National holidays have always been the time when people give greetings to each other together with various traditions, and the Chinese New Year also appears a battlefield for beverage consumption and marketing. Almost all the big brands have their own CNY creative platform, including Pepsi’s “Bring Happiness Home.”

In the last three years, instead of the traditional brand film content, Pepsi aimed to play a bigger role in consumer’s CNY. Instead of relying on media investment and paid exposure, this year we aimed to let consumers talk and interact with the brand, to enhance the emotional bonding and brand power in the way of creating a new CNY ritual that connects people with Pepsi.

In order to let Pepsi be part of consumers’ CNY greetings and convey the brand message, we tapped into the most-used social app in China –Tencent WeChat, as more and more people nowadays are using it to give their greetings to families and friends online.

We made a deep collaboration with Tencent, the mother company of WeChat, and developed a special digital mechanism launched in CNY. When consumers were giving their CNY greetings on WeChat by typing in “Wish You Pepsi Cola”, which can show Pepsi Cola‘s Chinese brand name obviously, and Pepsi animation effects like raining red envelopes with festival lions will appear on screens, carrying brand message and blessings with gifts offers to trigger engagement. With other branding content, we made Pepsi’s Chinese name into consumer’s CNY greeting words and created a social trend.

Pepsi Cola as a soft drink, used to target young consumers, but for CNY, the biggest national holiday which everyone celebrate, Pepsi is talking to all the Chinese.

The Chinese are used to sharing their greetings of new year and sending red envelops to celebrate the moment as traditional customs, so we looked for ways to let the brand be part of the behavior. We found that the Chinese brand name of Pepsi Cola, could be back-translated, word-by-word into “Everything will be happy” in Chinese, which perfectly matched people’s CNY greetings.

We planned to leverage such linkage to communicate Pepsi’s brand message, as well as a CNY greeting to all the Chinese – “We wish you Pepsi Cola - Everything will be happy for 2023.”

The brand message and intention was executed with the help of big social platforms’ technological support. We collaborated with Tencent WeChat, the most used social app in China, to develop the digital experience that closely related to consumers’ daily life.

The whole mechanism and animation effects were based on Chinese traditional elements and customs, together with Pepsi’s brand assets during CNY season. When consumers were interacting through sending red envelops and new year greetings on WeChat, Pepsi animation effects will appear on screens, carrying brand message and discount offers to trigger engagement. Campaign posters, KOL & celebrity contents were also included to amplify the awareness and lead social discussion.

Timeline as following

1.18 – 1.19 Teaser: KOL Content Seeding

1.20 – 1.26 WeChat Red Envelope Rain Interactive Program Launch

1.20 – 1.26 Call to action: Celebrity Hook Video, Campaign Poster, KOL content seeding

1.21 CNY Eve

We successfully reached 760 million people, which is half of the Chinese population through the work. The overall exposure in WeChat was 3 billion. The campaign did not only raise Pepsi’s Top-of-Mind awareness by 1% compared to the last CNY period and make the No.1 internet interaction brand during 2023 CNY, but also allowing Pepsi to play a critical role in consumers’ CNY daily behavior where people were using the brand name to celebrate and greeting for this important holiday.