KangShiFu Ice Tea created a new rendition of a popular Chinese New Year song and promoted it on social media, encouraging younger consumers to celebrate the holiday with their families, boosting its brand image and sales in the process.
Objective:
Seen as a relatively old-fashioned brand, KangShiFu Ice Tea (KSF) has struggled to connect to younger audiences. As the Chinese New Year (CNY) approached, KSF needed to find an innovative way to connect to younger audiences, while not losing appeal with older audiences. In doing so, KSF wanted to enhance its brand image and increase brand love, driving sales.
Target Audience:
KSF is China's leading brand in the ready-to-drink (RTD) tea market with a dominant market share (45.7 percent market share, 10 percent more than the No. 2 brand, according to Nielsen). Despite its mass brand awareness, the brand's growth among younger audiences has slowed.
Creative Strategy:
When it comes to the CNY, generation Z has given up many of the holiday's traditions. What was once a warm family reunion has become a period often celebrated separately by younger consumers. As a result, a generational gap has formed between generation Z and their elders, made ever more visible over this important holiday period. KSF saw this challenge as an opportunity to enhance its brand image by reuniting generation Z with their elders and getting them to celebrate together.
To do this, KSF gave fresh life to one of China's most beloved CNY songs, A Fire in Winter. Born 30 years ago during CNY, the song represents moments of reunion and the Chinese New Year across generations. KSF took this well-known festive song and decided to remix it with hip-hop elements, creating a 360-degree integrated campaign that invited the whole family to get together and sing.
Context:
Chinese New Year (CNY) is a pivotal time in China, seen as the most important period of the year. It is also a time of mass advertising, making it difficult for brands without innovative ideas to stand out. KSF had never before advertised on its own during this period.
Overall Campaign Execution:
To create moments of reunion, KSF adopted a three-pronged strategy. The brand needed to drive awareness via the song's launch, before building popularity via moments of connection, driving sales for KSF.
To launch the remix, KangShiFu partnered with Chinese celebrities Weiting Chen and Meiqi Meng to perform the song live on China's leading social app, Weibo, as well as at Tencent's livestreamed popular music festival, WeSing Music Gala. Other key opinion leaders (KOLs) were asked to share their own recordings of the song on Weibo five weeks ahead of the CNY festivities.
To enhance awareness at a critical moment, KSF released a commercial featuring the remixed song on China's six hottest drama shows during the holiday period, which aired on China's top 3 streamers (Tencent, iQiyi and Youku), as well as out-of-home (OOH) at key CNY travel spots across 44 Chinese cities.
Mobile Execution:
To build popularity, KSF initiated a challenge to find the nation's top singers on China's number one online karaoke platform, Tencent's WeSing. The brand invited consumers to record their own version of the song together with their families, driving user-generated content and engagement.
Once people had recorded their own version of the song, they could share it on WeChat, inviting their social network to vote for them, with branded KSF gifts up for grabs for the winners.
In a final call to action and to drive sales, KSF designed a consumer engagement on Tencent's music streaming platform, QQ Music, rewarding consumers who made KSF purchases, listened and shared the song, as well as recorded their own version with CNY-themed red packet rewards. The brand also harnessed Tencent's network opening, a series of Tencent's leading apps to drive traffic to KSF's eCommerce store to better support sales conversion.
As the CNY approached, KSF needed to find an innovative way to connect to younger audiences, while not losing appeal with older audiences. In doing so, KSF wanted to enhance its brand image and increase brand love, driving sales. Through its unique remix, the brand successfully bridged the generation gap, helping families to celebrate CNY together.
KSF achieved a 53 percent increase in sales, driving a 7 percent increase in brand love and 13 percent increase in purchase intention among young consumers (15-22 years old), while purchase intention increased 14 percent among older consumers (39+ years old).
The song gained over 300 million views on Weibo and 70 million views at WeSing's livestream gala with more than 40,000 unique recordings, eight times higher than the benchmark. Additionally, the song was so popular it was incorporated into China's three biggest offline karaoke libraries.
