/PRZWT/Sept. 26, 2024 - As the most important sales season ** the year, FMCG companies naturally cannot let go ** the ****** Festival. However, compared with the complicated ****** Festival marketing activities, how to provide consumers with delicious, delicious, and cost-effective products is the key to FMCG companies' victory in the ****** Festival marketing war.
As we all know, candy represents sweetness and blessing, and is a must-have for every family during the Spring Festival. Benefiting from this, in recent years, the business of the top candy companies has been getting better and better.
With a few months to go before the Spring Festival in 2025, candy king Hsu Fu Chi is starting to prepare New Year's goods. This time their first push is New Year's sugar.
On September 24th, Xu Fuji joined hands with Michelin dessert chef, Focus Media chairperson Jiangnan Chun, Nestlé Greater China vice president of professional catering head Lu Hang, Nespresso Greater China general manager Lu Hanlin, well-known Chinese packaging designer Pan Hu and other big coffee, gathered in Shanghai Bund Peace Hotel to taste the New Year's sugar feast, for 1.40 billion people to select the 2025 Spring Festival New Year's sugar.
Why is New Year's sugar recommended?
As we all know, Hsu Fu Chi started with New Year's sugar, which is Hsu Fu Chi's biggest IP during the Spring Festival. It even gave people such a perception that "Hsu Fu Chi is New Year's sugar". Whenever the Spring Festival is approaching, the slogan "Eat Hsu Fu Chi New Year's sugar in the New Year" is flooded on platforms such as ladder media, high-speed rail stations, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, etc., reminding everyone that the New Year is here, and it's time to buy New Year's sugar again.
The data from CCTV Data Research Institute (CTR) and Media Convergence Research Institute in Guangzhou and Xi'an in January this year also confirms this: 94% of the audience remembered Hsu Fu Chi, and 97% of them were impressed by the New Year's sugar bucket.
Therefore, New Year's sugar is not allowed!
It is worth noting that the sales during the Spring Festival are particularly important for FMCG companies, including Hsu Fu Chi. It is reported that about 40% of Hsu Fu Chi's annual sales are completed during the Spring Festival. In other words, the Spring Festival is the peak sales season for Hsu Fu Chi every year.
Cai Dianru, general manager of the Hsu Fu Chi brand, said in an interview with Wugu Finance that Hsu Fu Chi used to rely more on direct-operated stores, but since the beginning of this year, the number of direct-operated stores has been shrinking, so the company team may need to put in more effort and will work harder, but there are still great opportunities in the market, especially in deep distribution. "We expect Hsu Fu Chi's overall sales to continue to maintain high single-digit growth this year, and some categories will see double-digit growth, such as fudge."
The top floor of the Peace Hotel that night was unique, with flowers decorating the long table of Western food, white tone embellished with red elements, which was very textured and showed the high-end atmosphere. With New Year's sugar products as creative inspiration and ingredients, the exquisite desserts and drinks cooked and prepared were presented in front of Michelin chefs and other chefs for tasting.
This is one of the purposes of this campaign, to redefine the content of Hsu Fu Chi's "ace" product New Year's sugar bucket, that is, what kind of delicious candy is eligible to be put into this sugar bucket to be "judged" by consumers.
After several rounds of PK, the final 8 candies stood out from more than 100 kinds of candies and successfully "entered" the 2025 Hsu Fu Chi Spring Festival New Year's sugar bucket. These candies will become sweet messengers for grandparents, parents, sons and daughters to talk at night and connect with each other during the Spring Festival reunion.
Why invite Michelin dessert chefs and other celebrities to choose New Year's sugar?
In this regard, Cai Dianru said: "In the New Year, New Year's sugar is essential. Therefore, Hsu Fu Chi people are very careful about the choice of New Year's sugar products, and must present good candy to consumers. So this year, we warmly invite Michelin chefs and other chefs to participate in the selection, aiming to use their professional perspective and picky taste to carefully select high-quality products for consumers to create Hsu Fu Chi's delicious and suitable New Year's candy for Chinese people. This also creates a precedent for Hsu Fu Chi to select New Year's sugar for 1.40 billion people."
With the increase in health awareness, more and more consumers are beginning to pursue low-sugar or sugar-free products, but delicious, delicious, and cost-effective products are still the first choice for consumers.
So how can we ensure that these New Year's candies are delicious and delicious?
Bao Xitao, general manager of Hsu Fu Chi Manufacturing, said that the complete and rigorous production system is the strong backing for our delicious products. Each candy is tested more than 200 times during the production process. Only with excellent product quality can every family be guaranteed to eat delicious candy.
It is not enough to invite chefs to taste the contents of the New Year's sugar bucket. Hsu Fu Chi also invited masters to upgrade the packaging sugar paper again.
Before the Spring Festival this year, the giant version of the New Year's sugar bucket designed by the famous Chinese product packaging design master Pan Hu became a traffic star and maxed out Moments as soon as it appeared in the Guangzhou flash mob event. The limited edition "conspicuous bag" designed according to this New Year's sugar bucket was snatched up when it was only sold to Hsu Fu Chi dealers. The scene was out of control for a while, and finally had to be "restricted".
Next year's Spring Festival, Hsu Fu Chi extended the design of the sugar bucket, and this time it focused on a new upgrade to the packaging of a single candy.
Pan Hu, who was invited to lead the design again, said: "The design of sugar paper is inspired by the traditional Chinese aesthetics. The combination of seawater cliff pattern and group pattern not only shows the profound heritage of traditional culture, but also gives sugar paper a unique artistic beauty."
This design also echoes the call of netizens to "co-create" Hsu Fu Chi products - to integrate elements of traditional Chinese classical clothing into the design of sugar paper. At this press conference, the ideal of netizens to "co-create" products came into reality.
This fusion of traditional art and modern aesthetics uses a small piece of candy paper as a medium to design each candy into a work of art that conveys traditional Chinese culture.
"This is Hsu Fu Chi's inheritance and innovation of traditional Chinese culture, and it reflects a high degree of confidence in traditional culture." Cai Dianru commented.
In fact, from the Sugar Dot family to the national classic snack brand, the best-selling Hsu Fu Chi for more than 30 years exudes a strong "Chinese flavor" and "national tide style", festival gifts, candy, jelly, Shaqima, chocolate... The "all-powerful" Hsu Fu Chi occupies every happy moment and scene of consumers.
"I have been to many places, such as Mount Emei and Lijiang, and many small stores have very few types of products. As a consumer, I regret it, but as the general manager of the Hsu Fu Chi brand, I also think this is an opportunity." Cai Dianru told Wugu Finance that there are still more than 6 million small stores or mom-and-pop stores in China. If Hsu Fu Chi, which used to focus on direct stores, can make its products appear in these small stores, the sales scale of that year is very impressive. "We have done field research, and Hsu Fu Chi's branding impression is still very high, so Hsu Fu Chi now attaches more importance to deep distribution, just to make Hsu Fu Chi products ubiquitous and always present. Of course, this process takes time."
In 2023, iiMedia Gold List released the "Top 10 Most Popular Chinese New Year Candy Gift Box Brands in China", and Hsu Fu Chi ranked first on the list, which is behind Hsu Fu Chi's unremitting pursuit of product innovation and market positioning.
In the future, Hsu Fu Chi will promote through online and offline channels, using social media, e-commerce platforms and traditional retail channels to form a comprehensive marketing matrix, and use in-depth distribution to convey the sweetness and blessings of "New Year's Sugar" to thousands of households.
