Recently my instagram algorithm has decided to serve me up what I’m describing as programming from a series of Chinese industrial manufacturers. I assume they’re predominantly B2B businesses but they also sell D2C and it’s their consumer marketing on social media that’s reached me and frankly has me hooked. Truly it has no business being as good as it is! especially because it’s somehow balancing largely unrelatable, on the nose BUY NOW messaging with some of the pillars of entertainment-based marketing that earn salience when deployed well.
What’s Up Homie?
Meet Tony, or rather the many faces of Tony.
He’s the face of LCSign, a Guangzhou based company that makes light up display signs for commercial use and they have one party line : we make eye catching, easy to use commercial signage and ship it worldwide. I have no need for anything even close to this so why am I so invested in their brand? It entertains me is why, because their content features some hallmarks of entertainment:
Memorable character? ✅
Hooky catchphrase? ✅
Surprises from start to finish? ✅
And they repeat the same schtick again and again making it unforgettable.
Budget? 0. But it doesn’t matter because I’m not expecting anything from them let alone something of high production value and frankly you don’t need a big budget to deliver the above qualities.
In the same vein is Chinese livable pod brand Etong, a company selling mildly dystopian pre-fab living spaces to individuals, hotels and political regimes, probably. IG has served me a handful of carbon copy companies selling the same thing (presumably all served by the same factory) and I’ve seen ads that focus on rational, feature-first, appeals and other ads that portray these pods as aspirational living arrangements for the modern female Vlogger.
But Etong stands out because rather than telling me about the pods or trying to show how they fit into a made up lifestyle, they treat their product as a supporting character in a larger narrative. Their ads play out more like a soap opera than a commercial, where the product benefit is buried deep within an entertaining series of stories full of drama, infidelity, love triangles and unplanned pregnancies, incest even! Truly a series fit for daytime TV, hell even Netflix.
And all done, like LCSign, on less than a shoestring budget.
The reason why this stuff interests me so much is the way these companies instinctively and independently deploy tactics that established agencies find hard to come up with let alone sell through to their clients. Honestly it’s also because I’m not expecting to be entertained by these brands: the contrast of who they are and what they’re selling with how they’re selling it is entertaining in its own right. But going back to the first point, it’s nice to see that it doesn’t take years of thinking and planning and uphill battles and big budgets for brands to utilize entertainment to cut through the noise.
The Spread
It takes merely a human understanding of what makes people feel to know what levers to pull to keep them engaged. We’re as hungry as ever for content but the industrial-scale content farms of the mainstream platforms are no longer passing the smell test; their metallic, mechanized shows and movies are increasingly greeted by fatigue. So much so that we’d rather spend hours diving into the social media marketing lore of Chinese industrial manufacturers than watch an episode of [insert the latest same-guy show from Netflix/Hulu/Disney etc].
More from Chinese Instagram:
A years supply of Chungwhas for whoever guesses what @yozenkin does on the days when he’s not smoking 100 darts and drinking 12 beers whilst eating god damn everything in China, alone. How often have you actually ran out a lighter let alone the one in your bathroom.
And how have the cooking, rapping grannies @wangdajie2023 got neither a record deal or a cooking show yet?
Join the conversation on Discord.
Discuss whether Etong’s adulterous main character, Jacob, can ever really change and more in the terminally online channel of the Mayonnaise Discord server.
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