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Retail
Digital Marketing
Moschino - Leveraging the cutting edge of technology and O2O marketing for Qixi, the Chinese Valentine’s Day.
Moschino - Leveraging the cutting edge of technology and O2O marketing for Qixi, the Chinese Valentine’s Day.
Challenge
Leverage a Popular Occasion for Favorable Branding Campaigns and Marketing
The Qixi Festival, tracing its roots in Chinese mythology and romance, has a more practical modern connotation in being the Chinese Valentine’s Day. It is also the center of a weeks-long consumer spending frenzy that companies leverage not only for increasing sales, but also for brand marketing.
Luxury brand Moschino approached Branding Records to meet this challenge head on, particularly targeting their product line-up of heart-shaped bags. The situation had all the components of a straightforward brand marketing campaign: a suitable occasion, a product that’s properly themed, and a target audience that’s looking to spend.
But Moschino needed to stand out, not only to outperform competitors, but also to bundle together as many takeaways from a campaign as possible.
Solution
Cutting-Edge Technology and O2O Marketing Forms the Foundation of a Well-Targeted Brand Campaign
Branding Records rose to the challenge and developed an augmented reality (AR) game on WeChat called ‘Kiss to Catch’ or 吻住⼩「⼼」机, where players needed to blow kisses to their smartphone cameras to catch falling Moschino bags.
The higher they score, the more they can win prizes, which are RMB 500 and RMB 1,000 coupons they can use to purchase Moschino products. The highest scoring player also wins a Moschino bag, increasing social, player board-based gamification on top of the individual player engagement aspect. Lastly, to promote social media sharing, players can customize Qixi-themed messages after playing to share their scores and invite others to play as well.
This solution provided a few competitive advantages:
- It leveraged the occasion and the themed products to funnel audiences to a novel, readily available brand interaction (a game they can play on their mobile, and in their WeChat accounts).
- It allowed Moschino to gain valuable experience in AR as a technology for brand marketing as well as tricky offline to online (O2O) campaigns when prizes won in-game are used in offline purchases.
- It still met the seasonal sales spike goals that Moschino expected from the Qixi Festival while also planting the seeds for re-engaging audiences as they’ve already had positive brand experiences during this event.
Of course, Branding Records also helped Moschino maximize game promotion with ad-hoc advertising and partnering with Chinese key opinion leader (KOL) couples who produced themed content.
Outcome
Linked Favorable Brand Recognition to a Well-Known, Annual Event with a Spike in Sales
All in all, Moschino’s month-long Qixi campaign managed to link favorable brand interactions and a suitably themed product with an annual occasion, setting the stage for cyclical positive brand recognition. This means the spike in sales isn’t even the most important outcome.
Indeed, Moschino could have expected an uptick in sales anyway given the increased consumer spending associated with Qixi. Launching a month-long campaign to indelibly link a specific product and powerful branded experiences readily available to anyone with a smartphone cleverly targets a wide swathe of Moschino’s target market for a brand awareness campaign that can be re-leveraged for future campaigns.
Better yet, Moschino’s learned key takeaways for both avant-garde technology like augmented reality as well as practical experience in complex cross-channel campaigns like O2O marketing. This is an invaluable investment for future efforts.
