One of my friends who I first met when we were working on global brands at Unilever, took a change in career running their own chocolatier and coffee shop at a lovely market town outside London.
https://flic.kr/p/2kbJe7h
Coffee shops for years have had a nice line in selling branded insulated cups. The rationale is that these cups can be re-used and act as branded marketing for the shop. In the past you have had a push on using these insulated cups in the name of going green. There was a mix of take-up, but adoption was increasing over time.
The barriers to using re-usable cups include:
Having a cup big enough to take your drink. Coffee shop chains offer their branded cups. And if you don’t want to be a Café Nero billboard, you can buy cups from the likes of Stanley that will keep your drink warm for up to eight hours.
Having your cup with you. For drivers having a cup and a cup holder in their vehicle is easy enough. the challenge is when they take it into the home or workplace to clean the cup. They need to remember to have it back in their car. Public transport users have a similar problem but need a bag to hold their cup and their work ritual paraphernalia. One of the benefits of a single-use cup is not having to remember.
Having to wash the cups. Coffee shops have to wash cups used by people drinking in a coffee shop, but customers coming in with re-usable cups would need an immediate clean. I did notice in a Starbucks in a Hong Kong neighbourhood that customers left their cups overnight with the shop. However for most shops relying on customers to clean the cup themselves and a quick blast of steam from the coffee machine cappuccino function should be enough.
Customer habits
Pre-COVID the coffee shop problem looked as if it was being slowly but surely being addressed. This was because a significant minority of customers were going to their local coffee shop near work or home with a reusable cup. You are building a smaller habit with a bigger habit as a trigger: taking your reusable cup with you as you leave home prepared for work.
COVID-19 changed the whole coffee shop experience. Insurance companies had already been pushing store-owners towards cashless transactions. But now hygiene had its place as well. We were divided from baristas with a sea of perspex and reusable cups were not accepted.
Wider daily routines were broken with working from home, and the atomic habit of a daily caffeine fix was shattered. There were other aspects going on as well. Consumers got used to making coffee at home, or not going into their workplace at all. A regular coffee habit has been more difficult to reform due to hybrid working and the cost of living crisis probably hasn’t. helped the coffee shop problem either.
Back to my friend’s coffee shop
So back to the discussion that inspired this post:
We give a 30p discount for bringing your own takeaway cup, but out of the almost 400 takeaway drinks we’ve served in the last week only 11 times have we been able to give this discount. We’ve started talking about how we can help facilitate this behaviour change more as part of our sustainability drives. One idea being explored is to actually start charging for takeaway cups rather than discounting for bringing your own…
This equates to less than 2.75% redemption rate. My take on the coffee shop problem is outlined below:
Reduce friction and doubt: Tell people you will accept any takeaway cup that has room to hold the coffee (if its bigger thats fine).
Optimise any behaviour change activities that you are likely to implement: a Phil Graves research outlined in Consumerology supports the heuristic that positive reinforcement tends to be slightly better over time. But one thing to remember is that behavioural change is a war of inches. For instance reframe the above statement ‘In just one week we’ve already helped almost 3 percent of our customer base move to reusable cups’. This then becomes a social proof that encourages consumer reading the copy to be part of a growing movement.
A cup ‘fine’ might be like a sin tax – this paper on late pick up fines at an Israeli childcare centre is often quoted in behaviour change books. Here’s a synopsis of story laid out in the research paper. In day care centres in Israel, economists tried to help schools identify ways to reduce late pick-ups. Economists conducted a study by announcing that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay a $3 fine. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went up by 100%. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.
I was privileged to freelance at Ogilvy on Dove a number of years ago and got to understand the brand a little better during that time. My work on Dove was focused on product advertising for Dove soap in Brazil, the US, Vietnam and the Philippines rather than adding to the master brand canon around beauty standards.
When the 20th anniversary of the master brand campaign rolled around my LinkedIn was filled with posts about 20 years of the Real Beauty (or changing beauty as its currently articulated) positioning for the Dove brand. I took more of a slow read/write approach to my take on Dove.
Dove origin.
The origins of Dove lie in the injuries experienced by American servicemen during world war two. There was a need for a milder soap to address the needs of burn victims, and the concept of having moisturising cream (or cleansing cream as it was called in the earlier ads) was included in the soap to rehydrate skin rather than leaving it excessively dry after stripping off the skins natural oils.
Dove was introduced as a consumer product in 1957. The original advertising focused on the functional benefits of the product.
Decades later and the Dove advertising continued to focus on the products functional benefits.
For instance this 1990s advert positions Dove against everyday beauty brands and premium brand Neutrogena.
Dove still does functional benefit advertising, but it’s the master brand level advertisements that tend to get the most attention.
2004.
It is worthwhile considering the context that Dove was entering into with its reinvention. While we were post-9/11 the culture still has the optimism of the early 2000s. Celebrity gossip and paparazzi photos and videos were still a thing. Facebook had been launched for Harvard University students. Myspace had launched a year earlier with a focus on music and blogging was gaining a head of steam as a social channel. Real Media had launched a streaming music service but Spotify was a couple of years away from launch.
iTunes music downloads, CD ripping and iPods were reinventing music. Television shows were used to find the next popstars, while Dido and Eminem were dominating radio play.
DVD series box sets were a thing. Season three of TV show 24 was the must see TV with Jack Bauer trying to stop a biological terrorist attack and deal with his own heroin addiction.
I was using a Nokia smartphone and a Palm Tungsten T personal digital assistant at the time.
Beauty soap category at the time.
Beauty soap was not a new category. Unilever had arguably marketed the first beauty soap called Pears. By the time real beauty happened Pears was no longer distributed or marketed by Unilever in the UK. As well as Dove, Unilever owned Lux which was seen to be a ‘milder for your skin’ soap. By this time, Lux was a heritage brand that my Grandmother had liked and its main market focus was Latin America, Africa and South / South East Asia. Lux has pivoted to a girl power like position against societal sexism in its brand purpose led advertising.
Procter and Gamble had their own Lux analogue called Camay that traded on the glamour of famous actresses and socialites. At this time Camay was not seen as contemporary in the UK, but was selling well in Eastern Europe. By a strange twist of fate P&G sold Camay to Unilever in 2015, it was available in Latin America.
Simple soap was a British market competitor that had been part of Smith and Nephew’s spin-off of their consumer products division to focus on their medical businesses including advanced wound management. Simple’s positioning was that it contained no unnecessary ingredients and that it was ideal for sensitive skin.
Nivea had cleaning products like shower gels rather than soap per se but was in the personal care space.
At the time, Dove like Palmolive and Simple might be bought by a housewife and used by all the family. My Mum and Dad still use Dove or Simple soap bars, based on which they find first on their supermarket run.
Real beauty.
Dove’s global brand team wanted to reposition Dove more firmly in the beauty category. The story that is promoted revolves around how the brand team presented the Unilever board at the time with interview footage from their wives and daughters about their opinions on beauty.
There were a few iconic images that came out of the campaign.
https://flic.kr/p/cK2ndL
The tickbox images that appeared in a lot of out of home executions at the time.
https://flic.kr/p/2pKnnFq
The Dove evolution video which captured what lots of people knew in the media industry, but tapped into wider public discussions about the use of photo manipulation that were appearing around that time.
How real beauty memed.
Dove’s outdoor execution in the London Underground had wags using pens and markers to suggest the negative answers. I remember on the escalator in Holborn station seeing every advert with the box ticked. It even memed with online celebrity news site Holymoly launching the campaign for real gossip.
Dove Men+Care range.
Dove brand extension Dove Men+Care was launched in 2010 and now has a comprehensive range of everyday products. Unilever described this as a ‘white space’. But Nivea for Men had been in this space since 1986 and Nivea had sold shaving products to men as far back as the 1920s.
Dove Men+Care’s purpose wasn’t that clear when I worked on Dove as the master brand is so focused on empowering women and girls.
We believe that care makes a man stronger, and in order to best care for those that matter to you most, you need to start with care for yourself first.
This take from the Unilever website about what the Dove Man+Care brand stands for is still very generic and it could cover anything from Gillette or a Jordan Peterson sound bite to Andrew Tate’s various manosphere-oriented, fitness-focused enterprises.
The risk of a male counterpart.
It would be a major undertaking to build this into something a bit more pointed, yet fit for purpose. I could understand why it would be low on the priority list, particularly when Gillette’s effort was received so badly at the time.
We know from behavioural science that positive reinforcement works better than taking a negative stance. I have heard a couple of hypotheses put around at the time that:
Men may use Gillette razors; but women in households buy them.
Women represent the largest growth market for disposable razor systems due Gillette’s male market dominance, male consumers inertia to change brand once chosen and facial hair growth – meant that the Gillette brand team didn’t feel that they were taking a risk.
In both cases, men feature in the advert, but may not have been the ads target audience.
However I think that the media buying suggests these hypotheses were wrong. The ad was run during a prime TV spot on the Super Bowl. Critics point to Procter & Gamble taking a $8 billion non-cash writedown for the shaving giant.
P&G reported a net loss of about $5.24 billion, or $2.12 per share, for the quarter ended June 30, due to an $8 billion non-cash writedown of Gillette. For the same period last year, P&G’s net income was $1.89 billion, or 72 cents per share.
…The charge was also driven by more competition over the past three years and a shrinking market for blades and razors as consumers in developed markets shave less frequently. Net sales in the grooming business, which includes Gillette, have declined in 11 out of the last 12 quarters.
From a societal perspective in general masculinity related topics is a cultural land mine; particularly when #allmenaretrash and similarhashtags are now commonplace, so it is harder to use in an effective manner the kind of nuance Gillette attempted.
Egard – a watch brand made this response video to Gillette.
Impact
Dove grew as a brand and became a form of social currency. It made the agencies involved (Ogilvy and Edelman) famous for years to come. What Edelman actually contributed to the creative concept is open for debate.
In terms of the Dove real beauty brand purpose, the results seem to be more mixed.
The current Dove master brand ad ‘The Code’ seems to be very similar to the original ‘Evolution’ ad, the only changes have been that Photoshop was being used by an expert and AI has now put it in the hand of teenage girls.
While the public discourse has changed behaviours haven’t and the wellbeing of girls and women seems to be in a similar or worse position today than it was 20 years ago.
Part of this is likely to be societal, we live in more anxious times and the status quo may have been even worse, had Dove not sparked the kind of public discourse it had.
Brand purpose?
At the time when Dove’s campaign came out, I can’t remember purpose really being a ‘thing’. The closest thing I could remember in the marketing zeitgeist is that people would occasionally talk about technology in terms of the pitch a young Steve Jobs made to PepsiCo executive John Sculley: do you want to sell sugared water all your life, or do you want to change the world?
There was talk about changing attitudes and creating a movement – but it was seen in terms of creativity, rather than a higher purpose.
At the time Unilever’s fragrance brand Lynx / AXE were running creative like this.
AXE / Lynx is still the world’s number one men’s fragrance brand, but its positioning has changed a bit.
When you smell good, good things happen. You’re a little more confident and life opens up a world of possibilities. We believe that attraction is for everyone and between anyone. It doesn’t matter your race, your sexuality, or your pronouns. If you’re into it and they’re into it, we’re into it. That’s The New AXE Effect.
Lynx and AXE content wasn’t that far out. Advertising in the late 1990s and early 2000s wasn’t so serene. You has several ad campaigns that were subversive or transgressive in nature.
A good deal of this was cultural zeitgeist. If you were a creative director in your mid-30s at the time, your terms of reference were very different. You would have likely enjoyed sub-cultures like the rave scene and independent music that drew from 1960s psychedelia and counterculture icons. You probably watched the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow film, one of their TV appearances or attended one of their live shows. Russell Brand was considered funny.
Brands getting attention and critical acclaim like Sony’s Playstation gaming console, Levi’s and Skittles were taking brand risks with campaigns that were far edgier than we’d be likely to see now. One direct mail shot from Sony Playstation designed to promote the Tekken 3 fighting game was sent out in a plain manilla envelope stamped ‘private and confidential’. Inside was a convincing medical card advising that the recipient receive immediate medical treatment for a potentially serious condition. Some of those mailed were waiting for hospital test results and complained to the authorities.
Meanwhile in the US, Mountain Dew was promoting pager plans as part of a co-marketing deal. But this was happening in the middle of a moral panic on pagers being a portal to drug dealer hook-ups and teen prostitutes receiving bookings from johns. Kids were being arrested and charged for possessing pagers in schools and colleges.
Failed online business Pets.com had a distinctive shouty voice that we probably hadn’t seen since Poundland’s ‘teabagged’ social posts.
Two examples give a good temperature check of what was happening in agency teams at this time up to just before 2010.
The Volkswagen ‘terrorist’ film that was used as a door opener by creative team Lee Ford and Dan Brooks. It leaked online, much to the bemusement of Volkswagen. Creatives thought it would be well received by a brand marketing team with a sense of humour. While VW didn’t like it, it did get them work with a large production house in the US and London agency Quiet Storm.
The second one was Lean Green Fighting Machine’s Facebook campaign for Dr Pepper in 2010, that referenced an online Brazilian porn clip known as ‘2 girls, one cup’. The client had signed it off, without knowing the context. Controversy ensued on Mumsnet and the agency was fired from the account.
Amidst all this cynicism, boundary pushing and counterculture; Dove’s real beauty would have been distinctive and differentiated. Even if it did run a risk of being perceived as cynical self-serving corporate schmaltz.
Brand purpose as an idea seems to have gained popular currency after Dove’s campaign for real beauty.
You can see in this chart based on Google Books data how the English language mentions of ‘brand purpose’ took off.
Data from Google Books Ngram viewer
Brand purpose critic Nick Asbury places the rise of brand purpose to the 2008 financial crisis and related events such as the Occupy movement, which supports the post-2014 surge in interest. 20 years later, Dove is now seen as being emblematic of brand purpose. Dove took on brand purpose as a concept over time, with the increasing prominence of the Dove Self-Esteem Project being a case in point.
Almost 11 years ago business academic Dominique Turpin wrote an article describing CMOs as ‘dead’. Turpin worked at the IMD business school in Switzerland and the article was a classic bid for thought leadership.
https://flic.kr/p/XH854z
Alicia Tillman, CMO at SAP AG until 2021, at the time of writing CMO at Delta Airlines
It’s just the kind of thumb-stopping headline that drives readership of LinkedIn content where it was published.
… the decline in the CMO’s influence is alarming, especially at companies that claim to put the customer first but in reality are product-driven.
True, some companies have marketing in their DNA, especially firms that had a visionary founder with a great understanding of the customer. Examples include Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA or the late Steve Jobs at Apple.
But these are exceptions. The norm these days is that the CEO sets the overall strategy, the R&D and innovation teams design the product, and the CFO determines pricing and departmental budgets. No wonder some CMOs feel unloved and are considering a career change
Turpin goes on to explain what he believes that there are four causes, that together result in no CMOs.
Most CMOs aren’t focused on planning and delivering customer value
Short-termism has meant that organisations have become CFO-focused – a la ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch’s perception of shareholder value, rather than a balanced scorecard approach
Marketing impact is hard to measure
Organisations lack a clear understanding of what marketing is
Instead Turpin wanted to create a CCO role – chief customer officer. He saw that this role could sit with the CEO, the CFO or the former CMO. While the CFO as CCO might take the fuzziness out of marketing as Turpin put it, there would be a tension between their natural ‘ neutron Jack Welch’-nature and being customer-centric. What about the CEO? Turpin pointed out that they tend to come from engineering or finance. Both are efficiency focused disciplines with incremental short-term views. Again both are barriers to customer-centricity and would be largely blind to long term effects.
3G Capital
Move forward six years and a CFO-driven approach to running Kraft Heinz by 3G Capital saw a massive destruction of value some $15.4 billion from the $50 billion paid to buy out the business in the first place. The quarterly dividend got cut and shareholders filed lawsuits. The founder of 3G Capital talked extensively about the GE Way driven by Jack Welch as a key influence on their approach.
Scott Galloway
Professor Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur who is provocative, interesting and often right.
On CMOs Galloway said
“If you’re the CMO that shows up and says ‘I need more budget so that I can do a brand identity study, can spend money on advertising and get invited to great conferences and hang out with people who are more interesting and better looking than me by spending media dollars that are less and less impactful’ then you’re like the second lieutenant in Vietnam — you’re dead in 18 months or less,”
There is a lot to unpack in that statement, but it doesn’t spell the end of the CMO or advertising.
Pax Americana to Pax Australis
In this post Galloway taps into a wider criticism that we’ve seen of American marketers over the past few years. When I was in college American professors and marketing thinkers set the tempo for the profession around the world. As Mark Ritson recently wrote
In the 20th Century marketing was American. The discipline, the theories, the textbooks, and the approach. To arrive at Wharton in 1994 was to see a future that was not just untenable in the UK, it was one nobody back home was even aware of. Marketing was a decade ahead of anything in the UK. The American marketers I met, academics and practitioners, were so advanced it made my head spin.
Text books by the likes of Philip Kotler and David Baker, were perceived wisdom of old white academics. None of this thinking was evidence-based; beyond anecdotal successful case studies.
One of the ‘secrets’ that marketers and CMOs at large FMCG companies like Mars, Proctor & Gamble, Kellogg’s and Unilever had was access to Australian based marketing science research. This was primarily via their long-term sponsorship of the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide, Australia.
This body of research in turn shook up wider marketing thinking when Professor Byron Sharp published How Brands Grow. (There were other important works as well such as the UK based publications from the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising – notably The Long and The Short of it and Effectiveness In Context).
While marketing outside the US was shaken up by the works of Sharp and Binet, the US continued onwards in its marketing the way it always had.
Mark Ritson’s recent column on the state of American marketing caused international furore in the marketing community, despite Marketing Week being a UK-only publication. Ritson complained about American marketers lack of awareness about the importance of marketers effectiveness.
This comment on Mark Ritson’s post sharing the article, while humorous has a lot of truth in it:
Okay, okay. Stop throwing big words like vituperative and effectiveness at us simple-minded Americans. Sure, we handed the keys of marketing over to software engineers at the turn of the century. Maybe that led us to a fair bit of myopic strategery here in the very exceptional United States of America.
Based on the comments I’ve read, when asked to define effectiveness the answer provided is essentially #IYKYK. Why let a golden opportunity to school American marketers on the wise ways of the world beyond our ample shores slip through your fingers?
I don’t care if you call it Marketingwirksamkeit or efficacité du marketing, what matters is more than just numbers on the scoreboard, but how the points were won. Just the other day I was reading a scholarly piece on the effectiveness of meme marketing by the faculty of Griffith University in Queensland. It hit me. My American, effectiveness ignorance has blinded me. I now lag behind the rest of the world.
While the US obsessed over marketing technology, the rest of the world was attempting (imperfectly) to more knowledge about marketing efficiency and the marketing technology stack. Having worked in the technology sector, it was the last place I would have gone for marketing lessons. At best, marketing as a function was sales support.
A case in point in this mis-application of focus was the relative performance of this year’s Super Bowl advertisements. I realise that this delve into marketing efficiency has at least made the case for a dramatic change in US-based CMOs. But not so fast, CEOs don’t think that their CMOs and marketing teams are performing that badly.
CMOs: from the dog house to the boathouse
American agency Boathouse have been doing an annual survey of CEO attitudes to marketing and their CMOs. The third edition of this survey was published in January this year.
Some of the highlights of the report include:
CEOs identified what they want their CMOs and marketing teams to address: driving growth, market share/sales, differentiation, improving brand reputation, and “transforming company narrative.”
49 percent of CEOs believe their marketing team is “best in class.”
40 percent of CMOs are rated “best in class.”
One point I found quite interesting was that half of CEOs believe the short tenure many CMOs have “is a sign of success, not failure.”
CMOs’ perceived trust with C-suite stands at 43 percent and 41 percent with the CEO. This has doubled over the three years that Boathouse has been running this research project
In a bit of an odd note: CEOs believe CMO loyalty is growing, stating that “in a dramatic shift from 2021, the CEO’s perception of CMO loyalty is growing, [as] 8 in 10 CEOs perceive CMOs would take a bullet for them (up from 3 in 10 in 2021).”
76 percent CEOs are “integrating A.I. into their organizations” and 90 percent believe that 90 percent of their CMOs are engaging with AI for the benefit of the company in areas such as “content, analytics (about two-thirds), and customer experience or research (half).”
TL;DR CMOs don’t sound as if they will be disappearing in the next 18 months or so as Galloway believed.
C-suite without powerful CMOs get punished.
You could argue that CEO are the ultimate arbiters of CMO success, failure and tenure. But the reality for public companies is the large investors who can vote the CEO of most companies out of office. The key influencer in this decision process is the equity analysts who sit within, or advise client organisations such as fund managers.
https://flic.kr/p/2pyLbrQ
Even if CEOs don’t think that their marketing is important enough to have a CMO, their shareholders will. Equity analysts have indicated that they rate brand strength and marketing as more important than reported profit, or leadership quality.
Given that most of the c-suite can’t speak or do effective marketing, they really need their CMOs. Companieslike3GCapital and Reckitt Benckiser have been punished in public markets for failing at marketing, despite operational and financial excellence. Unilever has been punished for its focus on ESG at the expense of brand building and is even under regulatory investigation.
Six hundred pairs of Nikes in a custom-built house
The six hundred pairs of Nikes are owned by a Japanese lady who now is head of marketing for Ugg in Japan. Previously she’d spent over 20 years in sales and marketing for Nike. Her house was designed around her shoe collection and the double height ceiling in the room to host the six hundred pairs is worth watching for alone. There are more than six hundred pairs. Some of the stories about the six hundred pairs of shoes are fascinating such as how Nike Air Max 95s were responsible for thefts and muggings in Japan.
Tom Ford
Everyone needs a Tom Ford in their life. From personal life hacks to interior design and grooming all in the space of a few minutes. This sounds as if the interview as done around about the time that Ford was bowing out of his fashion and beauty businesses.
Gibbs SR toothpaste
Along with Close Up and Aquafresh; Gibbs SR toothpaste was one of the toothpastes I remember most from childhood. Unilever bundled it eventually into Mentadent and it was quietly taken off the UK market in 2018.
I didn’t realise that Gibbs SR toothpaste was the first advertisement shown on British television. UK law had changed the previous year allowing for commercial television. The creative behind the ad was Brian Palmer of Young & Rubican (now VML).
So, I was listening to the Uncensored CEO podcast Jon Evans when he had Les Binet and Sarah Carter on. One of them mentioned that the above ad was tested recently and scored top scores. It might be novelty, but is unlikely to be nostalgia that drove this test score. What’s more interesting it that Y&R managed to get the creative so high performing decades before the kind of tools that we have now.
Hyper-reality
Keiichi Matsuda took what Apple would call spatial computing to its logical conclusion in this 7 year old film HYPER-REALITY. There are a number of clever aspects to it. Watch when the device reboots in the supermarket and the glyph wearing criminal who escapes identification by the system.
In reality, hardware will restrict how useable that these products will be. Which is the reason why the Apple Vision Pro looks so cumbersome. More related content here.
John Glenn
Great interview with Mercury and Apollo programme astronaut John Glenn covering different aspects of his experience as an astronaut. We hear how astronauts became so involved in the engineering and safety aspects of the Mercury and Apollo programmes.
CNY 2024 or the Chinese new year is celebrated across east and south east Asia as it marks the new year according to the lunar calendar. It is as important an advertising spot as Christmas in the UK or the Super Bowl advertising slots in America.
This Saturday marks the new year. This year is the year of the dragon, it is a time for family and for cementing relationships through gift giving. Packaging and promotions will lean heavily on red, gold or yellow colours signifying good luck and general positive vibes.
The packaging can often be very ornate as this example by Shanghai design agency The Orangeblowfish for client Chow Sang Sang shows.
In many small businesses red or Christmas decorations are often left up and enhance the lunar new year decorations. Corporate florists will bring in miniature orange trees that are also a symbol of the season. (Pro-tip, don’t try one of the fruit).
Given it’s such an important time in the marketing calendar, you see some of the most creative campaigns conducted in the region. Here’s a sampling of this year’s advertisements broken down by country.
China
China’s ‘Galapagos Syndrome‘ social platforms mean that it’s really hard for me to share campaigns with you here. In addition, many of the main advertising agencies no longer seem to share their work on more accessible platforms in the west any more. Each year it becomes harder to write a post like this. It’s almost like they’re ashamed of it.
Amushi
Food brand Amushi worked with Leo Burnett on an advert that conveys the main elements of new year celebrations. You need to watch it on Campaign Asia.
Apple
Apple has done some really interesting Chinese new year films documenting different aspects of Chinese new year and this focuses on the trials of childhood and the magic of new year. The protagonist is ‘Little Garlic’, a young girl with special shape-shifting powers.
https://youtu.be/U1unmE6OlYM?si=fhr1pWihuTs0VzxZ
Coca-Cola
By January 2nd, Coca-Cola already had year of the dragon cans for sale in Beijing. They created a mini-film around a family gathering, but its on WeChat. Contact me if you would like me to share it in-app with you.
Lululemon
I am guessing that Lululemon’s campaign was planned to be running across Mandarin-speaking markets as well as appealing to Asian Americans. The theme of spring is an analogue for the new year, but it is a celebration of traditional Chinese culture rather than lunar new year traditions per se. Michelle Yeoh is Malaysian but has global recognition amongst Asian cinema fans and her Hollywood appearances.
The problem is that Lululemon has fallen foul of Asian Americans and this ad might have its media spend pulled outside Asia? If it happens it would be a shame, as this is the most ‘high concept’, artistic and cinematic of the ads that I have watched so far.
Nike
Nike in partnership with Wieden + Kennedy Shanghai have been turning out high quality Chinese New Year adverts for a number of years now and this year was no exception. It took me so long to get a copy of it, that it almost missed going into this post.
If you have been in a rush to do your Christmas shopping you can empathise with the struggle of getting ready for lunar new year and the vignettes are really nicely done.
Prada
Prada did a photo shoot which is shared on Sina Weibo microblogging platform. The photographs were designed to emulate the classic mid-century elegance of Wong Ka wai’s film In The Mood For Love. This also ties into the popularity of Wong Ka wai’s recent mainland Chinese TV series Blossom set in Shanghai during the early 1990s that is similarly visually rich.
Hong Kong
Hong Kong usually doesn’t have a rich source of lunar new year video advertising. You will see print and poster ads though as sales promotions are the main driver of marketing activities.
Coca-Cola
https://youtu.be/ErBBluzgHEA?si=EOJS8CNV32bJ6lAr
Coca-Cola HK
Coca-Cola Hong Kong went with really short takes, a celebration, fireworks, a branded giveaway and dragon-branded cans make it feel as if the creative was literally dialled in. Where’s the magic that’s integral to the brand?
Watsons
Hong Kong’s ubiquitous pharmacy and beauty care retailer has a brief ad promoting their new year sales promotions and the potential to win a Mofusand co-branded ‘Jenga’-style game – which would be ideal when you have young family members over for CNY 2024.
Their associated web page has promotional price offers containing 688 which its considered to be lucky.
https://flic.kr/p/2ptdpAG
Macau
Macau government tourist board
I am not even going to try and explain what you are about to see. It’s special. But once you watch it, it can’t be unseen. I will leave it at that.
Malaysia
Astro
Astro is a Malaysian satellite TV and OTT broadcaster. As is common with other media businesses in Hong Kong and Singapore they rolled out a song to celebrate Chinese new year. This video showcases their varied broadcast talent.
Cetaphil
Cetaphil is a range of skincare products from Galderma. Chinese new year means looking your best, including new clothes. This combined with gifting is why the holiday makes so much sense for Cetaphil.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola made use of high profile 3D OOH spaces such as this one in Malaysia with a very traditional dragon motive. It’s nicely executed and fits into the magic of the brand.
Eu San Yang is a traditional Chinese medicine retailer originally from Malaysia, that now has branches in Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore. It’s advert talks about relationships particularly assumptions like ‘I thought’ or ‘I took for granted’. Click the link, as they aren’t allowing embedding. It touches on the tension between tradition and modernity that is generational and is quite meta in the way it references lunar new year adverts as a popular trope in the dialogue between father and son.
Loong Kee
Malaysian dried meat brand Loong Kee put together a music video featuring ethnic Chinese influencers and celebrities.
Mr DIY
Mr DIY is kind of like Homebase or Wilkinsons but with an extended product range. Their film has a Christmas Carol type transformation to it. I’ll leave it at that for you to enjoy.
This comedy clip explains the universal insight above really well.
Pepsi: Finish The Unfinished
Pepsi’s campaign is built around the insight that during new year meals and celebrations there are lots of partly finished cans of drinks left around. The idea of finishing something is an important part of Chinese new year, echoed in the series of Hong Kong family entertainment films released for the new year called ‘Alls Well That Ends Well‘. The original film was released in 1992 featuring Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung and Stephen Chow – and spawned seven sequels. The advertisement connects with a gold cup giveaway that is also tied into this the theme of ‘finish the unfinished’.
Petronas
Malaysian government-owned energy company Petronas promotes its corporate brand with a short film that riffs on the harmony of Chinese new year. They were careful to cast talent from the countries three main ethic groups: Malays, Chinese and South Asians.
Tune Talk
Malaysian mobile provider Tune Talk focuses on filial piety and the high level of change that’s signified by the Dragon in the horoscope. At first when I saw the ad I thought that it would be warning about online scams, but the story is much more straight forward. It’s fun and high energy, just what you need for lunar new year.
Watsons CNY 2024 campaign – Enter The Dragons
Watsons is part of AS Watson, the retail arm of CK Hutchison Holdings and the owner of Superdrug. They have their own branded pharmacy stores with a large range of beauty products throughout China, Dubai, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Macau, the Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, Vietnam and Malaysia as you can see.
Yee Lee
Yee Lee is a Malaysian manufacturing and packaging company – imagine an analogue of Unilever and Tetrapak. Their products include food, bottled water, oral care, household cleaners, and industrial products. It also manufactures corrugated cartons and aerosol cans for a wide range of customers. The music video is notable for its use of rap lyrics. Also, notice how the cast is older than Loong Kee’s music video.
Yeo’s
Yeo’s is a local FMCG brand with a range of products including drinks, teas, instant noodles, canned food sauces and dairy products. Every household has some Yeo’s products in the pantry or the fridge. This advert neatly captures the stress and joys of new year celebrations.
Singapore
Mediacorp
Mediacorp is a Singapore government-owned commercial media company that would be analogous to the BBC in terms of the media footprint, and Channel 5 in the way it takes advertising. Chinese new year songs are a thing, with new ones launched each year. Mediacorp’s song is also an advertisement for its talent and the company’s OTT service – kind of equivalent to BBC Sounds and iPlayer.
SingTel
Singapore’s dominant telecoms provider SingTel have a reputation for delivering high quality Chinese New Year ads and this year was no exception. This time the ad focuses not only on reunion, but also remembering those people who we can no longer enjoy CNY 2024 with Mr DIY’s campaign we see greater than expected evolution of a senior citizen.
Taiwan
7-Eleven
Convenience store 7-Eleven created a 30-second spot to promote its range of Chinese new year products.
Here are the examples that I found in previous years:
I work alongside Craft Associates and together have helped a number of clients including Oxford Nanopore Technologies on their successful China GTM approach and SK-II on their content strategy for Hong Kong. I have also worked with the team to help advise Chinese enterprises on going international over the years in the consumer technology space.
Whether you want to advertise to a Chinese audience, or advertise a breakfast cereal to people in Wolverhampton, you can contact us here.
