Chinese New Year has become a new chance for marketing

Chinese New Year has become a new chance for marketing

By Vergil Dai

Spring Festival is a traditional celebration of the Chinese New Year. There are many things for Chinese people to do during the Spring Festival including: Pasting Spring Festival couplets, having reunion dinner, watching TV gala, setting off fireworks, visiting relatives, eating dumplings and Sending red packets.

Nowadays, some new practices to celebrate Chinese New Year has taken place. Meanwhile Chinese New Year also become a time for consumption like Black Friday. As a result, no matter in China or out of China, companies try to make use of this opportunity for marketing.

This year is the year of monkey. Some luxury fashion brands made red versions of classic items or popping monkeys on to their products. For example, Prada’s Chinese new year-themed handbags and Louis Vuitton’s new monkey-themed Vuittonite jewellery rang (Lau, 2016).

Sending red packets is a well-observed custom at Chinese New Year. Red packets are money wrapped in red paper given as New Year gifts (Wu, 2016). It used to be only for kids. But from 2013, red packets has been apply to Chinese social media (QQ, WeChat) and Chinese network payment platform (Alipay). People can easily send red packets money to their friends or relatives with blessings. People also can send specific amount of red packets to the group chat, members could try to catch as soon as possible. Because it is convenient and real-time, so network red packets become more and more popular. This year, it is widely used as a marketing approach. Many Chinese big companies start to send red packets from the Chinese New Year eve. Although the amount of money in each red packet is limited, but everyone have high opportunity to catch the red packets through the social media and payment platform. The total amount of red packets send through Wechatwas around 32.1 billion from Feb. 7^th to Feb. 12^th according to China News (Zhang, 2016). If someone get the red packets from companies, they will also get the blessing text. As a result, it can be a promotion of the brand and build a good brand image.

This case can be explained by the marketing theories. “Coppet defines rituals as core of the social identity of all communities (1992)”. Celebrating the Spring Festival and customs within are rituals of Chinese culture. Companies recognized the key ritual in Chinese New Year which is gift-giving. Therefore they find out variety of ways to sell more products or promote theirselves.

Reference:

Coppet Dd, (1992) Understanding Rituals. 1st ed.;London;: Routledge;

Zhang, M. (2016) Network Red packets during Spring Festival set a new high. ChinaNews. Available from:< http://www.chinanews.com/fortune/2016/02-16/7758373.shtml>.

Lau, S. (2016) Monkey business: how fashion is cashing in on Chinese new year. The guardian. Available from:< http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2016/feb/08/monkey-business-how-fashion-is-cashing-in-on-chinese-new-year>

Wu, A. (2016) Chinese Red Envelopes/Packets (Hongbao) - Amount, Symbols and How to Give. China highlights. Available from:< http://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/festivals/red-envelop.htm>