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Brands Shy Away From Celebrity Marketing in China

What Happened: China’s “traffic stars” may be fading out of favor. According to a recent report by Shiqu Insight Engine, celebrity marketing events in March 2022 fell by 50.9 percent compared with the same period last year. Conversely, co-branded marketing and new product marketing surged 91.3 percent and 57.6 percent, respectively, while sports marketing jumped 6.6 times.To get more chinese entertainment news, you can visit shine news official website.

The Jing Take: “Traffic stars,” a Chinese term for KOLs who drive high digital traffic, have helped brands achieve explosive growth for their new products. Although a decline of celebrity events could be partially attributed to the ongoing pandemic — with Shanghai still in lockdown and Shenzhen just recovering — it points more so to the shifting tides in China’s entertainment industry. From Kris Wu’s sexual assault scandal last year to the more recent tax evasion cases of livestreamer Viya and actor Deng Lun, brands that don’t respond quickly enough to their ambassadors’ bad behavior are finding themselves caught in the crossfire, too.
Fortunately, there are other options. As the Winter Olympics proved, sports stars can be just as effective at marketing. Take Anta and Tiffany & Co., who signed with freestyle skier Eileen Gu early and scored big when she won gold in February; sales of the red Anta ski suit Gu wore during the competition surged 20-fold while her Tiffany rings and bangles trended on Chinese social media. Similarly, Prada racked up over 46 million views on Douyin for its Spring/Summer 2022 collection after creating a video campaign centered around four Chinese Olympic athletes.

Co-branded drops are also a safer alternative, although brands are not exempt from netizen backlash if they commit a faux pas. Ultimately, globally players that want to fuel long-term growth in China rather than one-off sales should look beyond traffic stars — and focus on building their reach instead of just borrowing it. As the saying goes, the brightest stars burn the quickest. And brands don’t want to be around when things go up in flames.

The Jing Take reports on a piece of the leading news and presents our editorial team’s analysis of the key implications for the luxury industry. In the recurring column, we analyze everything from product drops and mergers to heated debate sprouting on Chinese social media.

The Art of China’s Empresses Reveals Their Powerful

At the onset of Empresses in the Palace, the 2011 miniseries that caused a sensation in China, a beautiful young woman, Zhen Huan, is paraded before the emperor. She is one of many marriage-age girls who have been summoned to Beijing’s Forbidden City to be considered for the Yongzheng Emperor’s harem. Although it is an honor to be chosen as an imperial consort, Zhen is dismayed—she must leave her family behind and enter into a new life of luxury, restriction, and scheming ambition.To get more news about last empress of china, you can visit shine news official website.

In the historical epic, set against the backdrop of the flourishing Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) in the 18th century, Zhen navigates the treacherous, strictly regulated court, where eight ranks of consorts compete with the top empress and vye for the emperor’s attention. (While there was only one empress at a time, the larger lower ranks could move up the social ladder, especially by bearing sons.) At the top of this food chain stood the empress dowager—a consort who had either installed her son on the throne, or was the widowed primary wife of a previous emperor.

The real women who lived in the palace are shrouded in mystery, but Daisy Yiyou Wang and Jan Stuart—the curators of a new exhibition that delves into the empresses’ lives—emphasize that the TV show is a dramatization. At least, there’s not enough evidence to prove that the salacious backstabbing and love affairs that dominate the plot actually took place.

“Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912,” a collaboration between the Palace Museum in Beijing; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; and the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C. (where it is now on view), capitalizes on the popularity of such costume dramas. The exhibition centers on five empresses’ little-acknowledged influence on art, religion, and politics through the furniture and objects they used, the paintings they enjoyed, and the jewelry and clothes they wore.
The relative obscurity of these women runs counter to our understanding of royalty today. “If you watch the royal wedding in England, it’s a public affair, a spectacle,” Wang said. “Back then, imperial women were probably completely invisible to the general public.” In European monarchies, copies of rulers’ portraits were circulated around the world for others to venerate; in China, access to imperial powers was a privilege, their images considered sacred.

The curators also knew they were up against pernicious gender bias in their field. Scholars of Chinese art history generally believed that women at court had access to inferior art, fashion, and decorations compared to those used by the emperor. “People questioned us from the beginning because we didn’t think objects used by women and made for women were secondary art objects,” Wang said. She was convinced that some of the most spectacular pieces in the Palace Museum collection were enjoyed by powerful women. She was right.
The curators found that the quality of art and objects owned by these high-ranking ladies matched those of the emperor, though they didn’t always feature the same motifs. “There’s a longstanding thought in Chinese culture that if you have good omens, images of what is desired surrounding a person, that can help actualize the goal,” Stuart said. Thus, women in the court found themselves surrounded by images of mothers and sons, or symbols suggesting fertility—a woman holding a seeded gourd, or two interlocking jade circles, a reference to continuity.

Their quarters were decorated with exquisite pieces of furniture. One delicate lacquer cabinet in the exhibition—whose staggered shelves offer discreet places to put personal treasures—is painted with a delicate landscape scene and auspicious motifs like the bat. Each piece in an empress’s living space was similarly spectacular and refined.
Still, the lives and activities of these women have been obscured for centuries. The Qing court, like many other monarchies around the world, had a patrilineal structure. There was a tradition to record the emperor’s life in great detail, but no such tradition for his wives. “To say they’re not documented at all,” however, “would be a false statement,” Wang said.

Often, the influence of the empresses is only obliquely referenced in archival documents written by the emperor, and so they are characterized from their husband’s or son’s point of view. “Although it’s not strictly articulated, you can get a very strong hint that many of these women were educated, they could talk about state affairs, and be the soulmate of their husband,” Wang said. The empress was also expected, like women all over China, to be a good household manager.