Talking About the Success of Wei Long Hotstrip (卫龙辣条) from A Customer Segmentation Perspective

Wang Yiqi, 1155081724

“La Tiao” (辣条), Chinese snack food, also known as “hotstrip”, is gaining increasing popularity recently. Among all hotstrip brands, Wei Long (卫龙) stands out due to its perfect combination of demographic and psychographic segmentation, as well as, its excellent communication strategies and tactics that match its target customers.

1.     Combination of Demographic and Psychographic Segmentation

     In terms of demographic segmentation, Wei Long mainly targets at post 90s and 00s as they mostly love eating snacks and have a fancy for food with spicy and strong flavor. Though they do not have much buying power, they certainly can afford a pack of Wei Long hostrip (106g) that costs about 4 Yuan, and more importantly, they are loyal to brands they fall in love with. Also, according to census, post 90s (0.17 billion) and 00s (0.15 billion) takes up nearly a quarter of Chinese population (1.3 billion), making sure Wei Long can continuously generate a great many revenues from them.

Having had a thorough analysis of post 90s and 00s, Wei Long further generated a deep understanding towards their interests, personality and lifestyle in the aspect of psychographic segmentation. According to VALS 2 Typology, its target customers are a combination of experiencers and strivers, who are not only enthusiastic, impulsive, seeking excitement, but also trendy and in pursuit of fun. Therefore, based on this discovery, Wei Long designed a series of communication strategies and tactics that focused on fun, successfully meeting psychologic needs of post 90s and post 00s and attracting great attention among them, which would be talked in next paragraphs.

2.  Communication Strategies and Tactics That Match Target Customers

(1) Co-branding with rage comics

In 2016, Wei Long co-branded with rage comics (暴走漫画), releasing a series of new packaging with rage face emoticons. The new packaging also integrates some network buzzwords with rage face emoticons, such as “I am tired of having been suffering from the wisdom and the handsome face that people of my age should not have… (我一直承受着同龄人不该有的智慧和帅气，我好累……)”.

Wei Long co-branded with rage comics

It was a successful co-branding and largely increased sales of Wei Long. As rage comics tell stories about real life experiences with a humorous punchline and exaggerated facial expressions, it easily resonates with post 90s and 00s who are fun-loving and therefore enjoys great popularity among them. Because Wei Long’s target customers are also post 90s and 00s, their co-branding turned out to be a perfect match, which enabled Wei Long to benefit from rage comics’ popularity and transfer it into sales.

In addition, the co-branding also led to a burst of UGC among post 90s and 00s who are in pursuit of fun. It boosted their enthusiasm to generate emoticons that combine both rage face emoticons and Wei Long hotstrip. These emoticons were so interesting that they quickly became popular in WeChat and Weibo. As a result, Wei Long hotstrip had increasing awareness and became a hot topic among post 90s and 00s.

User-generated emoticons that combine rage faces and Wei Long hotstrip

(2) Parodying iPhone advertising

When Apple launched iPhone 7 in early September, 2016, Wei Long also released its new product Hotstrip 7.0 in its Weibo account and Tmall store, parodying iPhone 7 from its product name to its advertising copy and layout.

Wei Long parodied iPhone advertising

The parody obviously attracts fun-loving post 90s and 00s. And in addition to fun-loving, Wei Long wisely captured another characteristic of post 90s and 00s in this campaign, which is trendy. As iPhone is perceived as a stylish product, its image is in line with Wei Long’s trendy target customers. By parodying iPhone 7, Wei Long builds a fashionable, high-end image as well, which differentiates it from other hotstrip brands. It becomes the “iPhone” in hotstrip industry and therefore wins hearts of those trendy post 90s and 00s.

What is more, as post 90s and 00s pay close attention to what is happening all over the world in order not to be left behind, they would certainly follow Apple new product launch event. Therefore, Wei Long successfully promoted itself by taking advantage of the popularity of iPhone 7 launch, and used the parody to shift their attention from iPhone 7 launch event to itself.

To summarize, Wei Long perfectly combines demographic segmentation with psychographic segmentation, which lays solid foundation for its communication strategies and tactics. Then according to their characteristics – fun-loving and trendy, it co-branded with rage-comics and parodied iPhone 7 advertising, not only taking advantage of popularity of rage-comics and iPhone 7 launch, but also meeting psychological needs of post 90s and 00s. This is why Wei Long gains fame among post 90s and 00s and stands out in hotstrip industry.

References:

什么，卫龙辣条挖来了苹果的平面设计师和营销总监？！

http://www.jiemian.com/article/847609.html

卫龙你“攀高枝”上瘾哈！苹果风模仿的有模有样的！
http://www.istarlife.com/w/case/?detail=16