Its latest launch, the Fibre Fruit Tea series, is about just that shift in proposition. Not fruit tea as a treat, but as routine. Not occasional consumption, but something embedded into daily life. The question is whether habitual hydration can be redefined as a branded experience. 

From fruit tea to functional hydration 

Consumers increasingly want beverages that are both functional and enjoyable, but the category is full of trade-offs. Health often comes at the expense of taste. Convenience can dilute perceived efficacy. 

Otter TonTon’s approach is to collapse that tension. Ingredients like kale, aronia berry, and turmeric work on the functional element, while fruit blends and sweetness control technologies smooth out the flavour profile. What they’re calling their ‘fresh extraction’ process is positioned as the technical bridge between the two. 

The more strategic move, however, is how the product is framed. Rather than leaning into wellness – which can imply effort, discipline, and inconvenience – the brand positions the product as ease. A small upgrade to something consumers already do. Reported repurchase rates above 40% suggest Otter TonTon has already moved beyond trial into habit formation.  

The discipline behind five years of growth 

Otter TonTon’s growth story is notably unflashy. In a market that has rewarded speed and virality, the brand has taken a slower path, focusing on product and the moments at which consumers engage. 

Instead of chasing traffic spikes, it has focused on when and why consumers reach for a drink. That discipline has allowed it to navigate a highly competitive period for China’s consumer brands, where many struggled with rising costs and short product lifecycles. In this landscape many brands have chosen to amplify their voice. In comparison, Otter’s branding feels geared towards timelines, being a good fit and not about exposure.  

Otter TonTon: From e-commerce brand to retail presence 

Like many digitally native brands, Otter TonTon started in e-commerce, where consumption is planned and delayed. Moving into offline retail shifts the brand into moments of immediacy. 

Now present in more than 50,000 retail locations – including convenience stores and supermarkets – the brand is mapping products to specific consumption contexts. Convenience stores capture the afternoon slump, supermarkets support household stocking, and discount channels cater to price-sensitive consumers. In this context, offline isn’t just a distribution expansion. It’s become a shift in how and when the product is consumed. 

Otter TonTon: From internet-famous to infrastructure brand 

Five years ago, Otter TonTon helped define the freeze-dried fruit tea category. That was the easier part. Creating a product is one thing, but embedding it into daily behaviour is another. 

The Fibre Fruit Tea launch suggests the brand is now playing a longer game. It is no longer just competing within beverages, but for a role in routine. That shifts the basis of competition. The moat is no longer built on traffic spikes or one-off hits, but on frequency, familiarity, and fit. In China’s consumer market, moving from internet to infrastructure is a common ambition. Few brands manage it. Otter TonTon looks set to pull it off. 

The post Can Otter TonTon turn hydration into a mass-market obsession?  appeared first on Dao Insights.

Born in Beijing in 1999, Yuqi first entered the industry through Cube Entertainment, debuting in 2018 as a member of (G)I-DLE. The group’s success gave her an early global platform, but Song Yuqi’s individual appeal has been built just as much outside music. Appearances on Chinese variety shows such as Keep Running and her own hosting roles have positioned her as an all-round entertainer, known for linguistic fluency and a distinctly extroverted on-screen presence.  

That breadth has fed directly into her commercial value. In just the past two years, Yuqi has accumulated a portfolio of brand partnerships spanning luxury fashion, sportswear and beauty. That includes roles with Fendi, Tory Burch and Adidas. And so, a pattern: brands tap into her ability to move between markets, aesthetics and formats without losing recognisability. 

The L’Oréal Paris appointment plays on that theme but brings it to haircare. Rather than introducing a new narrative, the collaboration leans into what Song Yuqi already represents – versatility, visibility, and a kind of high-energy self-assurance that aligns with the brand’s long-running ‘Because I’m worth it’ positioning. 

More broadly, it’s a lesson on how beauty brands are sourcing ambassadors. Technical expertise or your traditional actress-led type credibility is no longer the default. Instead, what you might call cultural elasticity – the ability to operate across music, fashion, content and even boarders – is becoming the valuable option. 

Yuqi fits that brief. But the question with this kind of ambassadorship will always be that multidimensional visibility can be translated into something with long-term payout. Marketing is not just about recognition. Relevance plays a big part too. Especially in an increasingly crowded beauty market. 

The post What Song Yuqi’s L’Oréal appointment can tell us about how brands are choosing their ambassadors  appeared first on Dao Insights.

At the centre is a brand film featuring an elderly rock band that unexpectedly goes viral. There’s high contrast at play. While much of social media leans toward polished, premium-type aesthetics, Canva opts for something more disarming. The choice of older protagonists introduces a sense of novelty but also reinforces the campaign’s core message: creative expression is not limited by age, skill, or background. 

The campaign sits under the banner From Inspiration to Viral Hit, extending beyond the film into a broader set of activations. Canva is partnering with Rednote Design Week to launch what they’re calling a Viral Cover Design Challenge, alongside a series of offline workshops branded as Cover Creation Camps. These will take place across major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Hangzhou. 

Online competitions are designed to generate attention and participation at scale, while offline sessions translate that interest into practical engagement. The result is a closed-loop system that moves users from passive viewers to active creators. 

By tying the campaign to Rednote Design Week, Canva gains access to an established creator ecosystem and the promise of platform-backed traffic. For participants, the incentive is tangible: visibility, not just expression.  

Canva has long positioned itself as a tool for everyone. A drag and drop design tool. This campaign evolves that message, shifting from usability to visibility. By tapping Rednote’s creator economy, it reframes design as not just easy, but as a means to be seen, shared, and culturally relevant in a crowded content landscape. They’re basically saying, your story deserves to be told, and here’s a tool simple enough you can get that story out there. 

The post Canva’s Rednote play: turning ease-of-use into mass visibility appeared first on Dao Insights.

The brand breaks down ‘Xujiahui’ (徐家汇), centring on the first two characters ‘Xu family’ (徐家), before expanding outward. Crowdsourced handwritten surnames – Wang, Li, Zhang, alongside compound names like Murong – are layered into a dense visual field that ultimately resolves into the final character 汇 (to gather). It’s a clean piece of work: from one family to many, from many into one place. It’s also a message that taps into MUJI’s long-running homely narrative. 

On Chinese social platforms, the reaction has been split. Rednote discussions show two camps forming quickly. Supporters focus on the logic. They read the work as participatory and locally attuned, a campaign that pulls MUJI closer to Chinese consumers.  

Critics, however, aren’t arguing with the idea. They’re looking at the design. The oversized black 汇 character – thick, dominant, bold – is the flashpoint. Users describe it as visually jarring, out of step with the handwritten textures around it, and at odds with the negative space that typically defines MUJI’s aesthetic. 

It’s a question of execution discipline. MUJI has built its brand on restraint and minimalism. The thing about minimalism is that when the restraint behind it slips – even slightly – it becomes frighteningly visible.  

The poster Muji put up in Xujiahui hasn’t failed. But you could say it has exposed something in Muji’s branding: MUJI’s idea of home is tied very tightly to how it chooses to show it. When it drifts even slightly off course, the customers that have tied themselves just as tightly to that brand image feel it all too acutely.  

The post A MUJI poster in Xujiahui has divided social media – concept lands, design questioned  appeared first on Dao Insights.

The campaign got to a start with a teaser animation that felt made for fans. There’s wordplay between 狼 (wolf) and 郎 (ro, from Sushiro), queue numbers that look suspiciously misprinted, and a handful of blink-and-you-miss-it in-jokes. It even sneaks in a plug for takeaway.  

Visually, the brand made the right call: it sticks to the original animation style. No redesign, no over-polishing. Just straight nostalgia, delivered clean. Like its earlier Chiikawa collaboration, this one rolls out in phases. From April 6, the menu gets a themed refresh – kids’ sets, oversized sushi platters, and a soft, slightly indulgent osmanthus mousse. Orders come with merch that backs the strategy: PVC pouches, stickers, ice cream spoons, acrylic charms. Small items, high collectability. 

Spend a little more and the collaboration opens up. Bills over RMB 100 unlock limited-edition character cards, with extra add-ons like branded plates, badges, and blind boxes available to purchase. Notably, this round feels more price-friendly. The barrier is just low enough to keep the access easy and impulse high. 

The colab runs offline too. Fourteen stores have been re-skinned into Green Grassland, with themed table mats, ordering screens, and interiors that push the experience beyond the plate. Then there’s the live moment: on April 12, characters dropped into the Guangzhou Yuehui City store for photos, interactions, and instant keepsakes. 

It’s familiar territory for Sushiro by now. Take a well-loved IP, layer it across product, space, and collectables, and let nostalgia do the heavy lifting. But this time they’ve shown a real deft hand in how to tie collaboration into more purchases and collectibility. 

The post Sushiro has let the wolf in  appeared first on Dao Insights.

The campaign starts with behaviour, reconstructing the cyber overthinking loop in which users attempt to self-diagnose only to find themselves caught between possibilities: is it an allergy, a cold, or something else entirely?  

Instead of treating knowledge as something delivered top-down, the campaign acknowledges how users actually process information. Confusion becomes the insight for this campaign. The result is a nice reflection of a shared experience, and a chance for Meituan Pharmacy to push a full-stack solution.  

Meituan Pharmacy: From awareness to diagnostic infrastructure 

Alongside the film, Meituan Pharmacy introduced Xiaotuan Health Assistant, an in-app service that enables real-time symptom consultation and medication guidance. The assistant positions Meituan as the place where uncertainty is resolved. 

Symptom recognition, consultation, and purchase often happen across search engines, social feeds, healthcare sites, and e-commerce platforms. By integrating these steps, Meituan Pharmacy creates a closed loop: identify, consult, act. They then add 24-hour one-on-one rapid medicine delivery, ensuring that consultation leads directly to fulfilment. 

It’s not quite a feature update. More like redefinition of a role. Meituan Pharmacy is not just facilitating transactions. They’re inserting their AI into the decision-making layer of everyday health. Allergy season is just the entry point through which that broader function is demonstrated. 

How Meituan Pharmacy is extending the system into public space 

The campaign becomes more distinctive in how it moves beyond the interface. In March, Meituan Pharmacy launched its Health Index Public Welfare Programme, opening up aggregated data from search, consultation, and purchasing trends to public institutions such as disease control centres and parks. If the platform can detect patterns in user behaviour, those signals can be used to anticipate and respond to public health risks during peak pollen periods. 

Meituan has even begun cracking on with offline intervention. In Beijing’s Chaoyang Park, they covered up high-pollen cypress trees with netting to limit allergen spread. Elsewhere, a Pollen Reduction Programme deployed misting trucks and pollen-fixing agents across parks and residential areas, lowering airborne pollen concentrations. 

At the same time, Meituan Pharmacy activated around seasonal leisure spaces. In Wuhan, pop-ups at cherry blossom sites in Donghu and landmarks like the Yellow Crane Tower distributed masks and medical kits while raising awareness of allergy prevention. Interventions like these place the brand where exposure actually occurs, aligning messaging with lived experience. 

From seasonal marketing to behavioural design 

Since 2023, when Meituan Pharmacy released Allergy Social Etiquette to address misunderstandings around allergy sufferers, the brand has been building a narrative around everyday health realities. What has changed is the level of integration. The latest campaign connects content, product, data, and environment into a single system. 

That system operates on a simple premise: seasonal health issues are recurring behaviours. People will continue to misread symptoms, search for answers, and act under uncertainty. By designing around that behaviour – rather than attempting to correct it with information alone – Meituan Pharmacy positions itself as both interpreter and intermediary. 

The result is a campaign that pushes beyond the limits of seasonal marketing. Instead of reminding users to take care, it constructs a framework through which symptoms can be recognised, understood, and acted on in real time. In doing so, they’re tapping into one of the most powerful marketing messages out there: strong, reliable products and services. 

The post Meituan Pharmacy builds a full-stack response to spring allergies  appeared first on Dao Insights.

Collaboration is nothing new in the F&B world, but this one plays neatly into Saturnbird’s positioning. Rather than pushing function or origin stories, the brand leans into emotional association – using a legacy IP to frame coffee as a small, everyday trigger for imagination. 

The core product is a boxed set containing nine capsules of Saturnbird’s signature specialty instant coffee. Each mini canister features a different Snoopy ‘highlight moment,’ translating the character’s shifting identities into visual packaging cues. Alongside the coffee, the set includes a mug, magnetic fridge accessory and themed cards, extending the experience beyond consumption into collectible territory. 

Limited-edition bundles expand on this base. Three themed variations – ‘Roaming,’ ‘Pet Lover’ and ‘Carefree’ – add practical lifestyle items such as a thermos, pet bowl and storage bags. The additions are not incidental. They position the product within a broader routine, linking coffee drinking to moments of leisure, mobility and companionship. 

In this case, Snoopy’s open-ended imagination offers Saturnbird a flexible narrative frame – one that aligns with the possibilities of a seasonal spring reset, while keeping the product anchored in daily habit. This isn’t a collaboration for novelty’s sake. It’s more about reinforcement and turning a cup of coffee into a repeatable, lightly imaginative ritual. 

The post Saturnbird is turning to nostalgia – and a globally recognised beagle – to refresh its spring marketing appeared first on Dao Insights.

The campaign builds on what the first film started. That earlier instalment, produced in March 2025 with Xinhua News Agency to mark the 20th anniversary of Balabala’s bala T product line, centred on children’s emotional development, highlighting how they process setbacks and turn them into part of growing up. 

In the new film, Balabala documents a range of children’s interests, including insects, traditional instruments such as the pipa, lion dancing, painting, boxing and seal carving. The film presents these pursuits without hierarchy, framing them as self-directed expressions rather than performance-driven activities. 

Alongside these moments, the film also depicts the challenges that accompany children’s interests. Scenes include children feeling misunderstood by peers, resisting pressure to perform, or seeing their work altered or erased. The narrative positions passion as something that involves uncertainty and persistence, rather than a straightforward or purely positive experience. 

A notable change from the first instalment is the inclusion of individual names for each child featured. The campaign also extends beyond the film itself, with Balabala publishing letters written by parents to their children, adding a layer of intergenerational perspective. 

Through the series, Balabala continues to position its bala T line as part of children’s everyday lives, framing the product as a long-term presence rather than a seasonal item. The approach aligns with broader brand moves toward emotional storytelling and sustained narrative building. We’ve seen it recently with 999 Ausnutria and FILA KIDS. It’s hardly a subtle tactic, given the emotional bonds between parents and children, but can you knock an approach that hits home? Probably not.  

The post Balabala extends ‘Chinese Children’ series with focus on passion  appeared first on Dao Insights.

Shot in Yunnan with no fixed script or production flow, the video follows Zhou through a spring day of sunbathing, coffee stops, and unplanned wandering. The aesthetic is intentionally unpolished. Slight camera shake and off-the-cuff moments give the film a lived-in quality, closer to personal documentation than brand content. Product messaging is kept deliberately light. Only in the closing line does Winona’s signature Repair Cream surface, framed as a gentle reminder rather than a hard sell. 

The campaign extends onto social platforms, where Winona maps Zhou’s itinerary across locations such as Dounan Flower Market and Haiyan Village. These posts blend travel guidance with skincare tips, embedding the product into everyday scenarios rather than isolating it as a standalone solution. 

Winona has long played the role of the lab-coat brand in China’s sensitive skincare space – all clinical claims, derm credentials, and problem-solving. Now, it’s loosening up a little, stretching beyond pure efficacy and experimenting with a softer, more mood-led way of speaking to consumers. 

Instead of foregrounding clinical claims or before-and-after comparisons, Cloud Travelogue builds around mood. The idea of taps into a positioning of skincare as part of a wider lifestyle rather than a corrective measure. 

Sensitive skin doesn’t operate in isolation. It moves with stress, weather, and the pace of everyday life. Winona’s latest campaign suggests the brief is shifting. Not toward classic cosmetics, but toward context – positioning its products less as reactive fixes and more as part of the everyday conditions that trigger sensitive skin in the first place. 

The post Winona tackles pollen problems in brand film with Zhou Keyu appeared first on Dao Insights.

The runway, the Folders project, a Xiaomi tie-in, all look in the same direction: Margiela is done being obscure by default. It’s moving on to translating its message for a market in which it wants to be understood.  

A slow burn: Maison Margiela in China 

For most of its time in China, Margiela has operated in the margins. Not invisible, but never loud enough to go head-to-head with logo-heavy luxury. Early access came through multi-brand stores and word-of-mouth, with the audience skewing toward stylists, editors, and people who already knew what they were looking at. 

While others pushed visibility, Margiela leaned into opacity. Anonymity, deconstruction, and anti-branding aren’t ideas that translate cleanly in a market built on recognition. Especially in China where bold statements about luxury have typically been the norm.  

Things loosened in the mid-2010s. Retail expanded into Shanghai and Beijing, still controlled, still selective. The arrival of John Galliano added drama without dilution. Basically, the ideas didn’t change, but they did become easier for the fashion-conscious consumer to see. 

Growth didn’t come through a big footprint or loud campaigning. Online, the brand showed up where it had to – WeChat, Tmall, Rednote – but never overexplained itself. Replica fragrances, being narrative-rich, easy to buy and distribute, did much of the work on the product side. Accessories filled the gaps. Split-toe Tabi shoes came into circulation next – another anti-mainstream look, but unmistakable in an IYKYK kind of way.  

Decoding Margiela: the Shanghai show and four-city exhibition 

Set inside a container yard in Baoshan, the Shanghai show leans hard into atmosphere. There’s raw steel, open space, and a refusal to polish things up. It’s on brand, but also strategic. Margiela isn’t just presenting a collection; it’s staging its logic.

Over 70 looks move between ready-to-wear and Artisanal couture, pulling apart and recombining references like Edwardian silhouettes, antique fragments, garments that look halfway between archive and experiment. 

The real shift sits around the runway. The Maison Margiela / Folders project breaks the brand into four parts and distributes them across cities. Shanghai gets Artisanal and the archive. Beijing takes on anonymity. Chengdu works with Tabi. Shenzhen turns Bianchetto – a hand-applied white paint coating that’s a signature of the maison’s style – into something you can try yourself.  

Then comes Xiaomi. VIP cars, co-branded devices, and – more interestingly – a kit: white paint and brushes for Bianchetto. Guests are invited to apply the paint themselves. Broken up, each piece is easier for audiences to grasp than the whole. And as a whole, it looks a lot like a reflection of Margiela’s entry point strategy.  

Luxury learning 

For years, Margiela’s distance filtered out anyone that didn’t love the brand. If you got it, you got it. If you didn’t, well, you just didn’t, and it wasn’t for you.  

The Folders project suggests that this might be about to change. It’s not necessarily louder, or even broader. More like clearer. The brand is still resistant to easy reads, but now it offers a way in for those on the outside.  

The Chinese luxury market is moving past surface-level recognition. Many consumers now want to know what they’re spending their money on – and are unwilling to spend it on anything that’s not providing something clear, be that utility or emotional connection. Understanding has started to carry its own weight.  

This change may have been the reason Margiela is upping its visibility. But it’s doing so in its own way. Nothing high-spectacle, but a lens to help consumers see what they’re offering.  

The post Maison Margiela in China: from niche import to cultural translation  appeared first on Dao Insights.