Mulberry captures the hearts of Chinese during China’s 2015 Valentine/Qixi Festival

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In today’s mobile-led era, the importance for relatively newer businesses to make a digital impact is all the more important. Mulberry understanding this, took forward with their marketing campaign for Qixi Festival, or Chinese Valentine’s Day in August 2015. Called “Mulberry Love Letters,” the Online to Offline campaign allows Chinese people based all over the world to send heartfelt messages over WeChat that, with the help of digital marketing firm Hot Pot Digital, Mulberry transforms into a custom image for the recipient.

 

• To bring people into their stores, Mulberry promised a selected number of recipients the opportunity to take their digital love letter into one of the participating shops in Shanghai, Beijing, London, Paris, New York, and Toronto to receive a handcrafted leather bracelet that could be personalized.
• Companies marketing during Qixi the past few years have attracted criticism over whether their campaign strategies traded Chinese tradition for Western-charged Valentine’s Day romance.
• It seems, though, that Mulberry has stuck with the Qixi legend on this one, where in the mythology surrounding the festival, every year on the seventh night of the seventh moon on the Chinese lunar calendar, two lovers who have been banished to either side of a river are able to reunite with the help of magpies who form a bridge across the water.
• Mulberry’s WeChat campaign may as well be those magpies, aiming to connect Chinese people separated by miles of land and ocean through social media.

 

“Given the global nature of today’s Chinese community, we felt it was important to recognize our Chinese customers in the UK, US, mainland Europe, and beyond,” said Mulberry Brand Director Anne-Marie Verdin. “We love the fact that Mulberry is helping our fans to reconnect with a little romance on this important day in the Chinese calendar.”