On December 18, Meituan Waimai (美团外卖) announced actor-singer Jay Chou (周杰伦) as its new brand ambassador. In two official campaign videos, Chou’s classic songs and film-era dialogue set the tone, but the message itself angles much more towards the operational than the nostalgic: one-to-one delivery, and delivery within 20 minutes.
The announcement lands at a telling time. Rather than signalling another escalation in China’s long-running food-delivery price war, the campaign suggests Meituan is pivoting toward a different battleground altogether – brand trust, service certainty, and user mindshare.
The backdrop: a rivalry shaped by subsidies
For much of the past decade, competition in China’s food-delivery market has been defined by subsidies. Platforms including Meituan, Alibaba-backed Ele.me, and JD.com treated food delivery less as a profit centre and more as a strategic gateway into local services, instant retail, and high-frequency consumer behaviour.
Discounts, red-packet campaigns, free delivery and aggressive promotions were designed to lock users into ecosystems, even at the cost of sustained losses. According to reporting by Sixth Tone, China’s major platforms collectively burned through hundreds of billions of yuan in subsidies during successive rounds of food-delivery competition, with limited evidence of lasting structural advantage for any single player.
That model has increasingly come under strain. User growth has slowed, marginal returns on subsidies have diminished, and both investors and regulators have become less tolerant of open-ended cash burn.
Over the past year, senior executives across platforms have begun signalling a pullback. Alibaba has said it will significantly scale back related spending, while Meituan management has stated that losses in its delivery business have peaked and that it has no intention of continuing price-led competition indefinitely.
The Meituan Jay Chou partnership: a market recalibrates
The result is a quieter but more consequential shift. Rather than fighting for users through ever-deeper discounts, platforms are refocusing on retention, service quality, and higher-value orders. The emphasis has moved from cheapest to worth it.
This is the context in which the Meituan Jay Chou partnership makes sense. High-profile endorsements are hardly new to the platform. In earlier phases, Meituan leaned on younger, traffic-driven stars to accelerate user acquisition. In 2023, signing Liu Yifei marked a transition toward image building and brand stability. Jay Chou represents the next step in that evolution.
As one of the few Chinese-language pop icons whose influence spans multiple generations, Jay Chou reaches students, young professionals, and middle-aged consumers alike. That breadth mirrors the food-delivery user base today, which is no longer a youth-centric market driven by novelty and discounts, but a mass utility embedded in daily life. In a slower-growth environment, cross-generational familiarity and trust matter more than short-term buzz.
Meiutan, Jay Chou, and speed as a strategic promise
Crucially, the campaign does not rely on celebrity appeal alone. The ads repeatedly foreground a concrete service claim: one-to-one express delivery – where drivers take only your order – with an average 20-minute time saving. Operationally, the promise implies fewer stacked orders and clearer delivery expectations – a premium-leaning signal in a category long dominated by price sensitivity.
In the post-subsidy landscape, this matters. As platforms retreat from blanket discounts, users are being asked to pay closer to full price. Reliability, speed, and certainty become decisive factors in platform choice. Meituan’s bet is that fulfilment efficiency – rather than coupons – can lock in loyalty among high-value users who prioritise convenience over marginal savings.
The emphasis on one-to-one delivery also reframes competition. Instead of matching rivals discount for discount, Meituan is attempting to set a new baseline for what “good” delivery looks like, turning operational capability into brand identity.
From price wars to mindshare wars
The Meituan Jay Chou appointment, then, is less a celebrity splash than a strategic signal. It reflects an industry moving beyond subsidy-fuelled expansion toward a phase defined by efficiency, experience, and emotional resonance.
The question now is whether Meituan can convert that message into durable trust – and whether its rivals will follow with similar brand- and service-led plays of their own. If the last chapter of China’s food-delivery rivalry was written in coupons and cash burn, the next may be decided by who owns the consumer’s sense of reliability when price is no longer the loudest voice in the room.
