How to create a marketing campaign for Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year holiday may be over, but we're not done dishing out advice.

Great marketing campaigns are planned in advance! Save this article to your favorites for later on this year when you're planning your 2023 Chinese New Year marketing campaign.

Not all brands can produce a micro-movies like Apple (even with a new iPhone 13) nor do they have access to a huge budget to carry out simultaneous online and offline activities, or broker sponsorships with the Winter Olympic Games. So what can brands with limited budget and resources do?

We rounded up our top 5 favorite Chinese New Year campaigns of 2022 and what makes them so special.

Focus on the combination of brand value and Chinese New Year emotion

The most practical strategy of good Chinese New Year marketing is to find the most significant, overlapping resonance point with the emotion of Chinese New Year and brand characteristics. We love how KASAKII did this. The design studio cleverly combined their brand logo (mushroom) with people's wishes for happiness in the Chinese New Year, and showed it in a creative and interesting way in-line with the brand positioning. This not only attracted the attention of young audiences, but also successfully expanded their popularity during the heat of Chinese New Year.

Make the distance between "Nian" and "Family" shorter

Chinese New Year is a festival which revolves around the keyword "family". During this special promo window all brands are making an effort to create “Nian Wei” (New Year atmosphere). The goal is to help families reunite and come closer together through the products. In this case, to stand out from many competitors, you may not want to make the idea more complex, but more simple.

Take Wang Laoji for example, the popular tea brand combines the “Family Name” with “New Year Gifts” by limited customization, which not only helps in a practical sense with digestion of greasy foods eaten during the holiday, but also makes the family members who give and receive gifts feel the pride and heritage in their family name.

Create the exclusive Chinese New Year experience for your audiences right now

With the help of the multi-functional support of social media platforms, more and more emerging brands are willing to develop their own “Nian Wei".

One of our favorite Chinese lifestyle brands, BANANAIN did a great job with this. They brought the retro boxing game back on WeChat, combining it with the story of the “fighting tiger”. The story itself is deeply rooted in Chinese traditional culture and therefore brings an added significance to the campaign.

The audiences can enjoy a few nostalgic seconds without purchasing any products or being dragged into any brand intro. These few seconds are so precious in any Chinese New Year campaign scenario and help to build a deeper connection with consumers. Not to mention the brand will also send out New Year's WeChat necessities (e-red envelopes) and shopping coupons!

Pick the right partner for the most traditional festival

As a foreign brand, it is very common to cooperate with China's popular celebrities and idols for localization. However, if brands like McDonald's can select the Shanghai Animation Film Studio which is renowned as a "high-quality spokesperson of traditional culture”, it will really impress people.

Even if they are not loyal fans of McDonald's, many can appreciate the brand’s deep understanding of Chinese culture as an American fast food brand when they see such wonderful campaign posters full of Chinese classical charm. This seemingly no-frills campaign is indeed a successful step in the in-depth expansion of the brand image.

No harm in following the same big theme every year

Although consumers like to see new things, it has been proven that the long-term impact of a brand following the same Chinese New Year promotion theme is also a very good choice.

For example, Pepsi’s slogan of "Take Joy Home” (把乐带回家), including Lay’s chips, Pepsi coke, Meinianda and so on, has continued since 2012. What has changed in the past decade is the variety of display forms, and what remains is the constantly strengthened brand image. People love it and always remember to bring some Pepsi products home during the Chinese New Year!

In the meantime, it should be reminded that the premise of doing so is to find the best fit between the brand value and Chinese New Year. If your campaign theme meets the above four tips or some of them, you might as well consider calling it a long-term and powerful marketing project.