China's Mobile Economy

Chapter 2 Users, Partners, Investors and Competitors: Global Stakeholders

In 2014, PepsiCo launched a “Bring Happiness Home” campaign during the Chinese New Year using its public account on WeChat, a popular app in China similar to Facebook and WhatsApp. By using the WeChat features, Pepsi made it possible for people to send good wishes to friends and family creatively and digitally during the traditional holiday season.

The Chinese users could send their own voice recordings to the account and have them remixed into the customized “Bring Happiness Home” theme song, before being delivered to the smartphones of their friends and relatives across the nation. In addition, the audio features gave the users the option to include sound effects, such as the sound of horses galloping in celebration of the Year of the Horse. The brand message was incorporated in the theme song, and the Pepsi name was also cleverly embedded in the campaign title through the use of a pun on the word “Happiness”, as the translation of Pepsi's name in Chinese is “Happiness in Everything”.

In parallel to PepsiCo, Coca-Cola started a similar “Lyric Coke” campaign with contemporary Chinese pop songs. Each Lyric Coke bottle included a QR code that could be scanned using WeChat's built-in reader. By scanning the QR code, a short song clip was activated, featuring popular Chinese lyrics like “Baby, I'm sorry” as well as the FIFA World Cup lyrics from the same year. The song clip could then be shared on WeChat ...