Qixi Festival: A challenging Chinese holiday for global brands

Held on August 25 this year, Qixi Festival, the Chinese Valentine’s Day, is perfect for brands to focus on curating gift guides or releasing special edition themed items. 

The origin of this annual event is an ancient tale between two forbidden lovers — read more about it in our previous post — and is sometimes referred to as the Double Seventh Festival since it falls on the 7th day of the 7th Chinese lunar month. Most importantly, this day has grown in popularity for fashion and jewelry brands to target their promotions. 

Similar to the famous Single’s Day — which raked in USD $38 billion last year — brands are leveraging the Qixi Festival as a sales opportunity. 

Jewelry is becoming more sought-after for Chinese customers. China generates $5.8 billion of the global luxury jewelry market revenue and is also a major consumer of precious materials, such as gold and diamond. Men’s jewelry has also increased in popularity in Asia with millennials driving most of the sales in quality pieces as well as statement fashion accessories. 

With this in mind, Cartier released a video campaign that followed three different romantic relationships with the caption, “Trinity rings, witnessing all sorts of love and emotions in the world”, to promote a Cartier classic, the Trinity ring, that has three gold bands symbolically intertwined together.

Conflicting with Cartier’s message, Chinese e-commerce site Tmall included captions that described the two men as father and son, and a female couple as friends, much to the disappointment of many online users and the LGBTQ community.

Although they acknowledged that Cartier made an effort to showcase diverse relationships, the confusion surrounding the campaign may have hindered Cartier’s message and directed the conversation elsewhere. 

Another brand that has dipped their toes into this holiday is Burberry, as they continue to appeal to China’s young money. Their Qixi Festival gift guides for both men and women are a relatively tame approach to the holiday, featuring playful patterns and a festive colour scheme, and are front and centre on their Mainland China and Hong Kong websites.

Beyond that, Burberry is on a hot streak of meeting Chinese millennial and Gen Z’s expectations having recently unveiled their first social retail store in Shenzhen. This immersive, experiential store unveiled two new bags for the Festival through WeChat. 

Finally, earlier this month, Balenciaga released a limited edition design of their Hourglass Handbag with the Chinese characters “He Loves Me” in a Graffiti-style script. Within a few days, the hashtag #BalenciagaChineseValentineCampaignTasteless had more than 210,000 discussions and 170 million views on Weibo.

Some users commented that the oversized phrase on an otherwise classy silhouette was tacky and “simply ugly” as Balenciaga ultimately failed to tap into what customers were looking for this Valentine’s Day.

The real challenge is creating a collection and then advertising it in a way that appeals to younger generations and China’s social landscape — all while preserving the brand’s timeless luxury. 

Whether brands hit the mark or not, the Qixi Festival is proving to be a valuable enough opportunity for them to target Chinese consumers.

Navigating COVID: How the fashion industry is adapting

Across Europe, China, and North America, fashion brands are having to come up with creative solutions in an attempt to stay relevant during these challenging times. Take Bottega Veneta for example.

With efforts to limit in-person shopping by enhancing the at-home experience, their team sent editors and influencers a projector for an immersive display of their menswear film — a gesture that goes beyond simply posting the video on their social media. 

Brands are also focusing on how to continue capturing the Chinese audience. Since China has rebounded earlier from the pandemic than other countries, luxury brands are depending on Chinese consumers and their domestic shopping habits, especially with international travel still limited.

For Burberry, sales in Mainland China grew more than 30% in June but fell 20% worldwide. To ride the momentum, the British label is partnering with Chinese tech giant Tencent to open their first “social retail” store in Shenzhen.

With rewards that can be unlocked through WeChat mini-games and an in-store cafe, the idea is to merge interactive experiences with conventional shopping to appeal to the tech-savvy younger generation in Shenzhen. 

Shanghai was the first major fashion week to experiment hosting the event completely virtual, as they live streamed in late March through Alibaba-operated e-commerce website Tmall. This allowed viewers to instantly purchase items as it rolled out the runway.

In June, London Fashion Week was also virtual. Despite fashion houses’ efforts to put on a full production, the three-day spectacle was met with 55% less social media engagement than London’s other 2020 shows in January and February.

Even Jacquemus’ physically distanced outdoor show with select friends and family in attendance received only half of its earned media value compared to a year before.

Although transitioning to digital events and scaling down shows produced less than optimal results, brands are not shying away from this opportunity to continue showcasing new collections while supporting their staff and teams.

Upcoming shows in Copenhagen and Stockholm are on track to be completely virtual and some fashion houses are eager to present to small, physically distanced audiences. Luxury brands are more open to redefining strategies within the fashion industry regardless of the tepid response and low numbers. 

Perhaps this new normal only needs some getting used to.

Five Essential Tips For Your Chinese New Year Marketing Plan

Year of the Pig is just around the corner! For any brand looking to establish a reputation or achieve sales and marketing goals with Chinese consumers, the Spring Festival is definitely an important time of the year.

Figuring out customer patterns under a different cultural background is exhausting, not to mention that there are so many cultural elements or implications to be aware of for Chinese New Year. We’re here to help!

1. The Essentials — What’s the most important element of Chinese New Year?

There are some who compare Chinese New Year to Christmas. Apart from the same shopping fever and decorating pressures, Chinese New Year focuses more on the idea of family and reunion.

This has to do with the fact that family values are an extremely important part of Chinese culture, and have been emphasized throughout history.

Numerous brands take this value into crafting their marketing messages to encourage reliability to the Chinese consumers, usually by showcasing family reunions in their campaigns. But is it enough?

2. Add Seasoning — What else do Chinese people like to spend time on?

There’s no better time than the New Year to indulge in Asians’ obsession with food. In fact, you may have underestimated the significance of their food culture. There’s an old proverb “民以食为天” which can be translated to “People consider food to be the primary need”.

Instead of “How are you?”, many Chinese people today still prefer the old-fashioned greeting, “Have you eaten yet?” After all, it’s not common to have eight different types of cuisine specific to one country — which makes it perfectly understandable that so much pride is taken in food.

3. Dig Deeper — Show that you’ve done your research

Painting your products red or simply slapping a zodiac animal sign on top of your logo doesn’t work anymore. To truly relate to the audience, show that you’ve actually invested time and done research.

Think about these questions: What do Chinese people like to do in their spare time? What TV shows do they watch? What are the hottest online trends on Weibo? What’s the latest popular sing-along song on Tiktok? What common phrases do they say these days?

Find that element which not only resonates with the generation you’re targeting, but also represents your brand voice.

4. Ask Locals — Identify and connect with relevant influencers

With a current population of 1.4 billion, China holds significant value to any brand or company. Although the country has prohibited access to western social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (you can only access using VPN tools), this has certainly given rise to a flooding number of Chinese social media sites.

Major global brands like Chanel, Adidas, Estee Lauder, Shiseido, have all been adept at taking advantage of the massive KOL resources in China — and the results have proven to be very successful. Jing Daily has also suggested working with more niche mid-tier and micro KOLs, to reach your core target audience.

5. No Hard Sell — Don’t make everything about your brand

We get it. You have amazing products, and you believe it will be a huge hit in the Chinese market. But let’s face it — nobody likes hard sells, no matter how great the product or service. When it comes to reaching audience from a different culture, we suggest taking baby steps. Focus on showcasing their culture first, before working your way to engaging them with your product.

To learn more about Chinese traditions, social media trends, or marketing tips to reach the Chinese community — drop us a message at info@spotlightwest.ca! You can also reach us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn!

The Chinese Digital Christmas Campaigns That Were Done Right

As Chinese celebrations and trends, such as Singles’ Day, are getting more buzz around the world, Western holidays are becoming a major part of the everyday life in China as well.

This is more common especially among Chinese millennials or the post-90s generation.

Having talked about how WeChat and Weibo are the two most prominent social channels to reach the younger generations in China, many Western brands are jumping on the bandwagon.

Swarovski’s WeChat campaign from last year set a perfect example for many luxury brands that are still figuring out strategies to reaching Chinese consumers. To drive the sale of their limited-edition Advent Calendar Box — which contained 24 gifts, one for each of the days leading up to Christmas — Swarovski launched a highly interactive WeChat campaign allowing users to redeem gifts by engaging with the platform.

Upon entering Swarovski’s account, the users were given access to different built-in mini-games on a daily basis, through which they were able to collect a card each time they won. After collecting all seven unique cards, they would receive a free gift.

Pop quizzes and selfie makers have proven to be successful, with Chinese consumers enjoying customized user experience. In 2017, Italian handbag brand, Furla, designed a quiz for their Christmas WeChat campaign, encouraging their female followers to discover their signature charm (passion, elegance, mystery, etc.). The final answer would come up with a product recommendation based on the quiz, as well as a customized page they could share to their own WeChat feeds. Meanwhile, Stella McCartney’s Christmas campaign brought more aesthetic elements to their user experience by launching a mini-program that allowed users to upload their selfies before adding vintage-style stickers and filters.

London's iconic department store Harrods also arranged a #ChristmasTreasureHunt campaign, providing clues each day leading up to Christmas for customers to find hidden Christmas presents in store.

Not only have these campaigns drawn significant organic followers to the brands’ social channels, they’ve also promoted brand awareness through interactive experiences and seamless integration — which are both key factors in effective social marketing in any country.

While shopping for the holiday, keep in mind that more Vancouver outlets and stores are accepting WeChat Pay — given that you’ve already connected at least one bank card).

From all of us at Spotlight West Communications, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for more on Chinese social trends, WeChat marketing tips, or other fun tidbits about the Chinese community. You can also reach us at info@spotlightwest.ca.