“Taste the Feeling” of Chinese New Year

Happy Chinese New Year!!!

Although Chinese people use the same calendar as the rest of the world, we still celebrate some traditional holidays according to the lunar calendar. Therefore, the New Year’s day is different from year to year. The 2016 Lunar New Year is on February 8th.

Chinese New Year is much like Thanksgiving and Christmas in the States, during which families gather together to feast, communicate, and give… (oh wait, this part is different) MONEY! Yes, instead of presents, we give money to children. The money is always placed in red envelopes, because the color red symbolizes happiness, fortune, and joy. Most of the new year wishes also revolves around happiness, health, fortune, longevity, and good luck.

Before I go into the marketing communication portion of this post, I would like you to first watch a commercial from Coca-Cola. A few notes before you start watching.

Pay attention to:

• The color red
• The pachira plant that’s used as a slingshot
• The two animated dolls
• The sense of family

Coca-Cola vividly depicted a typical Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, where the house is decorated, family is gathered, and food is served. The two animated dolls are inspired by traditional Chinese clay folk art figurines, and they symbolize good luck and blessings. The pachira plant, on the other hand, has a Chinese nickname called the “fortune tree”.

For the past seven years, Coca-Cola has been developing and promoting the campaign “Open Happiness“. Coca-Cola’s new global CMO, Marcos de Quinto let go of “Open Happiness” and started a new campaign called “Taste the Feeling“. Marcos de Quinto explains that, the previous campaign was more like preaching, which focused on big social issues. Instead, Mr. de Quinto made the change to have Coca-Cola take a more humble role in the new “Taste the Feeling” campaign. The new campaign focuses on ordinary moments in daily life, such as dating, family gathering, and hanging out with friends. In fact, the Chinese New Year commercial is part of  Coco-Cola’s new marketing campaign. At the very end of the commercial, a Chinese phrase appears “(family) reunion should taste like this” with the Coca-Cola logo next to it.

Now, let’s watch a commercial from the previous campaign “Open Happiness”.

This first time I watched the above video, I was deeply touched and astonished by it. I was glad to see that a brand is putting in so much effort to make the world a better place by using their product as the conduit. I think such commercial can be very useful at promoting the brand. However, after reading about the new campaign “Taste the Feeling” I agree that contents that are closer to daily life would work better at promoting the product.

So….which campaign do you prefer? Is it the touching ones that are changing someone else’s life or the heart warming ones that could happen to you?

References:

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coke-debuts-taste-feeling-campaign-strategic-shift/302184/

http://adage.com/article/advertising/coke-sticking-giggling-characters-chinese-year/302163/