Editor's Introduction: If you ask who is the top of the Beijing Winter Olympics these days? The mascot "Ice Pier" must have a name! From the initial lack of interest, to the current "one pier is difficult to find", what is the reason for such a big change? The authors share their views, let's take a look.
A week ago, you may not remember the opening time of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and you can't describe what the mascot of the Winter Olympics looks like, but these days you probably also found that the ice pier has suddenly become a trend vane that is being discussed wildly on various social platforms.
Strangely enough, as the mascot of the 24th Beijing Winter Olympic Games, the ice pier seems to have received little attention since the image was announced in September 2019 (Note: the snow melted into the mascot of the 13th Beijing Winter Paralympic Games in the same period).
At the beginning of the unveiling, the ice pier was even once complained about by netizens because of its stupid image, such as some netizens who designed a "brother" of the ice pier at that time: Tie Huan
It was thought that the fate of the ice pier, like many mascots, would be forgotten after being spat upon and completing its short-lived mission.
But with the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, the ice pier has unexpectedly become the new top stream.
The most direct manifestation is that the various peripheries of the ice pier cannot be bought.
Although not everyone knows the meaning of the ice pier, this does not affect the hot sales of its surrounding goods.
For example, on February 7, the Olympic Tmall flagship store sold 6,000 handmade and 3,000 keychains on the hour, and once they were launched, they were all seconds away;
At the Winter Olympics franchise sales point in Beijing's Wangfujing Gongmei Building, people began to queue at two o'clock in the morning, and although each person was limited to one piece, many goods were sold out by 10 a.m.
A long line in front of the Wangfujing Winter Olympics concession sales office
In idle fish, the original price of 110 yuan of ice pier dolls has been sold to about 500 pieces, the original price of 708 yuan a set of blind boxes sold to 1488 yuan, the bid price doubled.
Netizens who also pay attention to the stock market found that on the first trading day after the resumption of work, many "ice pier concept stocks" including listed companies related to the production and sales of ice piers, such as Yuanlong Yatu, Caibai Shares and Cultural Investment Holdings, rose and fell.
One of the busiest, Yuanlong Yatu, contracted the production of seven ice pier series products, including plush toys, buckles, badges and precious metals.
Objectively speaking, the ice pier keychain of 58 yuan a, online purchase and 15 yuan more freight is not cheap.
But under the influence of the atmosphere of the Winter Olympics, many people feel that this price is worth it.
Everyone found that this round panda seems to be more and more cute the more you look at it.
From personal behavior to cyber memes
Initially, the ice pier was brought to fire by a Japanese journalist.
On the eve of the opening of the Winter Olympics on February 2, Tsujioka Yoshido came to the Capital Gymnasium to report on the preparation for the game.
He was supposed to report on the Japanese figure skating team, but because the Japanese athletes had not yet arrived in Beijing, he turned to the camera with a mysterious face and said, "Today there is the latest ice pier information", as if the ice pier is the protagonist of the news report of this day.
Then he pulled on his shirt and began to introduce the six ice pier badges he had just bought to the host of the line, "Today I am bringing reports in the form of six ice piers."
In fact, as the number one fan of the ice pier, Tsujioka Yoshido passed the ice pier to the Japanese audience as early as January 31 in the radio broadcast, and said in a loud voice, "Every time I see the ice pier, I feel extremely happy."
After arriving in Beijing, he also sent back a box of ice piers around the TV station, and in the process of live unpacking, he once disliked the host's emotions.
When the host was curious to remove the body of an ice pier doll from the transparent shell, he was immediately stopped by Tsuji, "Gentle you! ”
You can feel the sincerity of Tsujigang Yoshido to the ice pier, and the video of Tsujigang Yoshido's fancy Amway ice pier was quickly disseminated on Chinese social media, and the snapping up of the ice pier has since escalated from a personal behavior to a social network carnival.
Many people have watched Tsujigang's video before they think of buying, and this incident has also become a classic case of successful goods going to sea and then driving domestic sales (mistaken).
At first, the discussion of the ice pier was normal.
For example, out of love for ice piers, but can not buy them for a while, some people use various materials around them to manually DIY ice piers.
Although some of the ugly are ugly, there are netizens in the place where there are ice piers.
In Japan, in order to make the ice pier better integrate into the daily life of the villagers, the Japanese social software Line also recently launched the ice pier snow rong theme emoji.
However, with the increase in the heat of the ice pier, people are gradually no longer limited to appreciating it, but began to exert their ingenuity to inject a variety of new stems close to life into the ice pier.
The ice pier has also changed from a cute little cute to a network meme with more personality and more exuberant communication.
Compared with simple production and shooting, network memes will contain more secondary creations of netizens, netizens will add more connotations to it in the creative process, and can also be understood as an internalization process of incorporating a popular thing into their own life experience.
For example, the following set of ice pier emojis circulating on the Chinese Internet looks much more grounded than the cute wind emojis launched by Japanese software.
Some netizens have discovered the truth of life from the comparison of mascots of previous major events.
On the fifth day of the Chinese New Year, greet the god of wealth, forward this magnet ice pier, and suck away all the gods of wealth in the circle of friends.
At this point, the ice pier has evolved from a mascot that does not eat human fireworks to a new generation of Internet celebrities.
The ice piers in people's hands are no longer just for the Winter Olympics, but have become a fashion item that "if you don't buy it in the season, you will be outdated".
Second, how to see the ice pier more and more pleasing to the eye
In the process of the ice pier becoming a new Internet celebrity, people's evaluation of its image is also slowly changing.
In the eyes of many people, the ice pier that was ridiculed as "iron and humble" at the beginning of the announcement looks more and more cute.
Psychological "sensory adaptation" may explain this.
You may have had such an experience, the longer you spend with a person, the more blurred the judgment of the person's appearance will be;
And including the old saying "into the room of Zhilan, long time without feeling its fragrance; into the abalone wanton, long time without smelling its smell", these are actually described as "feeling adapted" phenomenon.
Sensory adaptation refers to the continuous action of stimuli on the same receptor, so that the sensory threshold changes, resulting in an increase or decrease in susceptibility to later stimuli.
Similar to walking from the light to the dark, the human eye needs to spend a few seconds to adapt, which is also a manifestation of sensory adaptation.
To some extent, we also have a sense of adaptation to the ice piers.
One condition of sensory adaptation is that stimuli need to be constantly acting on the receptors, and for us, the recurrence of ice piers during the Winter Olympics (whether official propaganda or online memes) brings this stimulation to our senses.
Of course, we may be able to adapt to the ice pier may have another premise - its bottom is at least not too bad.
To say that the ice pier is ugly, probably has not seen an even uglier mascot:
Moreover, the moving ice piers can also make people cute in minutes.
Zhihu netizen @ Nanmuxiang wrote, "Round face, round eyes, round things are easy to make people like." It's not that babies have to rely on cute looks, fool adults to care for them, feeling is a principle. ”
If the principle of sensory adaptation is further diverged, it will also be concluded that when people gradually tend to a state of adaptation to the appearance of things, it will be more of those inner things that will play a role.
Although at the beginning of the image, meanings such as "symbolizing the strong body, tenacity and inspiring Olympic spirit of the Athletes of the Winter Olympic Games" were written into the design concept of the ice pier.
But at first, everyone did not have a deep feeling about this, until the successful opening ceremony of the Beijing Winter Olympics, which also magnified the connotation of the ice pier.
The opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics has allowed people who have experienced two years of epidemics to share a rare warmth, and people need such a moment of encouragement and celebration.
Under the influence of this emotion, it is natural to project emotions onto the mascot.
For most people, buying the area around the ice pier is the smallest move to participate in the Winter Olympics and feel the Winter Olympics.
If this is a deeper psychological motivation for the best-selling of ice pier-related products, then whether the ice pier is good or not may no longer be a key question.
Author: Li Hezi; Public number: Pin Play
This article was originally published by @PinPlay and everyone is a product manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.