Enhance the Brand Concept: Nongfu Spring Plays Well with Innovation to Improve the Added Value of the Brand
10-13
When it comes to Nongfu Spring, one of the most impressive things that comes to people’s mind is the well-known slogan "we don not produce water. We are just porters of nature". Founded in 1996, "the porter of nature" has maintained the number one spot of the bottled water market in China for eight consecutive years since 2012. Aside from Nongfu Spring’s product quality, marketing also plays a big role in its development. Zhong Shanshan, the founder of Nongfu Spring who releases his natural gifts for advertising, not only creates many popular advertising slogans, but also implants the keywords such as "natural" and "healthy" deeply into the hearts of consumers, which gives a boost to the brand’s further development.
In 2013, Nongfu Spring started an activity named "Nongfu Spring tastes a bit sweet - the journey to explore water sources". After doing a good job in soft power side, Nongfu Spring turns to "witness" its efforts. Apart from a visit to the factory of Nongfu Spring, the target audience are supported to explore its water source on foot. People can feel the charming natural scenery of the water source, and at the same time learn about the production process of Nongfu Spring natural water: natural water is drawn from high mountains to the factory, purified by ultra-high temperature sterilization technology, and then comes into the production line where the water goes through various processes including bottle blowing, filling, capping, followed by labeling, coding and stacking. The target audience can see, listen and feel the production process directly and better understand Nongfu Spring from the source. Nongfu Spring makes consumers a walking advertisement speaking for the brand and enhances publicity of product quality, and at the same time supervises the production in line with high standards and strict requirements, thus opening up a new era of development.
In 2017, Nongfu Spring launched a marketing event named "a crying bottle of mineral water" in partnership with Netease Cloud Music, printing the most followed music reviews from this music platform on the bottle body of Nongfu Spring and making it warmly human with AR technology. To better communicate with young people, Nongfu Spring Victory Vitamin Water sponsored the phenomenal IP, The Rap of China, which expressed itself in the way that young people like and made the topic flood social media with the total broadcast volume exceeding 1 billion.
Do as the Romans do and have a dialogue with young people in a way that young people like, so ACGN stands as another breakthrough to this end. Tea π once partnered with Onmyoji, a mobile game IP, to promote Nongfu Spring fruit flavored water products. Nongfu Spring establishes a deep and comprehensive crossover cooperation with Onmyoji, including authorized animation characters as well as prize draw in game, and with the help of this hugely-popular IP, Nongfu Spring successfully opens up the fruit flavored water market and develops consumer loyalty. It follows that Nongfu Spring plays well with ACGN. Crossover, to some degree, represents an integration of different lifestyles, emotional demands and manners, which enables different brands that have nothing to do with each other to penetrate and integrate with the other. Nongfu Spring’s crossover cooperation with Netease Cloud Music, the Palace Museum and other super IPs not only fosters dialogue with young people but also makes itself rich in historical and cultural connotations. Brands choose to be title sponsors of variety shows mostly for their strong online influence. With a great insight into variety shows, Nongfu Spring sponsors those hugely-popular IPs to establish contact with users and present its brand content to young consumers from another perspective, thus achieving the goal of capturing young people.
In 2018, Nongfu Spring launched an advertisement named Winter of the Water Source in Changbai Mountain with the theme "high quality water sources nurture healthy life". But the advertisement is more a documentary than an advertising film, which is shot on location in Changbai Mountain and records approximate 2800 kinds of plants and 1500 kinds of animals living there through the lens, including rare northeast tiger, Chinese merganser, sable, sika deer and other animals. Nongfu Spring is obsessed with creating advertising content with a craftsman spirit and attracting target audiences through content, thus making "originality", "breath-taking beauty", "the most beautiful documentary in history" and "smart advertising" the labels of Nongfu Spring. It also creates buzz and boosts traffic on Weibo, provides further integrated report through Wechat, and cooperates other platforms to support its marketing efforts and to attract media attention.
Every step of Nongfu Spring closely follows its brand concept, making the product packaging an advertising platform and creative advertisements the heart of its marketing topics. Nongfu Spring also proofs by its deeds that advertising is content and product is marketing. It is expected that Nongfu Spring will deliver better products to consumers in the coming days.