Source丨Liang Jiangjun Let's open our minds: have you ever thought that if Musk did Spring Festival marketing, he would think 99% of brands are wasting their budgets because their approaches completely violate the laws of physics? Your habitual thinking is: Spring Festival is the peak of traffic, so you have to rush in and join the big carnival to get a piece of the pie. So what you do is: give out red envelopes, create atmosphere, and talk about reunion. But from a physics perspective, Musk would see Spring Festival marketing as essentially a 'signal-to-noise ratio' problem. Let's write this formula on the blackboard first: Information transmission efficiency = Signal / Noise. Think about it: what is Spring Festival? It's the moment of the year with the highest 'noise' in all of China.

  • Visually, from big shopping malls to your aunt's door curtain, everything is in that high-saturation red.
  • Auditorily, it's the cacophony of 'Good Luck Comes' and those pixelated New Year greeting videos in family group chats.
  • Psychologically, it's the brain capacity filled with pressure to marry, comparisons, and social stress. At this moment, a brand rushes out, spends tens of millions, hires a big director, and produces a six-minute micro-movie. The content is nothing more than 'a young person from Beijing returns home, first clashes with dad, and finally reconciles over dumplings.' You think your film is touching and your signal is strong, right? But in Musk's view, you're throwing a stone into the sea during a tsunami. Your signal frequency completely overlaps with the background noise. Even if you spend hundreds of millions, your signal just becomes part of the 'background sound.' It's like everyone is shouting in a 2,000-person auditorium, and you walk in with a megaphone and shout along. You think you'll be heard. No, you'll still be treated as noise and automatically filtered out by users' sensory defense systems. So, following Musk's physics thinking, how should we play it? When the denominator (noise) becomes infinitely large, it's useless to fight over the numerator (signal strength). It's like hawking in a market: others rely on shouting, you use a loudspeaker. You think your voice is louder, but to shoppers, it's just more annoying background noise. The right move is not to amplify the signal but to 'change the signal's frequency.' Here's a life example. Suppose your whole family is in the living room watching the Spring Festival Gala, the TV is blaring, your dad is bragging, your mom is cracking pistachios, and your uncle is video-calling to send greetings. At this point, you rush in and say, 'Dad, I bought you a new massage chair!' Your dad probably won't hear you, or he'll just mumble a response and forget. This is called 'same-frequency interference.' But if you stay silent, walk behind your dad, and put a neck massager directly on his neck, that instant physical sensation from the electric pulse will make him jump. That's 'changing frequency': you switch from the 'visual-auditory channel' to the 'tactile channel.' Let's stop talking about 'New Year flavor' for now. We need to discuss: how can we make users truly feel your presence during this information-overloaded Spring Festival holiday? Now that we've sorted out the 'signal-to-noise ratio' logic, it's time to get serious. We'll break down Musk's first-principles thinking into six handy tools to break the dull Spring Festival marketing game. Ready? Let's look at the first tool: Narrative Dimensionality Reduction.

Narrative Dimensionality Reduction: Sentimentality Doesn't Work; Do Functional Care Let's talk about the first method: narrative dimensionality reduction. Although Musk is good at grand narratives, like saving humanity, he also hates vague, unquantifiable words. In his logic, anything that can't be converted into physical work or improve system efficiency is garbage. But in Spring Festival marketing, what are 99% of brands doing? They're all 'elevating dimensions.' Bosses and ad agencies sit together, striving to go higher, talking about reunion, hometown nostalgia, and thousand-year-old ethnic culture. This is typical 'poetry marketing.' Everyone wants to be a poet, to move users to tears during those days. But Musk would tell you: In a high-chaos, high-load system like Spring Festival, people don't need more poetry; they really need a good wrench. From an engineering perspective, the living environment for Chinese people during Spring Festival is actually extremely harsh. Don't get me wrong; I'm not talking about material scarcity. The New Year's Eve dinner is more lavish than ever. I mean 'harsh in an engineering sense.' Usually, in Shanghai, Beijing, or Shenzhen, you're an independent, efficient, and highly controlled professional. Your life is modular, your Wi-Fi is fast, and your social circle is algorithm-filtered. But once you return to your hometown, your system crashes instantly. You regress into 'Ergou' or 'Dacui' from the village. You face unstable rural internet, information bombardment from aunts and uncles with no logic, and chaotic tech support demands like 'the whole family needs to use your computer to adjust the printer' or 'help your nephew install a cracked game.' At this moment, if a brand comes to you and says, 'Home is the harbor of the soul,' do you feel warm? Honestly, you just want to slap them and ask, 'Can you fix this crappy internet for me? Or give me a reason to leave this living room full of relatives and have a smoke?' So, a Musk-style approach might be: completely abandon sentimentality and do 'functional care.' If I were the CEO of an electronics or internet brand, I would never shoot any micro-movie during Spring Festival. Instead, I'd launch a service called 'Hardcore Survival Guide for Returning Home During Spring Festival.' It would be full of practical tips: How to use tech to instantly block spam keywords in family group chats? How to use operations research logic to scientifically explain why you're not married yet, leaving your aunt stunned and nodding? How to use your device to create a stable personal hotspot in a mountain village with no signal? We need to reduce marketing from an emotional signal to a tool signal. Think about it: when the whole family is arguing over trivial inefficiencies like who should wash dishes or who should buy firecrackers, if your brand can act like a patch and precisely solve a specific problem—even if it's just providing noise-canceling earplugs that truly block firecracker sounds, or a mini-program that auto-sends red envelopes and auto-replies to New Year texts—users will remember you far more deeply than those celebrities in red clothes faking New Year greetings on TV. In a chaotic system, solving a real bug is ten thousand times more powerful than painting a grand blueprint. This is the application of first principles in narrative: strip away all decorative emotional needs and go straight to the hardest survival pain point.

Negative Marketing: Be the Brand That Shields Users from Spit Most marketers have a path dependency that's extremely stubborn, called 'creating desire.' They always think, 'I need to create joy for users, make them feel that with me, your life is complete.' In math, this is addition; in psychology, it's creating desire. But in physics, you should know that adding a new variable to a closed system inevitably increases system complexity, i.e., entropy. Let's re-examine Spring Festival: the system is already complex and chaotic enough. New Year goods, visiting relatives, lucky money, Spring Festival travel rush, all kinds of hypocritical socializing... Everyone is like a computer with 99% CPU usage, fans spinning wildly, and the machine hot enough to grill meat. At this point, a brand rushes in and stuffs something else in, saying, 'Hey, add this too! It's more festive! It's more classy!' The user's instinct isn't to want it but to say, 'Go away, don't bother me.' Musk's thinking is always: do subtraction, shift from creating desire to eliminating friction. What is friction? Friction is what makes you uncomfortable, slows you down, and drains your energy. During Spring Festival, friction is almost everywhere. Take gift-giving, for example. In Musk's eyes, current Spring Festival gift-giving might just be 'inefficient long-distance transport of physical atoms.' You spend a few hundred yuan on a gift box that's huge, with complex packaging, but contains only a few pieces of pastry. You struggle to transport it from the city to the countryside, and then your relative might pass it on to someone else. How much logistics energy is wasted? How much non-degradable packaging waste is produced? Another example: what's the most painful part of the New Year? It's meaningless social pressure. If a brand stood up and said, 'This Spring Festival, we're not selling products; we're selling peace and quiet,' It could launch a 'Spring Festival Social Shielding Kit' or an 'Auto-Call System for Pretending to Work Overtime.' For instance, an AI feature: when people start urging you to marry, a commanding voice comes from your phone: 'Is your Spring Festival promotion plan done? I need to discuss it in a meeting,' allowing you to legitimately decline that awkward drinking session and go back to your room to play games. If you make noise-canceling headphones or VR glasses, Spring Festival is your stage, but don't advertise them as 'great gifts.' You could shoot a very cold ad: a messy rural living room full of relatives, the protagonist sitting in the middle like an outsider. Then, he puts on your headphones or VR glasses. In that instant, the scene changes. The noisy world around him disappears, replaced by the Martian surface Musk dreams of—silent, desolate, but infinitely free. He sits alone in a Mars rover watching the sunset. Your tagline could be: 'Install a firewall for your world.' Or 'In one second, travel from Tieling to the Tranquility Base.' You might think this is too anti-traditional. Is this still the New Year? But when everyone is trying to pull you into the crowd and push you into the noise, the brand that's willing to stand by your side and shield you from the spit is your true ally. The power of this 'negative marketing' lies in its foundation on users' most genuine physical defense. It's not about putting a heavy crown on you but helping you take off that muddy battle robe. During Spring Festival, when everyone is vying for your attention, the brand that protects your attention wins big.

Refusing Red: Whoever Uses Red in Packaging Gets Fired In Musk's physics view, China during Spring Festival is a giant visual red hotpot. When everyone is adding chili oil, using red again just adds to the system's visual white noise. If you don't want your brand to be drowned out but still need to express festivity and blessings, we need to play asymmetric warfare. From first principles, red is mainly a means to represent Spring Festival's joy and blessings; red is just a tool, not the goal. There are various solutions beyond red. First move: Warm up your brand color Many people ask me: 'General, my brand color is purple, blue, or even black, which doesn't match Spring Festival at all. Should I force it to red?' Absolutely not. If you change to red, you lose the brand equity you've built. Instead of switching systems, upgrade the existing one. Your thinking should be: make your brand color warmer, brighter, and do an obsidian treatment. If your original brand color is purple, upgrade it to obsidian purple during Spring Festival. That means adding a glow and fluidity to the dark tone, like embedding a warm light in a deep purple gem. In physics, this is called an excited state. You haven't changed the frequency, but you've increased the brightness. This color visually conveys: I'm expensive, I'm warm, and I'm hardcore. It retains your brand's coolness while perfectly fitting Spring Festival's energetic festivity. In Musk's view, this might be called 'temperature-preserving translation of brand assets.' Second move: Semantic zodiac hijacking; black horse is the highest blessing for 2026 If the first move is about adjusting visuals, the second is about adjusting logic. Musk's specialty is redefining rules. 2026 is the Year of the Horse. If your brand color is black or you focus on dark tones, don't feel awkward. In the Year of the Horse, black is the best omen. Your marketing logic should be: the return of the black horse. You can directly tell users: Red horses and gold horses everywhere are mediocre. In 2026, we wish you to be that most surprising, most explosive super black horse. See, you don't need a single bit of red. You use your signature black, paired with ultimate metal brushed texture. When users receive this black gift box, they don't feel dullness but a fighting spirit of 'I'm going to turn the tables this year.' This is the highest level of using color like using troops: you don't change the atom's color; you change the color's semantic code. When you give black the definition of a black horse, then black in the Year of the Horse is the most powerful blessing. Third move: Material dimensionality reduction; use jade's warmth to eliminate paper's cheapness This last move is my favorite: replace color with material. During Spring Festival, everyone competes in hue, but Musk values quality. Red looks cheap during Spring Festival because 99% of red is printed on paper. If you want your brand to stand out instantly, switch from the pigment channel to the material channel. This Spring Festival, try covering your brand with celadon green or lacquer texture. Why? Because in Chinese subconscious, jade represents peace, and lacquer represents longevity. Imagine: everyone is giving bright red and green, light paper boxes, while you give a heavy package with a warm, jade-like feel and a matte cyan texture. In that instant, the user's value scale tips. You don't need to say a single blessing; the material itself is the highest form of 'peace year after year.' Visually, this is noise reduction; psychologically, it's weight gain. You use an extremely calm, extremely high-end color texture to build a safe harbor in the red sea. Folks, in Musk's view: physics doesn't care about your wishes. Same for Spring Festival marketing: users don't care how hard you try to become red; they only care about what they feel.

  • Obsidian treatment: high-light upgrade of brand color, doing energy excitation.
  • Semantics: leverage the zodiac's momentum to turn brand color into hardcore blessings like the black horse.
  • Materialization: abandon cheap red paper; use jade and lacquer textures for aesthetic suppression. With these three moves, your brand not only avoids turning red but becomes more premium. That's the dimensionality reduction attack of first principles in visuals.

【Moving Toward the C-End】The 11th China FMCG Conference Time: March 16-18, 2026 Location: Chengdu, China