Skittles and DDB Guangzhou encourage people to speak out at Chinese New Year reunions
Chinese New Year is here again! Whenever this important traditional festival comes around, Chinese people who work and live in different parts of the country or across the world, will try and come back home to reunite with their families. However, while young people look forward to these reunions, they are also worried about being asked embarrassing questions about their lives and loves by their relatives.
To address this social phenomenon, Mars Wrigley China launched an integrated campaign to encourage young people to speak out frankly to their relatives and elders. Skittles hoped to build an emotional connection and help people communicate more sincerely and thus enjoy a happy and harmonious Chinese New Year reunion.
The online video featured Yibo Wang, a popular Chinese celebrity who loves dancing and candy. The video shows him in an interesting hip-hop battle with his uncle who is typical of many older Chinese relatives.
Many families in China are often only able to come together at the Chinese New Year Spring Festival. However, with so much time apart between the family members, the conversations between the older generation and the youngsters can often be stilted and awkward. Conversations often revolve around questions like, why don’t you have a boyfriend/girlfriend? when do you plan to have a child? how much do you earn each month? Young people often don’t want to talk about these things or give honest answers that may simply upset their elders. But they can’t avoid replying either.
Shimin Ni, Marketing Director of Mars Wrigley China Fruity Confectionery CBU, said: “Skittles found that , in fact, the older generation don’t want to invade the young people’s privacy. They simply want to show their concern and interest to the kids they see so rarely. So we decided to create this exaggerated hip-hop conversation to encourage young people to speak out and share their thoughts with their elders, to deepen the mutual understanding between the two generations and ease the small embarrassing moments.”
DDB Guangzhou is the creative agency behind this integrated campaign.
Besides the online video, Yibo Wang also shares a cute mobile phone video on social media to direct visitors to the Skittles ecommerce channel, and gives out his personal belongings to encourage his fans to engage with the brand campaign. In the meantime, Skittles called for people to share their experiences/plans onto social media as part of the campaign.
This was actually the second year Skittles had adopted this “ease those embarrassing moments” idea for their Chinese New Year campaign. Last year DDB helped Skittles to capture another common phenomenon during the festival: the problem of people playing mahjong and showing off in different ways. When it comes to awkward moments, Skittles appears to be saving everybody from embarrassment.
This year, the marketing campaign was much more integrated as the creativity came from a deeper insight about the communication gap between the generations.
The campaign also leveraged the most important touch point for Skittles consumers – the product package. The four cartoon characters shown in the video are actually the four famous IPs of Tencent’s “daily crush” which is similar to Candy Crush in the Western. After buying their Skittles, consumers can scan the QR code on the package and play the little game just for fun.
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