4 Lunar New Year Marketing Tips for 2024

Lunar New Year is here. Also known as Chinese New Year, it’s one of the biggest holidays celebrated by millions of people. Such worldwide holiday fever is a golden opportunity. For years, many local and global brands always go all out on their Lunar New Year marketing campaigns. And so should you.

This year’s zodiac animal

In the Chinese zodiac, 2024 is the Year of the Dragon. More specifically, the Year of the Wood Dragon, a uniquely rare and lucky year that is highly anticipated and celebrated across Asia.

This year’s festive season, the celebrations start on February 10th and throughout the region people and businesses are gearing up for major celebrations for this uniquely auspicious year. How can marketers capture the opportunities that this celebration represents – particularly with Asian audiences? We offer some thoughts below:

Red Envelope

In traditional Chinese culture, it’s common to hand out red packets during Lunar New Year – both physical and, increasingly, digital. Approx. 600 million red envelopes will be shared upwards of 4 billion times. These are often branded and a great way for companies to reach new eyes, and even viral attention.

Lesson to marketers:

Consider creating your own Lunar New Year campaigns with branded packets, limited edition items and greetings that can help to increase brand awareness, particularly when shared on leading Chinese digital platform, WeChat, which has over 1.26 billion active users.

Little Red Book

Looking for social media trends during the Spring Festival? Little Red Book, one of the leading lifestyle platforms for young people in China, released a recent report titled Insights on Social Media Trends for Young People in the 2024 Chinese New Year. One of the key findings was that “post-90s young people have become the new generation of hosts for Lunar New Year”. This group is highly digital and actively looking for content offering fun ways to celebrate, shopping guides, unique hosting suggestions and ideas on what food to serve.

Lesson to marketers:

For those operating in the consumer or lifestyle space, Little Red Book is an essential platform to reach Asian millennials with spending power. The Lunar New Year represents a great opportunity to gain traction from topical and practical content, particularly when combined with the e-commerce integrations that the platform offers.

Livestreaming

Already a well-established and highly popular selling technique in China, live-streaming sees even bigger peaks during key festivals like Lunar New Year. This year Douyin (TikTok), will launch its New Year Goods Festival. There is plenty of buzz about the event, with user searches for keywords ‘New Year Goods’ increasing by 45% year-on-year.

Lesson to marketers:

Live-streaming is a key sales channel in China and should be built into the marketing strategy of any brand trying to reach Asian audiences. This isn’t limited to consumer goods, there are even channels that live-stream about B2B hardware and software that are extremely popular and effective sales channels.

Embracing Symbolism

The Lunar New Year is a time of symbols and lucky numbers – people decorate their homes with blessings and they display items meant to symbolise wealth, heath, fertility, family, new beginnings anything they hope for in the coming year. Over the years, brands have increasingly embraced this festive season as a time to create bespoke products or Lunar New Year campaigns that reference these symbols. And with retail sales hitting USD5 billion last year, it’s clear to see why so many brands feel this is worthwhile.

Lesson to marketers:

Consider creating Lunar New Year marketing campaigns or limited-edition products in-line with the coming Lunar New Year. This can be a great way to capture audience attention in markets like China. However, be sure to work with someone who really understands the market and can advise on what will be appreciated versus seen as cynical or insincere.

This above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the potential of China. For those who understand how to navigate it, the Asian market is full of opportunities and, in the Year of the Dragon, full of luck!