luckin Coffee every week, and the brand will help them make decisions.

At the same time, Luckin's 9.9 yuan strategy is also very successful. This is not an ordinary pricing strategy, but a "price down, quality up" mental strategy. Consumers do not have to order Luckin's 9.9 yuan coffee, but when they think of cost-effective coffee, they think of Luckin. I think this is Luckin's real appeal.

Moreover, based on low prices and high quality, Luckin is also doing well in the marketing circle. It has opened 10,000 stores of the "New Luckin" and sold over 39 million cups of coffee in the first week of its 9.9 yuan per week campaign. In addition to sharing, word of mouth and memes on major platforms, Luckin is promoting the rapid growth of the coffee market in its own way. Today, Luckin's products and communications have become a source of happiness for many young people. I am looking forward to the new products and communications to be launched next month.

Author: Mr. Bingfa

Source: WeChat public account "Marketing Art of War (ID: lanhaiyingxiao)"