Lunar New Year is the most important time for Chinese consumers to reunite and share happiness, and the best time for international brands to show understanding, respect and embrace local culture. BMW’s 2022 Lunar New Year campaign cleverly used its Chinese name Precious “Horse” with the Tiger, the symbol of the 2022 Lunar New Year, delivering an engaging and direct path to joy, which sits at the heart of BMW’s brand promise.

The campaign ignited the sharing of new year wishes using the campaign content and engagement formats turning it into a cultural trend during Chinese New Year in 2022.

Each year, we are tasked to create a Lunar New Year campaign to fulfil BMW’s brand promise of bringing joy to consumers during this period of family reunion. But communicating during this festival in China is as difficult as Christmas in the West. Expensive, crowded, and full of long format emotional stories about family and reunions. How to stand out when every story about family has been told? How to be seen when every brand is spending huge amounts on media. How to make it brand relevant so ad-saturated consumers can remember who was talking?

The “NOTHING BUT SHEER JOY” campaign uses mixed media, visual gags, and the energy and pace of music to show a mind-boggling interplay between a horse (BMW’s Chinese name translates as “Precious Horse”) and the tiger. The main film plays on the Chinese words “Ma” horse and “Hu” tiger in a straight forward, repeating and memorable audio-visual feast. The two words combined “Ma” and “Hu” also have a second Chinese meaning, “don’t be too serious, just enjoy.”

This seemingly crazy and mind-blowing campaign went for the most direct path to joy which sits at the heart of BMW’s brand promise, and was extended to diversified engagement formats with platform first initiatives. Our goal: no tears, no pressure, nothing but sheer joy to share with each other.

People were increasingly using social media to express their new year wishes when travel was restricted. In 2021 during the same festive period, we observed 17 million more users active on key social platforms.

We applied the “influence the influencer” PR strategy on key social media platforms, embracing the unique nature of each, turning the most active users on these platforms into our campaign ambassadors, thus delivering our campaign message: “don’t be too serious, just enjoy”.

Weibo, the entertainment centric platform - inviting cultural pioneers to participate in the campaign;

Red, the styling platform - transforming campaign designs into fashion items to seed to trend-setters;

WeChat, the brand community gathering platform - creating digital red pockets and stickers as gifts to BMW fans;

China’s TikTok, the UGC based music and dancing platform - engaging with leading creators and dealers to create their own films by leveraging campaign elements.

After the release of the launch film featuring UGC-friendly dance moves and meme-able iconic imagery three days in advance of the Lunar New Year eve, attention was ramped up with a customized influencer approach in the next three days:

Two leading artists/rappers on Weibo (Jackson Yee and Ma Siwei), posted the campaign film with their own remix, influencing 90M+ fans.

On Red, sweaters with iconic imagery were sent to 20+ key influencers.

A dancing challenge applying the campaign film background music was launched on China’s Tiktok attracting 3 leading creators and 50+ dealers to participate.

The engagement peaked on the Lunar New Year eve with the release of 30 collectible digital red packets and stickers as gifts for 2M+ fans to share, which extended the influence of the iconic imagery.

The campaign broke nearly every BMW viewership and engagement record on every social platform. But more importantly, the success was driven by consumers who amplified the campaign by generating UGC on multiple social platforms, even on platforms that weren’t part of the campaign!

The campaign achieved 88.5 net sentiment rating with huge positive sentiment at 45.9%. Of this, comments around “so creative, strong memory” 32.2%, “BMW so bold, love it” 31.8% and “Want to participate” 31.5%. 44.1% was neutral and 9.9% negative.

Brand influence wise, the campaign generated

- 258 million video views;

- 4.02 million social engagements, igniting 688,000 pieces of UGC content;

- 140k new fans across social media platforms, 65% from Gen Z;

- Spontaneously re-posted by 28 influencers, generating over 1M likes;

- Cultural topic, widely discussed on Weibo (China’s Twitter) and transferred by fans into new and niche social media platforms;

- Fifty dealerships also created their own dance videos from the campaign assets

26 clippings from domestic and international marketing media including Contagious, Campaign Asia, Markettech APAC, Little Red Book, Madisonboom, Campaign China, SocialBeta and China Advertising.

Lunar New Year has 12 animal signs that are part of a 12 year cycle. While 2022 is the Year of Tiger, the horse is also part of this lunar cycle. When the horse “Ma” in Chinese (BMW’s Chinese name is “Precious Horse”) and tiger “Hu” come together, it’s a celebration of BMW welcoming the Year of the Tiger. The two words together also have another meaning; “don’t be too serious, just enjoy”. This is culturally nuanced as while it is the most important time for family reunions. Campaigns stereotypically depicts long film stories of the family reunion, tear jerky and heavy-hearted.

The campaign taps into pop culture, overturning the cultural codes of the Lunar New Year, reinventing traditional Chinese elements with a completely fresh perspective, delivering a direct path to joy, while facilitating ways for people to express new year wishes with the “influence the influencer” approach.