Chinese Holidays in Q2 and How Brands Can Participate

Around the world, brands often leverage holidays to connect with consumers. In China, consumers often celebrate a mix of both Chinese and Western holidays, it can sometimes feel like there is a holiday coming up every few weeks, however it is important to know which holidays are appropriate for brands to get involved in, as well as how to create the right content that will resonate with Chinese consumers. 

For example, just because the US and China both celebrate mother’s day doesn’t necessarily mean you should leverage the same marketing materials. While both celebrate mothers, each country’s citizens might recognize and appreciate their mothers in different ways. 

In Q2 2021 there are several holidays including: Qingming or Tomb-sweeping Festival (4.4), International Workers’ Day (5.1), Youth Day (5.4), Mother’s Day (5.9), Children’s Day (6.1), Dragon Boat Festival (6.14), and Father’s Day (6.20). 

Among these, there are 4 festivals that brands can consider creating campaigns for: Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, Dragon Boat Festival and Father’s Day. Since these four holidays are very close to each other, we suggest brands choose one holiday to focus heavily on with content, products, influencer campaigns, etc. and then simply recognize the other three holidays by changing their Tmall and WeChat mini program store decorations and having some kind of small promotion. Otherwise, if brands create content for all of them, it will be too much for consumers. 

Mother’s Day

Feminism is a popular topic in recent years in China, that’s the first thing brands can consider when creating content for this holiday, especially brands targeting millennial and Gen Z moms.

The second topic they can consider is females’ anxiety in China. They face a lot of pressure in both their personal and work lives and many find it extremely hard to balance the two. Some choose to take care of their kids and give up promotion at work. This is a topic that brands can tap into on the coming Mother’s Day. 

But brands need to be thoughtful. Leveraging these topics correctly can be a huge success for a brand – leveraging them the wrong way can create a lot of backlash. 

Some great examples include Proya’s recent women’s day campaign “Gender does not set boundaries; prejudice does” and Perfect Diary’s 老妈出逃日记 video about a girl worrying about her mother. 

Children’s Day

In China, this is a festival not only for children but for adults as well. Couples send each other gifts on this day, often something nostalgic. Because of this, you’ll often see many brands creating cross-collab products together with IPs and brands that were popular in Chinese millennials and Gen Z’s childhoods. 

A great example of this is Scent Library’s wildly popular 2019 Children’s Day campaign with candy brand White Rabbit. 

Dragon Boat Festival

When you mention this festival, I think the first thing that comes to the majority of Chinese people’s mind is Zongzi (粽子), a treat made of rice wrapped in bamboo leaves. In different regions of China, there will be different ingredients added into the rice filling. For example, some will have sweet red dates, while others will include meat.  

This is a festival to memorize Qu Yuan (屈原), a poet in the ancient China. It is not a holiday for shopping and gifting. However, this is a good holiday for food and beverage brands, who can make their own zongzi, similar to how many brands will make their own moon cakes for the mid autumn festival. It is also a time when families gather together for a meal, similar to Chinese New Year, so snack and beverage brands can incorporate zongzi imagery onto special packaging which can be used for gifting. 

Father’s Day 

For a long time, brands have often focused more heavily on mothers’ love but when it comes to Father’s Day, not many campaigns have targeted it and performed well. This might be an opportunity for brands to think about how to cover this festival and to stand out from other brands. 

Last year during Father’s Day 2020, Baidu, the largest search engine in China, launched a creative campaign. It had posters placed in subway, where every day there will be lots of people especially during peak hours. On those posters, Baidu listed out frequently asked and funny questions, such as where is the safest place to keep my nest egg, or is being-not-good-at-studying an inherited thing, or where is my mom. Most questions sounded like they were being asked by children.

The way how Baidu related those questions to Father’s Day was by saying “Don’t ask Baidu those questions, go home and ask your father ”. We have a slang term saying if you don’t know something, ask Baidu (like how people in the US say “Google it”.) This time, Baidu was using reversed marketing, instead of asking people to use its search engine, it was asking people to ask their fathers. It was also suggesting people to have conversations with their fathers, which showed the warmth and humanized thinking from Baidu.

Other than Baidu, you can also check out Huawei’s video on the Father’s Day in 2020 and Gillette’s.