As a marketing agency, Chinese New Year makes us all excited! We love the majestic lion dance ceremonies that herald in more luck and wealth for everyone with the New Year, we love our yummy festive goodies – and most of all, we love how the season brings with it a whole new way to flex our creative muscle as we come up with and execute some really fun Chinese New Year campaigns!
It doesn’t always have to be an elaborate one, and we’re happy to share with you some of our favourite ways for your business to ride on the Chinese New Year train without breaking the bank! Collaterals are always a fun way to get your brand into the homes of your customers, but Chinese New Year presents an even better opportunity to put your brand right into your customers hands – with a well-designed, festive red packet! And if you think it’s a bit too close to Chinese New Year this year… You can always keep these in mind for Chinese New Year NEXT year!
- Collaterals
Setting aside a budget to produce collaterals that are useful and significant for the festivities of Chinese New Year is a very smart way of marketing your brand! Some items you can consider producing for your partners and customers are red packets, a paper bag to keep those mandarin oranges during visiting, a Lunar calendar or even a Chinese New Year greeting card.
This is a wonderful way of keeping your business and brand on the mind of your customers and partners during Chinese New Year, as they are reminded of you as they go about their festive routine! These are practical and useful collaterals that will be much welcomed when you give them out, that they’d hardly be tossed aside and forgotten, like what tends to happen to many novelty collateral items. Make your marketing dollar really stretch with these Chinese New Year collaterals!
- Social media campaigns
Digital marketing campaigns over the Chinese New Year period are a great way to engage with your customers and ring in the New Year with them in a fun and
creative way. An effective social media Chinese New Year campaign will span several platforms and if you really want to go for the biggest fish in the sea, you’ll want to use WeChat or Weibo as one of the platforms on your social media campaign plan. These are the biggest and most popular chat platforms in China.
One of our favourite Chinese New Year social media campaigns in recent times has to be Tiger Beer’s #SayItWithTiger campaign – a digital campaign centred around a microsite with a greeting generator that enables users to create authentic Chinese New Year greetings with popular phrases. It has global celebrities Liam Hemsworth, Diego Costa, Emily Ratajkowski and Chris Both behind it, who all made their best versions of a Chinese New Year greeting. The campaign spanned several social media platforms including Instagram, Weibo and WeChat. This campaign was hugely successful not just in Asia but all over the world!
- Limited edition product launches
Brands love to do this during Chinese New Year, releasing special, limited edition items that commemorate the Chinese New Year. These items are usually presented in colours of red and gold, with the zodiac animal of the year prominently featured. Popular Chinese phrases or characters denoting wealth, prosperity and good luck are also included on such items. Prada and Dior released monkey key rings last year during the year of the Monkey. Apple released two exclusive red Apple Watch sport models that were only available for a short time. Nike launched a pair of customised sneakers with the Chinese characters for “getting rich” and “fortune” on each heel – but this was ill-conceived as the two characters actually meant “getting fat” when put side by side.
If you want to try this strategy out, we really recommend going into the mind of the Chinese market and understanding how certain characters or imagery will be received, from their perspective! Getting an agency to help you think through the nuances of such a project would be very helpful in preventing inadvertent misrepresentation.
