After reviewing the case in March, I have a new understanding of holiday marketing

This article shares new thoughts on festival marketing based on the March "marketing calendar". It is recommended for those who want to learn about new types of program marketing.

I believe that most marketers are familiar with the "marketing calendar" ——

This calendar will mark out important festivals and solar terms throughout the year to help everyone carry out some marketing activities. For example, this March, there are Women's Day, Arbor Day, Consumer Rights Day, Earth Hour, etc. Each brand will also carry out corresponding communication around these key nodes.

Unfortunately, most brands tend to fall into a misunderstanding when doing holiday marketing: that is, to focus all attention on the emotions behind the nodes and produce a creative theme that can resonate with consumers. Let’s not talk about whether these homogeneous contents can break through the “threshold” of consumers’ attention. Even if they are moved, then what? Many consumers will not remember this brand, let alone what products to plant.

How can we make consumers who have become increasingly desensitized to holiday marketing recognize and like our brand? After reviewing a series of recent marketing cases, I have some new thoughts, which I would like to share with you today.

0 1Why do brands do marketing during festivals?

Before discussing specific strategies, let’s first sort out the reasons why brands like to do holiday marketing.

Firstly, holiday traffic is more “perceptible”.

In this era of extremely fragmented attention, consumers will develop an "antibody" to the information they see every day, and many carefully crafted content by brands will be automatically filtered out by consumers' brains. But if these contents are placed at the right time, they can become a "tourist attraction" that attracts the public to stop and watch.

For example, on Women's Day this year, ukiss teamed up with the "Bud Protection Project" to launch a series of public welfare activities. The brand not only used the camera to travel through the city and into the mountains, inviting everyone to listen to the stories of the little buds. It also went to Puzhu Primary School in Wushi Town, Pingjiang County, Yueyang City, Hunan Province, and distributed bud gift packs and opened small classes to let these little buds learn to love and respect their bodies and enhance their self-protection awareness. Compared with daily activities, this public welfare activity created in a special period is easier to be perceived and remembered by everyone.

Secondly, it is easier for brands to find the “focus” in marketing.

Compared with ordinary days, the biggest advantage of festivals is that they come with "specific emotions" and "spontaneous group behavior". For example, many women will take the opportunity of Women's Day to examine their inner selves and express their attitudes. On Arbor Day, many people will plant a small plant as a necessary ritual for the festival. For example, last year, Zhihu sent a joint gift box to 600 high-quality answerers, which included a mini sapling and a donation certificate for donating a real tree to western China. This idea was also well received.

Simply put, during a specific festival, there are traces of what consumers want to express, what behaviors they will have, and what emotions they will have. Brands can also make relatively accurate predictions based on the characteristics of the festival itself, making it easier to find a point of force that can achieve great results with just a little effort.

However, although holiday marketing is good, not many brands can reap the benefits.

On the one hand, they "blindly follow the trend" in terms of form. When creating holiday marketing, many brands refer to some popular marketing forms, but fail to consider their own target groups in the process. For example, they follow Huaxizi to invite Li Jiaqi, Meituan to package elevator advertisements, and NetEase Cloud to use H5 to flood the screen. In the end, they often fall into the dilemma of unsatisfactory conversion effect due to inaccurate reach.

On the other hand, the content is "old bottles in new packaging". Some brands will use the ideas that have worked well in previous years (or other brands in the industry) when creating holiday marketing. However, these highly homogeneous contents will not only make consumers forget them after seeing them, but also make it difficult to establish a recognizable brand image.

Even brands that avoid these two points will fall into the communication trap because of the "strong perception" and "focus" characteristics of holiday marketing. As we mentioned at the beginning, the advantages of holiday marketing will guide brands to focus on "emotional resonance" . Many creative ideas come to an abrupt end at this step, which is a bit regrettable.

0 2How should brands fully unleash the power of “festival marketing”?

I guess in the eyes of many people, holiday marketing has gone from being a "hot commodity" that brought surprises to a tepid "chicken rib", and some brands even just treat it as a fixed task that needs to be completed with gritted teeth. However, in my opinion, hot holidays are still the key opportunity for brands to break through, but the "blind pursuit of hot spots" method of taking advantage of the trend is no longer applicable. Only by thinking with a newer logic can we explore new possibilities.

From touching users to stimulating their consumption interests

When many brands are doing holiday marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is "emotional resonance." Take the International Women's Day that just passed, for example. Everyone was rushing to discuss hot topics such as women's independence, body anxiety, and workplace discrimination. Discussions on the emotional level can move users, but it is difficult to stimulate their consumption interest. It is easy to fall into the misunderstanding of separating "creative sensibility" from "practical content."

On Women's Day this year, Manxi released a short film with the theme of "Spoiling Mom to Heaven". The short film starts with the status and feelings of women during pregnancy, breastfeeding and before returning to the workplace. While using clever metaphors to communicate with the audience, it also presents the "anti-gravity" characteristics of its own space maternity and breastfeeding underwear in a scene-based way, and uses the double entendre "Spoiling Mom to Heaven" to combine emotional resonance with business purposes.

Leverage festive sentiment to build a more complete brand awareness

Another very important point is that in the communication of holiday marketing, pure numbers do not mean much, and the same exposure often produces completely different effects. After all, from the user's perspective, the Internet is becoming more and more fragmented, and the content that brands want to convey is also quite fragmented. It is difficult for the public to establish a "complete understanding" of the brand through these scattered contents. If you look at it from this perspective, brands may wish to use holiday marketing as an opportunity to communicate with users.

On Women's Day this year, Hopewater organized its first offline party, where 100 girls put on wedding dresses and discussed the answer to happiness together, allowing more consumers to perceive the "romance" and "beauty" that the brand wants to convey. As a beverage brand, Hopewater has also used the emotions of many popular nodes to carry out many highly perceptual activities, such as the "Apricot Blessing Plan" and the "City Romance Plan", each of which was very impressive. It is these clear and recognizable contents that have established a mental consensus in the hearts of consumers.

Leverage hot spots to expand long-term user operations

Although holidays on the marketing calendar are isolated, when planning marketing for a particular holiday, we cannot just focus on that day, but must explore the significance of that day from a longer-term business perspective. Speaking of this, we have to mention PROYA’s three-year-long theme project “Gender is not the boundary, prejudice is” .

In 2021, PROYA joined hands with China Women's News to question the prejudice in the name of gender, using common words in life as a starting point. In 2022, the brand continued the core of this topic, discovered the Lion Dance Girl to interpret the power of women, exposed hidden prejudices with anti-traditional advertising declarations, and delivered gender equality with practical public welfare actions. This year, the brand released a theme short film "Female Commando Male Soldier" with a real story change. It uses the story of the girl Pubu Xiaoma and the boys in the courtyard forming a team to participate in the Freshman Cup football match, presenting the bright bravery of the new generation of young female cores and the courage to fight against prejudice.

This kind of textured, in-depth and continuous discussion has allowed this topic, which was originally only noticed at special times, to take root and grow in the hearts of consumers. The series of activities built around this event, such as offline flash mobs, popular science books, social topics, etc., are actually the process of brands operating users with long-term thinking.

In short, if you want to release the potential of holiday marketing, you can't simply continue the concepts and practices of the traditional era, but should jump out of the inherent shackles of holiday marketing and touch on something deeper and more essential. After all, in the future, the Internet will inevitably become more fragmented, and it will become more difficult to grab consumers' attention. This window that can help brands convey their attitudes will also become a key opportunity in the development process.

Author: Mr. Bingfa

Source: Marketing Strategy (ID: lanhaiyingxiao)