KOL (influencer) marketing in China has exploded in the last 5 years to become a mature and trusted channel for brands to market their products. According to Suning Institute of Finance, brands spent 260 billion yuan ($38.5 billion) on marketing through KOLs in China in 2019, up from 37 billion yuan ($5.7 billion) in 2015.
KOL marketing includes live-streams, short videos, blogs and other forms of online interactions with followers. Live-streaming and short video have established themselves as the dominant forms of new media, with 500 million and 820 million regular users respectively.
The food & drink sector has taken to KOL marketing in a big way and is thought to account for 19% of spend on KOLs, second only to the cosmetics sector. The number of food & drink focused KOLs have increased dramatically across all digital marketing platforms. Food & drink KOLs’ work takes on various forms, with some of the most popular formats being mukbang, store discovery, cooking lessons, product reviews and cooking demonstrations
Below we’ve reviewed three of the top food & drink KOLs in China across these different formats, what they do, what channels they operate on and who they work with.
Mukbang and store discovery – Mi Zijun
Mukbang is an online video broadcast in which a host eats food while interacting with the audience. Though it has been recently banned due a government campaign to combat food waste, it was a way that some KOLs used to stand out from the crowd. Since the ban on mukbang, these influencers have turned to other methods, such as store discovery, to promote products.
Mi Zijun is one of the most famous Chinese mukbangers and is known for eating a lot in a limited time. In May 2016, she uploaded a video of her eating 10 packets of spicy instant noodles in under 17 minutes. This video was viewed more than 7.22 million times on Bilibili, a Chinese video-sharing website, before being removed. Mi Zijun mainly released live-stream and short videos across three major platforms – Weibo, Bilibili and Douyin – and her followers on these platforms are 19 million, 2.8 million and 13 million respectively. Since the ban on mukbang, Mi Zijun has differentiated herself by travelling and eating typical local food in different regions.
Leveraging her popularity, passion and talent for eating she has cooperated with many food & drink brands through promotions, product reviews and store/restaurant visits. For example, Uni-President Enterprises Corporation worked with Mi Zijun to promote its soymilk for the Double 11 shopping festival. Mi Zijun embedded her promotions in her normal food-eating short video, in which she tried more than 10 different types of brunch, together with the soymilk, promoting it in a natural and informal way. Her videos helped to increase Double 11 sales by 10 times, 4 times more unique visitors to their website and conversions rates increased 50 times compared to the previous year.
Cooking lessons and product evaluation -Alice
Alice is famous for teaching people how to cook and her unique recipes often cause heated discussions on Weibo. As well as cooking lessons, she also regularly reviews and compares products in different categories. She is active on Weibo with 8m followers and posts about 100 times per month. The content formats she uses are mainly pictures and short videos. The majority of her followers are young females aged 18 to 29.
Alice is famous for her engagement with her followers through events such as interactive sweepstake competitions. By commenting and sharing, the most active followers can receive gifts and this gift-giving is in return a way to promote the brand owner’s products and increase customer awareness (e.g. the gift is a multipack of a promoted product).
Influenced by her follower profile, Alice primarily endorses snacks, cosmetics and kitchenware. One innovative promotion was with Wonderlab, a meal replacement drink. Alice collected her followers’ favourite nine tastes and then the brand owners used this feedback to launch a gift box specifically designed by Alice’s followers and offered to them at a discount. The product launch was accompanied by copious promotion from Alice where she used her personal experience to talk about the benefits of meal replacement drinks and Wonderlab in particular.
Traditional food demonstration-Li Ziqi
Li Ziqi is one of the few Chinese internet celebrities to also gain a following outside China. She is famous for her videos in which she performs traditional countryside tasks and cooks homestyle meals in a bucolic setting with the look and grace of a Disney princess. She has more than 58 million followers worldwide across her social media platforms, including YouTube and Weibo.
Her fans are impressed by her deep knowledge of food, nature and Chinese culture, as well as the cinematic quality of her videos. She appears to make everything from scratch in an idealised countryside setting that appeals to urbanites. Her video of making Luosifen, a Chinese noodle soup, features her sawing off bamboo shoots and hand-catching river snails and has been viewed more than 56 million times on YouTube.
Rather than working to promote other brands, Li Ziqi has taken things to the next level and created her own business selling food, cooking equipment, clothing and more.
Conclusions
Working with KOLs is an excellent way for brands to leverage their fanbase and reputation to promote international brands in China. The most popular KOLs can charge high prices, but there are various different levels of KOLs and for many brands, working with someone who has an average size following but specialises in a particular niche may be more cost effective than working with someone with millions of followers.