Chinese Brands CNY Campaigns
Chinese New Year is coming!
While many international brands are launching CNY collections, many Chinese brands are playing a safe card. Only a few of them launch new products for CNY. We picked out top domestic brands following categories: beauty, fashion, toys, beverage and food, and took a look at what they have prepared for the coming new year.
Beauty Brands:
Perfect Diary
Perfect Dairy launched a New Year gift box which includes a new eyeshadow palette and three lipsticks priced at 299.9 RMB. The package is designed to look like a traditional Chinese home, and if you look closely at the eyeshadow, it has CNY elements on it, such as a lantern, the rock candy or Bingtang Hulu (冰糖葫芦) and the pattern of bricks.
Other than new products, Perfect Diary collaborated with popular relationship advice WeChat account Xin Shixiang (新世相) to create a short video called 老妈出逃日记 featuring people’s relationship with their mothers. In the video, the single mother is going to have a date with an old friend in Hainan (海南) but her daughter, who is a workaholic, doesn’t allow her to do so because she worries that the guy might be a defrauder. They had a fight and the girl finally finds out she had missed lots of messages from her mom and the guy is indeed her mom’s old friend.
The video reflects people’s relationship with their parents, especially those work a lot and don’t spend time with their parents. Though it isn’t directly related to CNY, the topic that the video is targeting is something that almost everyone thinks about when they go back home during the Spring Festival.
Florasis
Compared with Perfect Diary, Florasis did little for CNY. While it didn’t launch a gift set or special collection, it did create a look named “Good Luck in New Year” (新年转运妆). This is a common tactic used by lots of domestic beauty brands as many Chinese people are superstitious and like to wear or carry things that will bring good luck in the new year.
It also announced on its Weibo, WeChat Official Account and Tmall flagship store that it will stay open and continue to serve customers during the Spring Festival. And in fact, this has become many brands’ promise for this CNY.
Read why brands are staying open during this year’s Spring Festival here.
Colorkey
Colorkey seems very busy and engaged in preparing for the coming CNY. It launched a CNY gift collection which includes 6 of its iconic lip glosses, though in mini sizes. It also worked with an electronic toothpaste brand Usmile to launch a co-branded Doraemon gift box.
Colorkey also launched new lip gloss shades which they are promoting as suitable to wear for the Spring Festival.
Similar to Florasis, Colorkey also created a CNY look. Its look is called “CNY Hot Pot”, which means a makeup style to wear when having hot pot during CNY. The style is more creative and practical as Chinese people usually have hot pot during CNY and the hot steam rising from the pot often ruins women’s makeup.
Fashion Brands:
Fashion brands are more low-key compared with beauty brands. Some of them don’t even have a CNY collection, for example, activewear brand Maia Active and apparel brand Mo&Co.
Underwear brands such as Ubras and Neiwai launched red underwear for CNY. It’s not called “launched” to be honest, they always have this red collection and they emphasize it when CNY is around the corner.
We love wearing red when it comes to CNY, hoping it will bring more good luck in the coming year. And this is especially important for people who are having their Ben Ming Nian (本命年) meaning that that year’s zodiac animal is the same as the year they were born, which happens every 12 years. For example, 2020 is a mouse year and I was born in 1996, which was a mouse year as well, so 2020 is one of my Ben Ming Nian.
Toy Brands:
In this category, I mainly looked at POPMART, a blind box brand.
POPMART created a fun campaign that is a digital twist on the Christmas advent calendar. Leading up to the holiday, from February 4 to February 12, POPMART is launching new products every day. Users must come back each day to see what the newest item is. Many of them are limited edition so consumers must be quick and get them before they’re gone. Bravo!
Similar to many other brands, POPMART will also stay open and continue serving customers during the Spring Festival.
Beverage & Food Brands :
Most of the brands we looked at launched CNY collections. Hey Tea also went the extra mile, decorating its offline stores in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen and encouraging consumers to take pictures there. It also created CNY cups and paper bags. The bag design is quick beautiful and the Hey Tea branding is discreet so consumers could easily use it again to carry gifts or other items during the holiday.
Our takeaways:
Unlike many of the big luxury brands, you may have noticed that most of the Chinese brands don’t create collections specifically for CNY. They either combine their old products together as a gift set with CNY packaging or promote items from old collections that are relevant to the Spring Festival, such as red items.
Most of them also have discounts during the Spring Festival, but the deals are not as good as during Double 11. Another thing in common is that they also change their Tmall store’s background to a red tone to appear festive.
What’s most interesting is that none of them created a special collection featuring a cow or an ox, which is the animal of 2021. To be honest, as an ordinary consumer, I won’t buy items from the special CNY collection from luxury brands. First, they are expensive. And second, the collection may be suitable to wear and take a picture, post it on social media. But next year, when it’s another zodiac year, another animal, if you wear an ox sweater on the street, it will feel out-of-date. If I was super rich or I like the collection or the animal a lot, maybe I will buy one and collect it instead of wearing it, but otherwise collections with zodiac animals on them are not something the everyday consumer likes to buy.
