After the Lantern Festival on 12 February, the Chinese New Year (CNY) season is officially over. On the same day, BMW-owned MINI released a campaign video featuring retired Children’s TV host Dong Hao.
The short film is a combination of stop-motion animation with model cars and cutaways to real-life natural scenery of travel. It is a 4-minute short film where Dong narrates the allegorical tale of a “MINI Snake” (played by a model MINI EV) trying to find out why it and those in its village do not look like snakes. It embarks on a journey to find the elusive “Glutinous Snake” (贪吃蛇, the Chinese translation of the game genre Snake) before the sundown of the Lantern Festival. With a little help from its friends, it finds the Snake (played by a model ’65 MINI Cooper) and realises that its followers and friends have formed a long snake behind it.
Promoting the new springy green colourway, the film visually resembles the Japanese stop-motion short anime series Pui Pui Molcar, while the plot is reminiscent of the 2006 Pixar film Cars.
On Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, the topic “Uncle Dong Hao new fable” amassed a whopping 190 million views. Dong Hao used to release cassette audiobooks of him telling stories, especially Aesop’s Fables, back in the day. Many online expressed their nostalgia for Dong’s soothing tone when reading stories. The campaign was well received online, similar to Dong’s Baidu app ad last year.
Apart from Dong Hao, MINI has been exploring other unexpected celebrity collaborations for its campaigns, another example being last year’s campaign with crosstalk comedian Yu Qian. While these creative campaigns did bring interest and “emotional value” to viewers, on the ground, the BMW-owned brand is still engaged in a price war with recent price adjustments to its EVs, sometimes as much as 20% off. Many feel that MINI need to come up with something different for it to compete in the market.
Need to boost your China strategy? Dao Pro delivers bespoke insights on marketing, innovation, and digital trends, direct from Chinese sources. Find out more from our Dao Strategy Team here.
