The Complete Guide for your Mid-Autumn Festival marketing

Symbolizing the Chinese celebration of harvest and reunion, the Mid-Autumn Festival appears to be extra special this year — with China’s National Day and Golden Week all aligning at the same time. 

Having previously talked about the various traditions of the festival on our #SpotOn blog — we want to take time in 2020 to look at some intriguing examples of Mid-Autumn marketing ideas, from popular global brands.

Let’s start with Netflix’s collaboration with Pearl Studio and Lady M, the world-renowned luxury dessert brand, on an initiative to promote the upcoming animated musical Over the Moon. Fusing both Eastern and Western elements, the collaboration offers a limited-edition mooncake gift box housed in a lantern-shaped package, with a light-up feature and paper cutting details depicting scenes from the highly anticipated film. 

It’s a perfect balance of creative ideas, while showcasing the initiative and truly reflecting on the festival spirit.

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Netflix’s Mid-Autumn collaboration with Pearl Studio and Lady M

Branded gift boxes are indeed a great approach to secure publicity in a timely manner, while offering customers a memorable experience that’s closely associated with brand identity. 

Last year, mooncake packages from Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co. and Fendi all made it into Weibo’s trending list, with their exquisitely designed gift boxes.

Loewe

Louis Vuitton

Tiffany & Co.

Fendi

American chocolatier Godiva also recently debuted their immersive pop-up at Fashion Zoo, an annual fashion exhibition in Shanghai. Featuring a golden colour palette that gives off some major autumn vibes, the photogenic space highlights their latest mooncake collections, which are artfully decorated with patterns of full moon and peony.

Godiva's Mid-Autumn Pop-up at Shanghai Fashion Zoo

Apart from branded gift boxes and pop-up activations, content creation also plays an extremely crucial role when it comes to engaging the Chinese market — especially with the younger demographics (mainly the millennials and Gen Z) who are always hungry for unique experiences and ideas. 

Luxury automobile companies such as BMW and Audi have all become skillfully adept at incorporating relevant Chinese trends into their marketing messaging — but no brand has come close so far to the trendsetter reputation that Durex China has established, with the mind-blowing creativity they continue to demonstrate each year.

Mid-Autumn Poster by BMW

Mid-Autumn Poster by Audi

Mid-Autumn Poster by Durex China

Feeling a bit inspired by these ideas? Are you trying to plan out marketing strategies for the rest of the year, to engage with more Chinese customers? Great news — we can help!

Talk to us about Chinese traditions, fun social media trends, or marketing tips to reach your desired Chinese demographics — just drop us a message at info@spotlightwest.ca, or say hello on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn!

Qixi Festival: A challenging Chinese holiday for global brands

Held on August 25 this year, Qixi Festival, the Chinese Valentine’s Day, is perfect for brands to focus on curating gift guides or releasing special edition themed items. 

The origin of this annual event is an ancient tale between two forbidden lovers — read more about it in our previous post — and is sometimes referred to as the Double Seventh Festival since it falls on the 7th day of the 7th Chinese lunar month. Most importantly, this day has grown in popularity for fashion and jewelry brands to target their promotions. 

Similar to the famous Single’s Day — which raked in USD $38 billion last year — brands are leveraging the Qixi Festival as a sales opportunity. 

Jewelry is becoming more sought-after for Chinese customers. China generates $5.8 billion of the global luxury jewelry market revenue and is also a major consumer of precious materials, such as gold and diamond. Men’s jewelry has also increased in popularity in Asia with millennials driving most of the sales in quality pieces as well as statement fashion accessories. 

With this in mind, Cartier released a video campaign that followed three different romantic relationships with the caption, “Trinity rings, witnessing all sorts of love and emotions in the world”, to promote a Cartier classic, the Trinity ring, that has three gold bands symbolically intertwined together.

Conflicting with Cartier’s message, Chinese e-commerce site Tmall included captions that described the two men as father and son, and a female couple as friends, much to the disappointment of many online users and the LGBTQ community.

Although they acknowledged that Cartier made an effort to showcase diverse relationships, the confusion surrounding the campaign may have hindered Cartier’s message and directed the conversation elsewhere. 

Another brand that has dipped their toes into this holiday is Burberry, as they continue to appeal to China’s young money. Their Qixi Festival gift guides for both men and women are a relatively tame approach to the holiday, featuring playful patterns and a festive colour scheme, and are front and centre on their Mainland China and Hong Kong websites.

Beyond that, Burberry is on a hot streak of meeting Chinese millennial and Gen Z’s expectations having recently unveiled their first social retail store in Shenzhen. This immersive, experiential store unveiled two new bags for the Festival through WeChat. 

Finally, earlier this month, Balenciaga released a limited edition design of their Hourglass Handbag with the Chinese characters “He Loves Me” in a Graffiti-style script. Within a few days, the hashtag #BalenciagaChineseValentineCampaignTasteless had more than 210,000 discussions and 170 million views on Weibo.

Some users commented that the oversized phrase on an otherwise classy silhouette was tacky and “simply ugly” as Balenciaga ultimately failed to tap into what customers were looking for this Valentine’s Day.

The real challenge is creating a collection and then advertising it in a way that appeals to younger generations and China’s social landscape — all while preserving the brand’s timeless luxury. 

Whether brands hit the mark or not, the Qixi Festival is proving to be a valuable enough opportunity for them to target Chinese consumers.

Navigating COVID: How the fashion industry is adapting

Across Europe, China, and North America, fashion brands are having to come up with creative solutions in an attempt to stay relevant during these challenging times. Take Bottega Veneta for example.

With efforts to limit in-person shopping by enhancing the at-home experience, their team sent editors and influencers a projector for an immersive display of their menswear film — a gesture that goes beyond simply posting the video on their social media. 

Brands are also focusing on how to continue capturing the Chinese audience. Since China has rebounded earlier from the pandemic than other countries, luxury brands are depending on Chinese consumers and their domestic shopping habits, especially with international travel still limited.

For Burberry, sales in Mainland China grew more than 30% in June but fell 20% worldwide. To ride the momentum, the British label is partnering with Chinese tech giant Tencent to open their first “social retail” store in Shenzhen.

With rewards that can be unlocked through WeChat mini-games and an in-store cafe, the idea is to merge interactive experiences with conventional shopping to appeal to the tech-savvy younger generation in Shenzhen. 

Shanghai was the first major fashion week to experiment hosting the event completely virtual, as they live streamed in late March through Alibaba-operated e-commerce website Tmall. This allowed viewers to instantly purchase items as it rolled out the runway.

In June, London Fashion Week was also virtual. Despite fashion houses’ efforts to put on a full production, the three-day spectacle was met with 55% less social media engagement than London’s other 2020 shows in January and February.

Even Jacquemus’ physically distanced outdoor show with select friends and family in attendance received only half of its earned media value compared to a year before.

Although transitioning to digital events and scaling down shows produced less than optimal results, brands are not shying away from this opportunity to continue showcasing new collections while supporting their staff and teams.

Upcoming shows in Copenhagen and Stockholm are on track to be completely virtual and some fashion houses are eager to present to small, physically distanced audiences. Luxury brands are more open to redefining strategies within the fashion industry regardless of the tepid response and low numbers. 

Perhaps this new normal only needs some getting used to.

The Chinese Digital Christmas Campaigns That Were Done Right

As Chinese celebrations and trends, such as Singles’ Day, are getting more buzz around the world, Western holidays are becoming a major part of the everyday life in China as well.

This is more common especially among Chinese millennials or the post-90s generation.

Having talked about how WeChat and Weibo are the two most prominent social channels to reach the younger generations in China, many Western brands are jumping on the bandwagon.

Swarovski’s WeChat campaign from last year set a perfect example for many luxury brands that are still figuring out strategies to reaching Chinese consumers. To drive the sale of their limited-edition Advent Calendar Box — which contained 24 gifts, one for each of the days leading up to Christmas — Swarovski launched a highly interactive WeChat campaign allowing users to redeem gifts by engaging with the platform.

Upon entering Swarovski’s account, the users were given access to different built-in mini-games on a daily basis, through which they were able to collect a card each time they won. After collecting all seven unique cards, they would receive a free gift.

Pop quizzes and selfie makers have proven to be successful, with Chinese consumers enjoying customized user experience. In 2017, Italian handbag brand, Furla, designed a quiz for their Christmas WeChat campaign, encouraging their female followers to discover their signature charm (passion, elegance, mystery, etc.). The final answer would come up with a product recommendation based on the quiz, as well as a customized page they could share to their own WeChat feeds. Meanwhile, Stella McCartney’s Christmas campaign brought more aesthetic elements to their user experience by launching a mini-program that allowed users to upload their selfies before adding vintage-style stickers and filters.

London's iconic department store Harrods also arranged a #ChristmasTreasureHunt campaign, providing clues each day leading up to Christmas for customers to find hidden Christmas presents in store.

Not only have these campaigns drawn significant organic followers to the brands’ social channels, they’ve also promoted brand awareness through interactive experiences and seamless integration — which are both key factors in effective social marketing in any country.

While shopping for the holiday, keep in mind that more Vancouver outlets and stores are accepting WeChat Pay — given that you’ve already connected at least one bank card).

From all of us at Spotlight West Communications, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more on Chinese social trends, WeChat marketing tips, or other fun tidbits about the Chinese community. You can also reach us at info@spotlightwest.ca.