Through Mother's Day marketing, we see the possibilities of traditional media

Will traditional media be completely replaced? As new Internet media become popular, the speed at which the public obtains information becomes faster, and the channels become more diversified. More and more people begin to have the right to speak, which in turn affects the content of media reports. When the voices of individuals are heard through the Internet, the value of traditional media is naturally reduced. However, through this Mother's Day, many excellent brands have made bold attempts to promote value-added marketing with connotations on traditional media based on their own tone, which has shown us the possibilities of traditional media.

It’s Mother’s Day again, and this year’s brands are still moving at a fast pace in leveraging marketing.

As the social environment evolves, the awakening of women's consciousness has increasingly promoted brands to explore diversified insights in festivals related to women. From macro to gender culture and parent-child communication, to micro to women's bodies and holiday gifts, different brands have relied on their own tone to launch meaningful value marketing on Mother's Day, making the role of "mother" more and more visible.

There are also many outstanding cases in this year's marketing campaign: Proya implements gender issues and calls for reducing the burden on mothers with the slogan "There is more than one good mother in the world"; Mengniu starts from the perspective of age and uses the idea of ​​synchronous growth to highlight the close connection between mothers and children; Tmall grasps the pain points of mothers and reminds the public to face stretch marks through popular science and respect the sacrifices made by mothers for childbirth...

Based on past experience, the key to a successful Mother's Day marketing campaign is to "use the brand to serve the holiday." However, overall, most Mother's Day ads this year still haven't gotten out of the rut of "advertising for the brand," using "Mother's Day" as a leveraging tool to serve the brand. The TVCs that brands have consistently used are somewhat clichéd in terms of theme and form of expression. In addition to the cookie-cutter creative ideas, TOP Jun's eyes fell on traditional media outside the Internet.

At a time when festival marketing campaigns focusing on women are becoming more and more homogenous, how do they achieve differentiation? Let’s take a look.

1. Two-dimensional carrier, multi-dimensional experience

This Mother's Day, Uniqlo Japan published an advertisement featuring a mother and daughter in the Asahi Shimbun and Chunichi Shimbun newspapers. The two protagonists are from the well-known anime IP "Chibi Maruko-chan", with the mother on page 6 and Maruko on page 23. The two pages seem unrelated, but when readers take out the newspaper in the middle, they will find that Maruko and her mother are looking at each other from a distance.

The texts on the two pages express each other's troubles from the perspectives of mother and daughter respectively. The mother thinks that her child is lazy and self-willed, while the daughter thinks that her mother is angry and worries about nothing. However, these seemingly disdainful words are filled with deep affection between mother and daughter.

Our child/always loves to be lazy and does whatever he wants/always makes me worried/what on earth is he thinking?

Although I always nag, as long as you are by my side, I am very grateful.

I don't know why/I usually talk a lot/but I can't express myself well

I should tell you how important you are to me

Our mother is always angry and impatient. She worries a lot. I really don't understand what she is thinking.

Of course deep down in my heart I am really grateful to her but it is hard for me to say it out loud

Is it because we are too close? / I feel embarrassed to speak out my true inner voice /

I really feel thank you.

The two pages spanning multiple pages are just like the incomprehensible gap between mother and child in real life. When the newspaper is taken away, the deepest thoughts in the heart can be spoken face to face. The monologues of the two people are combined into an article. The sincere words allow readers to reflect on themselves and generate deep emotional resonance.

Who hasn’t experienced a moment of misunderstanding with their mother in life? UNIQLO has insight into this subtle emotional incision and flexibly uses the characteristics of newspapers to concretize abstract real-life situations into physical objects, allowing users to experience the importance of communication by flipping through them in person.

Just as Uniqlo said at the end, "It is precisely because we are too shy to express our feelings that we have a day like Mother's Day!" Perhaps the meaning of Mother's Day is to provide parents and children with an opportunity to open their hearts and bridge the gap, allowing children to express their love and mothers to feel love.

Coincidentally, last year Uniqlo's Mother's Day advertisement was also published in newspapers, but the protagonist was changed to Hana Ma from the animation "Our Family", and the format was changed to a cartoon separated into four pages.

The four cartoons are located on pages 1/9/11/13 of the newspaper. On the first page, Hua Ma seems to casually ask, "Oh, what day is the day after tomorrow?" to remind readers that Mother's Day is coming.

When turning to page nine, the page was enlarged appropriately, and Hua's mother crossed her arms and said, "Mother's Day is coming soon, but I don't need any gifts."

Page 11 becomes half page, and emphasizes again, “No need, no need for gifts, really!”

The last one took up the entire page of the newspaper, with the big words "I really don't need a Mother's Day gift!" The small words next to it revealed the mother's inner thoughts:

"Mom, sometimes you lie. When you're tired, you always say you're fine. When you only have one snack left, you say you're full. You even say you don't need a gift on Mother's Day. But moms never forget Mother's Day. Deep down in their hearts, they always look forward to your gratitude. So let's express our gratitude in any form."

Hua Ma in "Our Family" possesses the basic traits of the "middle-aged aunties" we have seen. She loves to get small bargains, likes to participate in supermarket discounts, loves to nag her children, but is a bit insensitive... Although Hua Ma has many shortcomings, she is still a kind person who loves her daughter. She can appreciate the little happiness in life and will wait silently until late at night when her daughter comes home late.

For these mothers who love their children inwardly, saying one thing and thinking another has become a habit, but they have a hidden expectation in their hearts. Uniqlo transforms this rising expectation into a comic, allowing readers to experience the mother's mental journey and feel this expectation through the gradually enlarged pages while flipping through the newspaper. This not only reflects the surprise created by the newspaper in form, but also mobilizes readers' desire to buy for their mothers, allowing people to see the various possible applications of newspapers beyond the static media itself.

It seems that relying on the once developed newspaper and magazine industry, Japan is always more adept at using print media. In addition to Uniqlo, the local newspaper "Shinano Mainichi Shimbun" in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, also launched a Mother's Day plan that was quite innovative and thoughtful.

First, the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun changed the word "每" in the title to "母" and the mulberry leaves in the background were replaced with carnations, announcing the arrival of Mother's Day.

At the same time, taking advantage of the foldability of the page and the principle of optical illusion, a three-dimensional carnation is placed in the flat newspaper. When the reader folds the newspaper, the carnation will present an optical illusion image of a three-dimensional greeting card.

In addition, as the largest carnation planting base in Japan, Shinano Mainichi Shimbun also used 8,000 carnations, and all the advertising pictures of the current cooperation with the brand were artificially arranged with carnations, which not only enhanced the visual impact, but also injected a strong atmosphere into Mother's Day.

If the first two advertisements interpreted the love between mother and daughter by changing the form to serve the content theme, then this advertisement played with the newspaper in terms of form. By using the image of carnations, it provided sufficient presence meaning for the identity of "mother" and highlighted her importance in the social role.

in the country, DingTalk has also made similar attempts.

Although it is a product that adapts to the workplace in the Internet era, the "fashionable" DingTalk has also returned to print media and appeared on the pages of Beijing Morning Post on Mother's Day.

The DingTalk ad is presented in the form of a diary from a mother's perspective. "I", who just returned to work after giving birth to my second child, imagined a workplace life with a nursing room where I could express milk, understanding from my boss, school and husband, and a burden that could be reduced. But in reality, these seemingly natural things do not exist.

Compared with other brands that focus on warmth, DingTalk used this diary to expose the difficulties faced by mothers returning to work in a direct and spicy tone, which resonated with working mothers. In response to the workplace pain point of "lack of breastfeeding rooms", DingTalk launched an online approval system for breastfeeding leave, which not only shows care for mothers, but also provides a "kind" reminder to companies.

In addition to newspapers, packaging can also be used as a medium to display brand creativity. In the advertisement released on Mother's Day this year, McDonald's received a lot of positive comments from users.

At first glance, the copy on the packaging is just a simple blessing - "May mother be happy and bright forever." But if you look closely, you can find that McDonald's cleverly uses the letter "M" on the packaging as the initial consonant of words to describe mothers - "mother," "happy," and "bright." On the one hand, it connects mother with positive and energetic words such as happiness and brightness to express praise for mothers; on the other hand, the intervention of "M" makes McDonald's naturally become the subject of sending blessings, winning the favor of the public. The simple and tender childish font expresses the most direct blessing and gratitude to mothers, and the meaning is worth recalling.

2. For holiday marketing, is traditional media still useful?

When it comes to traditional media, the public often sighs. From its heyday to its current decline, new media has squeezed the living space of traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, and television, at an unimaginable speed.

According to the "China New Media Development Report 2020", WeChat (77.25%), Douyin (39.02%), and Toutiao (24.61%) are the top three channels for the public to obtain news and information, while only 6.06% and 0.68% choose television and print media.

The reason is obvious. In the era of traditional media, everyone is in a position of "being spread". However, when the Internet new media becomes popular, the speed at which the public obtains information becomes faster, and the channels become more diversified. More and more people begin to have the right to speak, which in turn affects the content of media reports. When the voice of individuals is heard through the Internet, the value of traditional media is naturally reduced.

On the other hand, the development of the media seems to have brought endless benefits, but there is one drawback that cannot be ignored, that is, the influx of a large amount of content information has caused difficulties and confusion in the public's selection and reception of information, which has further led to people's numbness and indifference to the news. From this point of view, in fact, most people are still in a state of passive indoctrination of information in a "cramming" manner.

But traditional media is different.

Taking the brand marketing mentioned above as an example, brand advertisements in newspapers rely on people's manual flipping and touching to bring a real and tangible experience. The newspapers with the theme of "Mother's Day" covering dozens of pages bring a strong visual impact to readers, which is its uniqueness in form.

The emotional words are revealed page by page as individuals flip through the pages, gradually and deeply conveying the most sincere voice of the brand. At this time, the static content generates the power of flow. Traditional media uses appropriate and complete information content to exchange for the subjective choice of the public, and also gives them the most direct inner experience.

Just as e-books still cannot replace paper books today, as traditional media are showing signs of decline, the existence of these advertisements may also provide strong support for their irreplaceability.

Just like what Tang Zhijun said on the train in the movie "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department": "The road to Shu is not difficult anymore, and the problem of climbing to the sky has also been solved. It is difficult for people nowadays to experience the feeling of high mountains and long rivers and bumpy roads." The advancement of science and technology has reduced the pain of human exploration and compressed the joy of the process. The same is true for the development of the media. If we walk slower and look back more often, perhaps we can find the purest feeling of Mother's Day in the process of walking and thinking.

We also believe that in the future, not only Mother's Day, but also traditional festivals such as the Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and even big promotional marketing such as 618 and Double Eleven, will be able to bring more possibilities through traditional media.

Author: TopMarketing

Source: WeChat official account: TopMarketing (ID: TMarketing)