Image source @ Visual China
Text | Kaiboluocaijing, author | Su Qi, Editor | Golden Dragon
It's the annual "year-end gift-giving difficulties" season.
Chinese has always attached great importance to the Spring Festival, during which it has become a traditional custom to give gifts and blessings to each other. In the past, gift-giving was often very simple, tobacco, alcohol, sugar and tea, plus New Year goods and red envelopes. Nowadays, with the economic development and changes in consumer psychology and demand, gift-giving is becoming more and more exquisite. It is necessary to be both decent and healthy, but also intimate and different, coupled with the fact that the epidemic has disrupted the original Rhythm of the Spring Festival, the selection of a gift, and it cannot be wrong.
The matter of "gift-giving" has not only become a profound science, but also begun to be segmented. In the words of the video blogger, gift-giving is the core of Chinese-to-earth communication, learning to give gifts, the road is getting wider and wider, will not give gifts, and even eat "stuffy losses".
In order to give a "high-quality gift for human beings", the younger generation began to learn the "gift list" and "gift list" on social platforms, and found that they would not give gifts, and they could not afford to give gifts. Open these lists, per capita "XXX Hermès", "10 yuan cup can also drink water, but must send 1 thousand", "to be niche to the person who received the gift does not know the goods"...
Young people have not learned how to give gifts, and those bloggers who teach young people to "give gifts" and sell goods and lessons in this name have made a lot of money. There are also new consumer brands that want to make "gifts", but this year these consumer upstarts may have to disappoint young people, and overall, "creativity is flat".
There is no standard answer to gift-giving, but young people still have to rack their brains year after year. But perhaps, the ultimate mystery of the gift is hidden in the details of life, and the ultimate meaning of the gift is the word "heart".
New Year gifts, where is the difficulty?
Every New Year, whether they are in Tiannan or Haibei, young people are always overwhelmed by the same question: When the Spring Festival arrives, what gifts should we give to our parents, relatives, and colleagues?
Gift-giving is a test of the heart, and the Spring Festival gift-giving is a double test of emotional intelligence and financial resources.
Shuangshuang, who has been working outside for many years, told Kai Pineapple Finance that the thought of choosing gifts for herself and her lover's parents, the elders and juniors in the family, the leaders and customers in the workplace, has a headache. With 20 days to go until the first day of the Chinese New Year, she already felt that there was not enough time.
Six user gift objects become family members Image source / Ai Media Consulting
However, this big test cannot hand over the white paper, and the gift that should be given must be prepared carefully.
"When I was a child, my mother would take stock of the gifts at home, who sent them, while teaching me how to return the gifts, the most important one was to receive gifts from others, and there must be more than one, otherwise the relationship chain may be broken." Double weighing. Gift-giving was originally prepared by her mother, but she just got married in 2021, and it is time to learn to prepare her own gifts.
The reason why the gift-giving process cannot be wrong is because the gift exchange forms the initial economic flow.
Others send gifts worth 100 yuan to the door, and they need to return gifts at a standard of 110 yuan or even higher, which produces a "return on investment". At the same time, giving gifts to others at home will also get similar returns, gifts are still exchanged, and funds flow with human feelings.
Nie Huihua, a researcher at the National Development Institute of Chinese Min University and a professor at the School of Economics, told Kai Pineapple Finance and Economics that in the farming society, as large as the Spring Festival, as small as a certain family with red and white happy events, housewarming and building houses, they will carry out "crowdfunding" through banquets to alleviate the financial burden. When other families also need large expenses, helping others is equivalent to inter-period financing and mutual investment. This is an effective way to solve the problem of large expenditures in traditional societies where the formal financial system is underdeveloped and household savings are relatively small.
"With the development of economic conditions, social security has been relatively perfect, these functions have been weakened, and now the New Year gifts and the pressure of the old money are more of an investment in social interaction, which is used to consolidate interpersonal relationships and the network of relatives and friends." Nie Huihua concluded.
Gift-giving is nerve-wracking, and because the value of the gift is high, it cannot be simply calculated.
Dou Donghui, a professor of psychology at the Central University of Finance and Economics, explained that the value of gifts is composed of three aspects: the value of the item itself, the use value of the gift, and the emotional added value of the gift, and the modern people give gifts for the purpose of maximizing emotional benefits, so the value is even more immeasurable.
Different people may evaluate the value of gifts received in very different ways, so there is no standard answer for gifts. Shuangshuang has a deep understanding of this, "to give gifts to the elders, I really don't know how to vote for their liking, send to the heart", if the sending is too high-end, the face is there, but the other party is simple and frugal, not necessarily practical, but easy to cause pressure; I really don't know what to send cigarettes and wine, money is a lot of money, but I can't show the heart of the gift giver.
In a video of a street interview on the Internet, many elderly people complained that a New Year received dozens of boxes of milk, and they could not drink until they expired; the charging treasure sent by the younger generation could not be used at all, because they rarely went out, and the mobile phone would not run out; the air purifier received was also very chicken ribs, because the air in the hometown was very good, and they preferred to open the window for ventilation.
Source / Screenshot of the "Spring Festival Gift-giving Lightning Protection Guide" released by the main "Ankangtong Smart Pension" of Station B
Gifts are not well chosen, and the people who give gifts and receive gifts are uncomfortable at both ends. Shuangshuang sighed, "The learning of gift-giving is deeper than being a person."
Who makes gift-giving more and more "rolled"?
In order to give "high-quality gifts to human beings", gift givers began to search the Internet for answers.
Unexpectedly, the anxious "gift giver" has given a variety of guides and grass bloggers the opportunity to "just eat", or the "inner volume" atmosphere brought up by the bloggers on social platforms has contributed to the anxiety of young people's gift-giving.
It has been observed that in order to highlight their "knowledge" and the weight of the recommended list, bloggers use more words than one "volume" in their copywriting - limited edition, one shot into the soul, say no to invalid gifts, gift ceilings, large pattern gifts, etc. To this end, the Internet has even fermented hot search topics such as "if there is a paragraph for gifts".
"New Year gifts" have pain points and topics, and there is traffic and business. According to The Pineapple Finance And Economics Observation, lifestyle, emotional, and emotional intelligence training accounts use "teach you to give gifts" to attract traffic and do goods.
The most passionate about teaching gifts is lifestyle bloggers. Taking a blogger who focuses on lifestyle sharing as an example, at first, he shared videos such as luxury unboxing and niche brand recommendation on social accounts, which were always tepid, and most of them only had a few hundred likes. Until the end of 2020, a video of a "Versailles gift" allowed him to master the traffic password, and his likes and collections exceeded 10,000.
In his comment area, there is even a treatment that bloggers have only a fire - "class representative", that is, there will be users who will spontaneously summarize the video content as key points and publish it in the comment area, saving users time. The blogger himself said in the comments section, "It seems that the theme of this issue is OK." Subsequently, the blogger put this video to the top, and in 2021, he opened a review, unboxing, recommendation column, and the sequel of "Versailles Gift", embarking on the road to monetization.
A variety of "Versailles gift-giving" guides
Nowadays, "Versailles gift" has become a popular keyword on the Little Red Book, click on the keywords, you can see that beauty and skin care, clothing wear, fitness bloggers, good things group buying bloggers, etc. are cutting "cakes". Their videos are mostly recommended with the labels of "tasteful", "exaggerated" and "sent to the heart", but many bloggers have obvious intentions of "just eating", marking in the comment area "marking a secret code when purchasing can be discounted", or directly saying "come to the live room to buy".
However, many bloggers' recommendations will be directly "punched in the face" by users. For example, recently with the heat of the meta-universe, a VR all-in-one machine has taken the New Year gift as the selling point, and has been ruthlessly pointed out by users that the advertisement is too obvious and a bit out of place.
"New Year gifts" were also dug out of the doorway by another batch of accounts. Kai Pineapple Finance found that on short video platforms, emotional accounts, emotional intelligence training accounts, etc., are also good at rubbing the traffic of "gift-giving".
Emotional accounts usually lead to a couple, sharing daily life, from love, marriage to having children, throughout the parents of the short and sophisticated, different times, different groups of people, different occasions of the picking and gift-giving, is one of the themes they share most often.
Emotional intelligence training accounts often take "gift-giving" as a case, exporting the "emotional intelligence education" of people in the world, and some even extend to the thick black study of the workplace and the official field, preaching that "if you do not give gifts well, you will self-destruct your future".
From the perspective of monetization methods, emotional accounts have accumulated a fan base because of the foreshadowing of family life content, for example, under an unboxed video of a New Year's gift to parents, users have commented on "a collection of relative gifts soon", even if some videos mark ads, there will be user comments "arrange for mothers". The gift-giving instructional video of the emotional intelligence training account often directly adds the content of the book to be sold at the end of the video, which is conducive to conversion and purchase.
On the short video platform, the copywriting is similar to the "gift-giving learning" video
However, many respondents said that some bloggers exaggerated the importance of "gift-giving", and if people exchange gifts with each other, if they exceed the boundaries of expressing emotions, mix too many utilitarian purposes and become the carrier of comparison, it will violate the original intention of etiquette exchanges.
Consumer brand, creative mediocre
It is not only the blogger group that eats the "gift-giving" cake, but also the brand and e-commerce platform.
Ai media consulting data show that from 2018 to 2020, the market size of China's gift economy industry increased from 800 billion yuan to 1,091.3 billion yuan, showing a trend of increasing year by year, and the market size is expected to reach 1,156.8 billion yuan in 2021 and 1,226.2 billion yuan in 2022.
In 2021, the user purchase gift channel is mainly based on the online integrated e-commerce platform Image source / Ai Media Consulting
The launch of special products and limited gift boxes combined with the Chinese zodiac signs during the Spring Festival is a tacit understanding of consumer brands for many years. The Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger in 2022 is approaching, and new consumer brands have also begun to rub "tiger" oil, fighting for creativity, gimmicks and feelings.
In addition to the snack brands such as three squirrels and good shops that are mainly focusing on New Year goods, brands in other industries also have different postures for "tiger" oil.
This year's popular IP, when the number of Uncle Ma's "I am not a fat tiger". The figure of this fat tiger frequently appears in major shopping malls and bags and clothing. Blind box players have also benefited from this, 52TOYS launched a new series of blind boxes for Fat Tiger Trick Plus Dawa and Fat Tiger with Baby; Jiumu Miscellaneous Society launched a "I am not a fat tiger" joint chili potted plant. It is expected that in 2022, more brands will build more peripherals around the IP.
VARIOUS CO-NAMES OF THE IP "I AM NOT A FAT TIGER"
In contrast, Bubble Mart chose to let its all-IP unified release of the "Tiger Leap New Year" series of blind boxes, of which only the blind box of the ace IP Molly is related to the tiger, which is the "Tiger Tiger Shengwei" model.
This year's main co-branded models of the beverage industry, such as Seesaw coffee and perfume brand Guanxia jointly created a pop-up space, Guanxia released the "Zhao Cai Tiger" candle gift box, Seesaw released the "Love Tiger Grapefruit" special tune; and Yuanqi Forest directly and Disney co-branded, launched the Tigger series milk tea gift box.
Lingerie brands naturally do not miss the New Year dividend, inside and outside, Ubras, banana inside and outside, Ubras, banana have cleverly launched a red underwear/pants set with a tiger pattern, respectively, mainly New Year red and honmei red, respectively, banana also with the artist Zhu Jingyi jointly released a gift box, including socks, hats and scarves.
New Year red is the main color of the Spring Festival of lingerie brands
Compared with foreign beauty brands that have added tiger patterns to their main products, domestic beauty new consumer brands have not made an article on "tigers", but have only released New Year's limited models. For example, Perfect Diary has a New Year's limited lip glaze, the outer packaging is designed in the style of red packets, and the names of the 4 new colors represent a New Year's wish. Hua Xizi packaged the old concentric lock lipstick and honey powder box into a "Little Honey Language" gift box and added 4 red envelopes to sell together.
The most "Buddhist" is the new tea industry. Xicha and Naixue's tea have not yet launched the New Year's limited peripheral, they are more focused on the first cup of milk tea in 2022, respectively, the sale of new flavors - Xicha main peach series, Naixue's tea main black mulberry series. Previously, Xicha launched a New Year gift box with PEACEBIRD in 2019, a gift box jointly signed with "Qingming On the River Map" in the Spring Festival of 2020, and a "new life gift box" in 2021.
The perception of many consumers is that the Spring Festival gift boxes of these consumer brands do not have too many creative and memory points, and more brands seem to have "abandoned" the New Year marketing war.
Some industry insiders pointed out that in response to the problem of excessive packaging, in September 2021, the state introduced a "mandatory standard", so unlike "relying on packaging to complete creativity", many consumer brands have converged a lot of New Year gift boxes this year.
"At the same time, these products focus on sensory stimulation such as watching, playing, sniffing, etc., and pay more attention to allegorical gimmicks and tonal transmission, such as those used by young people to send to couples and friends, which is different from the practical and sales methods of traditional New Year gift boxes." The above-mentioned industry insiders said.
In the final analysis, neither the bloggers in the inner volume nor the consumer brands that take advantage of the situation may make young people more "smart" in gift-giving, after all, the most important thing in gift-giving is the heart.
*At the request of the interviewee, both are pseudonyms in this article.