Mid-Autumn Festival is an important event in the Chinese calendar. It’s a chance to catch up with family, return to your hometown, and take a much-needed week off from work. It’s also a time for businesses to plug their brands. Walmart’s Mid-Autumn Festival ad campaign has done it with a touch of finesse.
In the ads, Walmart (沃尔玛) uses artful techniques to overcome the inherent challenge of marketing fresh produce. That challenge being when advertised on screen, you miss the produce’s chief feature: taste.
Not content to overcome hurdles, the campaign also demonstrates a solid knowledge of Chinese traditions important to consumers and displays a neat sleight of hand.
Walmart’s campaign: Echoes from Nature
The first thing to know is that this campaign is primarily for TV spots – that’ll come back into focus later. Titled Echos from Nature (入口有声音) – or The Entrance Has a Voice if you take a more literal translation – it’s a series of four ads promoting a message of freshness and the careful selection of Walmart produce.
To do this, they put a subject in the midst of nature. Hair is caught in a breeze, rain is sheltered from under the eaves of woodland houses, a figure cycles across the backdrop of Guangxi’s karst mountains.
But what really stands out is the sound design. The back half of the ads are set to Chen Jingfei’s calming voice (陈婧霏) singing The Sunset Elsewhere (别处的夕阳). Our UK readership might look back to M&S’s famous use of Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross in their food ads for a western parallel.
Despite this, the spotlight isn’t on the music. The focus is on sound mastered to a near-ASMR pleasure level. A raindrop doesn’t just sound like water hitting the deck, it near enough soothes you to sleep. Apples are placed in a basket with a pleasing tap. Wind feels like it’s blowing just for you.
Here comes the mastery: when someone actually bites that apple, or they sink their teeth into a mooncake, you’re so tuned in to the pleasure of the accompanying noise that its comparable to the joy of actually eating the thing. Walmart swapped the pleasure of taste for one your TV can actually provide: the pleasure of sound.
Mid-Autumn Festival and Walmart’s view of the bigger picture
There are two smart moves at play in Walmart’s Mid-Autumn ads. The first demonstrates an astute knowledge of Chinese consumer behavior – the type of knowledge that can win you major points in the Chinese market. It’s the understanding of their market’s love of tradition and Mid-Autumn Festival’s traditional roots as a harvest festival – the ideal time to advertise fresh produce.
Second is the aforementioned sleight of hand. Walmart is familiar with the techniques of modern marketing. Much like those at Christmas or Thanksgiving in the west, adverts around Chinese traditional festivals usually involve lots of people, family and friends coming together, screens crowded with happy faces, the loud noises of celebration.
Walmart’s Echoes of Nature campaign does the opposite. The subjects of its adverts are solo, alone. The soundscape is quiet. Gone is the noise of the many, instead each sound plays out one at a time.
Ultimately, Walmart’s campaign succeeds because it unites sensory marketing with cultural intelligence. It takes a festival built around the harvest and reimagines it through a modern lens – using sound to speak for taste, solitude to stand out from the crowd, and silence to create space. It’s a reminder to brands that great storytelling doesn’t shout, it listens.
