WeChat Case Study: Pepsi ‘brings happiness home’ for Chinese New Year

During the lunar new year period, Chinese people send good wishes to friends and family. This case study looks at how PepsiCo, as part of a huge annual holiday campaign called “Bring Happiness Home,” gave the tradition a twist.


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Pepsi China’s “Bring Happiness Home” campaign blitz, in its third year running, had a WeChat feature that let followers send their own voice recordings to the account and have them remixed into a customized Pepsi theme song to share with friends and loved ones.
WeChat has a heavy focus on audio messages as many Chinese people prefer that to texting because typing in characters is time-consuming.
As a result, users could record an audio message on the Pepsi ad that would get mixed in with a soundtrack of the well-known “Bring Happiness Home” theme song.
“You could also add in effects like the sound of a train, and say, ‘Mom, I’m on my way home,'” said Tim Cheng, chief creative officer of DDB Group Shanghai, which created the campaign. Another sound offer was a horse’s gallop, to conincide with the Year of the Horse.
The brand message, coming mostly from the theme song, was subtle.
“It’s about spreading happiness, as opposed to ‘buy Pepsi,'” Cheng said.