From using each other’s trademark to launching co-branded products and IP content marketing, cross-field marketing is now preferred by many brands and the game is constantly evolving. The artistic elements add cultural connotations for enterprises and enhance brand value to win favor and recognition from more user groups, making it a popular method of marketing for many brands.

Brands + art to activate more target users

According to the 2020 China Licensing Industry Report, the annual turnover of licensed products reached RMB 99.2 billion in 2019, of which the art & culture category accounted for 17% of spending, making it the most active IP licensing category. 

In 2020, OPPO worked with globally-known visual artist James Jean to release its limited-edition phone, the Reno4 Pro. The infusion of art made the phone a technological production with cultural aspects and soon became a fast-selling product.

However, a successful cross-field cooperation requires a point of coherence between the two parties to ensure harmony and cooperation in order to make a product that is both sensible and relevant.

Meitu Creator Platform empowers aesthetic marketing

Meitu started its business with a focus on beautification and has cultivated unique insights into art and beauty over time. To allow more people to express their creative and aesthetic ideas, Meitu launched the Meitu Creator Platform.

Supported by Meitu’s powerful technologies, the platform provides creators with easy-to-use tools, lowering the creation threshold and allowing creators to transform their creative fantasies into a reality. Meitu’s cooperative brands have also found brilliant ideas and creations on the platform, enabling them to come up with cross-field marketing solutions. 

The work of creators on the Meitu Creator Platform are integrated into the photo/video beautification features of Meitu’s apps and are shared on the Meitu social media community. They are also used in brand publicity, further enabling the commercialization of creators’ works.

At the same time, the platform has become a content matrix that has a deep connection with industry-leading artists, content geeks and creators, and allows Meitu to have a creator library that contains designers, caricaturists, visual effect artists, freehand sketching talents, and more, providing a forward-looking content experience and a sense of a mix of science and technology.

Explore the new interactive gameplay for brands

Through the Meitu Creator Platform, brands can connect directly with creators and receive new communication methods from the pioneering artists, achieving extraordinary marketing effects. The platform’s cooperation with Uni-President, a leading beverage and instant noodle manufacturer in the market, and Fresh (a famous skincare brand from the USA) are two good examples.

The Uni-President jointly launched 5 fun AR effects for its product “Rock Sugar Snow Pear” with a popular Gen Z artist, Sun Jiayi, from the platform. Meitu has also coordinated the KOCs of its own to promote the effects, which are full of interactive fun and quickly caused the product to receive popular support among young consumers. 

In its cooperation with Fresh, the Meitu Creator Platform and School of Visual Communication and Media Design from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts jointly launched an AR effects creation competition, which encouraged students to create Spring Festival-themed AR effects for the new Limited Edition product of Fresh using the tools available on the Meitu Creator Platform. The cooperation helped Fresh to find new aesthetic and social marketing solutions from the perspective of a young user. 

The powerful technologies and novelty provided by the platform have allowed Fresh to gain more attention and engagement from young users. The AR effects from the competition were also released on the Meitu App to reach more targeted user groups.

Cross-field cooperation featuring artistic elements has become a great choice for many brand’s commercial marketing efforts, and is set to be used by even more enterprises in the future. The Meitu Creator Platform, by integrating creators with different styles, allows the collision and fusion of art and commercial creativity. It helps brands to customize marketing solutions that conform to the attributes of their products and corporate culture, allowing brands to easily achieve successful marketing to different user groups. These attributes will allow the platform to be acknowledged by more brands and is expected to usher in more development opportunities in the future.