Chunyue, a packaged water brand in China, faced the challenge of differentiating itself in the highly competitive bottled water market. To address this, the brand collaborated with Labbrand’s design team and Madjor, a digital agency under Labbrand Group, to launch the “City Walk” brand activation campaign in 2022. This campaign design celebrated the unique vibes of 29 cities in China through a refreshed cultural packaging design and a digital H5 activation, inviting consumers to explore and engage with their cities in a creative and interactive way.

Challenge

Chunyue was launched in 2014 as a packaged water brand and has since evolved into various branded and design expressions in a bid to find its distinct voice and share in a market that is cluttered and has low involvement. Although Chunyue has been growing steadily as a challenger brand, there is still room for improvement, especially when comparing to the market leaders. As an aspirational driven brand, Chunyue advocates for self-enhancement and motivating others to bring positivity forward. With the new cultural packaging design and ‘City Walk’ campaign under the creative concept of ‘Every Step Counts’, Chunyue hopes to help consumers rediscover the culture of their city and actively participate in it through cultural discoveries and engagement to grow adoption and affinity towards the brand.

Solution

Water shapes the earth and nourishes generations of people in their cities. Through ethno-cultural research, Labbrand design team decoded the unique personalities of 29 different cities from across China and extracted distinct elements, perfectly combining water, cities, and people into rich cultural packaging design expressions. Take the city Beijing as an example, when it comes to Beijing culture, the essence can be summarized into one word: “exquisiteness (讲究)”. Which can be elaborated into three Chinese characters : “精气神, means vigorous spirit”, and the exquisiteness of old Beijing mainly comes from three aspects:

1. Etiquette

2. Knowledge

3. Culture

These three aspects are inseparable from Beijing’s hutong culture. Back in the Yuan Dynasty, the hutong culture established because of the checkerboard-like urban layout, centering around water wells. People chose to live around water wells, and its habit has passed down through generations. There is an old saying: There are as many wells as there are hutongs in Beijing. The wells nurture the hutong culture, and the hutong culture nurtures the “exquisiteness” of Beijingers. Over the years, the exquisiteness of hutong culture has also become a part of the life of old Beijingers. The well-known ones are pigeon keeping, bird-watching, cricket fighting, dog keeping and so on. Based on the holistic understanding of Beijing culture, Labbrand design team takes the birdcage, chessboard, hutong culture and siheyuan (the traditional Beijing courtyard house) as the key elements to create a unique Chunyue bottle design for the city of Beijing.

In the design of the Chunyue “Walkie Bottle” created by Labbrand, each city label design is composed of three key elements: the water infused walkway, the cultural architecture, and the unique urban life scenes. Observing each city’s bottle is like flipping through a unique urban album, where the architectural style and local life scenes of each city are opened in front of your eyes. From Beijing’s wells and unique hutong culture to the Suzhou River and Shikumen architecture of Shanghai, from “gentle”, the attribute of Nanjing to Chengdu’s “relaxing”, from Guangzhou’s morning tea culture to Shenyang’s night market, each bottle is celebrating the unique charm of the city, bringing consumers together to discover each cities beautiful packaging design. Under the creative concept of ‘Every Step Counts’ Labbrand also presents the vitality and attitude of 29 cities in an interactive form on the H5 activity page. By scanning the QR code on the bottle, consumers can accumulate steps and explore step by step different cultural walking routes within one of the selected 29 cities.

Results

Chunyue’s new packaging design and the “City Walk” brand activation campaign achieved remarkable success. The campaign reached over 70 million people, with more than 5 million users actively participating. Consumers were enticed to purchase Chunyue’s local “City Walkie Bottles” and embark on a city exploration journey. The campaign further extended offline through events and activities, such as the Hangzhou City Run, Xi’an Marathon, and Shandong Charity Ride. Chunyue became a witness to the beautiful cultural connection formed between cities, water, and people. Labbrand’s creative design of the “City Walk Bottles” and their strategic activations and communications successfully helped Chunyue differentiate its brand personality in the competitive packaging water market.