Around the end of July, the international pizza chain Pizza Hut announced its collaboration with the Chinese canned herbal tea brand Wong Lo Kat (王老吉). A little more than a week later, the two brands announced a second phase of the team-up: specially decorated themed restaurants.
The collaboration includes two co-branded cold drinks, one hand-muddled lemon and calamansi tea and a hand-muddled citron americano coffee with Lavazza beans, both laced with Wong Lo Kat herbal tea. Wong Lo Kat is known to dispel ‘heat’ (shanghuo, or yeet hay as in Cantonese) in the body, either from cuisines or the climate. As the heat outside rages, an icy glass of Wong Lo Kat is much needed. On the 4 and 9 August, Pizza Hut and Wong Lo Kat unveiled their co-branded restaurants, specially decorated in Pizza Hut locations in 11 cities across China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and Hangzhou etc. Not only do these branches incorporate “check-in” (打卡) spots for photoshoots, but they also include exclusive merch such as a fan and a pair of flip-flops for your summer days.
In the punny fashion of many recent campaigns, the tagline of the collaboration was “吉时必爽” (ji shi bi Shuang), a play on words with “即时必爽” meaning “instant cool”. “吉”, which represents Wong Lo Kat’s brand name, is used instead of “即” as a pun, as they share the same ‘ji’ pronunciation in Mandarin (‘kat’ in Cantonese). The rest of the tagline ‘必爽’ (bi shuang) is also a play on words from Pizza Hut’s Chinese name ‘必胜客’ (bi sheng ke). When combining the new characters all together, the tagline is then understood as “fortunate cool” or “cool kat”. The topic #吉时必爽# gained a modest 173,000 views on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent.
Pizza Hut has been launching collaboration after collaboration, from the video games Justice (逆水寒), Eggy Party and the newly returned World of Warcraft to automaker Wuling Motors. Meanwhile, both Pizza Hut and Wong Lo Kat have been experimenting with unconventional flavours such as durian pizza burgers and cola-flavoured fizzy herbal tea. It would seem that the latest partnership shows a combination of the two tactics with the citrus-and-herbs-flavoured Americano from the collab.
