• Within 9 hours of launch, over 10,000 boxes were sold, turning whimsical ideas into reality. A year ago, Mondelez partnered with Tmall to launch a color-your-own packaging, and at least 28 brands across 4 industries have since followed suit, creating customized products with Tmall.
  • Alibaba has also entered strategic partnerships with global giants like Nestlé and Mars, conducting innovative experiments that spark consumer revolutions.

Video: Oreo and Tmall Launch Biscuit Record Player ■ Text by Liang Zhouqian

An Oreo Thins biscuit is placed into a vintage, specially made music box. The stylus is connected, a white indicator light turns on, and the biscuit transforms into a vinyl record, spinning and playing music.

Take a bite of the music-filled biscuit and put it back; the "damaged" Oreo switches to another song. Take another bite and put it back; the track-changing doesn't stop. From the childhood of the Rising Dragon Punch and Cyclone Kick, to the high school of half-hidden verses, to the college where dreams bloom, to the workplace where you feel drained, Oreo divides youth into four stages, each with an original song.

Take out your phone, scan the QR code on the box, then scan the packaging illustration. The phone screen enters AR mode, playing corresponding live-action MV animations for different songs. If you're lucky, you might even hear a recorded "Easter egg" of the gift-giver's confession.

At Tmall Super Brand Day, a user experiences the Oreo Music Box

This is the Oreo Music Box—a high-tech product that lets you "listen to music while eating." It launched on Tmall Super Brand Day on May 16, exclusively released in limited quantities. All 20,000 limited-edition gift boxes sold out before noon.

105-year-old Mondelez Oreo has been trying to partner with Tmall to turn various "whimsical ideas" into reality and attract young people to pay for them.

Oreo Music Box launched on Tmall Super Brand Day

Customization + Strong Content + Strong Experience

"Will I transform after eating it?" "Can I eat the music box?" "Buying this magical thing!"... On the evening of May 15, social media like WeChat and Weibo were flooded with videos of the Oreo Music Box in action. Curious young people left comments and watched, with some even saying they'd stay up until midnight to grab one on Tmall.

The first Oreo biscuit was born in 1912. Now, this 105-year-old brand is rejuvenating itself—turning a biscuit into the world's smallest record.

Customization is also a major selling point, allowing consumers to choose a unique box. In fact, this isn't Oreo's first foray into this new approach.

Oreo Custom Music Box

On May 6, 2016, Oreo's collaboration with Tmall on the Color-Your-Own packaging became one of the most classic marketing cases. It was also the first time Tmall replaced "Buy Now" and "Add to Cart" with "Start Customizing," allowing all consumers to freely purchase their own customized products.

This was the first case where a brand pushed Tmall's team to modify and develop the transaction link in reverse, and it was also the first time its parent company, Mondelez, attempted to restructure the supply chain's packaging production process for online business after entering the Chinese market. This achieved the seemingly impossible task of "from customization to delivery within five days" for truly customized consumer products.

In May 2017, Oreo again launched a limited-edition Oreo Music Gift Box with color-your-own packaging exclusively on Tmall, creating a new consumption experience for high-end online consumers. The two sides integrated marketing, technology, creativity, and the entire chain to drive Oreo's brand upgrade. Through AR interactions on the mobile Taobao and Tmall apps, they continuously exposed young online users to brand innovation.

Building on customization, adding strong content and experience to the product is Oreo's major move this year.

"This aligns perfectly with the concepts of new retail and consumption upgrade. We've been trying to upgrade in three areas: product, consumption experience, and marketing, and we're making more attempts at content marketing around Oreo," said Dong Xin, E-commerce Director of Mondelez China, told 天下网商 (Tmall's business media).

The AR interaction for the Oreo Music Box was provided by Icreator, the same service provider that created the "Catch the Cat" scene during last year's Double 11. Tmall has become an important venue for brands to test new marketing.

From "customization" to "mass production" to "large-scale commercialization," many barriers need to be broken. For example, not only do the buttons on the Tmall app need to be changed, but code integration must be achieved among Tmall, Oreo's packaging suppliers, and TP (Tmall Partners). After a consumer completes customization and payment, a code is generated in the backend. The supplier reads the code and accurately prints the packaging the consumer wants, ultimately delivering the corresponding packaging and product to the consumer.

At the same time, the Oreo Music Box, with its musical, media, entertainment, and even social attributes, has inspired Alibaba. "A biscuit that can sing, a potato chip that can dance—these wild ideas could all be realized on Tmall and become products with sales exceeding 100 million," said Fang Wai, General Manager of Tmall's FMCG division, at the launch ceremony.

Fang Wai, General Manager of Tmall Food, and Dong Xin, Head of E-commerce at Mondelez, jointly announced the launch of Super Brand Day.

Behind the Fun: Brand and Performance Integration

During this Super Brand Day event, within five hours of the Oreo Music Box's launch, the store's total sales exceeded the entire day of last year's Super Brand Day. Within 9 hours, over 10,000 boxes were sold. At midnight, consumers who had been waiting rushed to buy the Oreo Music Box. After the 20,000 limited-edition gift boxes sold out before noon, emergency restocking was arranged through Tmall Supermarket, but each person was limited to two boxes.

Behind the fun theme is the pace of Oreo's transformation and the presentation of phased results. From the slogan "Twist, Lick, Dunk" to the global positioning of "Whimsical Ideas," Oreo's attempts in China's e-commerce market are becoming bolder.

At 11 PM on August 6, 2016, Oreo invited Da Zhangwei and Xue Zhiqian to Tmall for a live-streamed "Real Xue Talk, Big Adventure" show. It was reported that on that day, Oreo's total sales across all Tmall channels were six times higher than usual, with new customers accounting for 91% of flagship store traffic. The number of fans acquired on the event day was 15 times the daily average in 2016. Moreover, Tmall tagged consumers who watched the live stream and conducted secondary targeting and promotion for this group over the next 3-5 days, encouraging them to purchase star-customized exclusive products.

Live stream scene of "Real Xue Talk, Big Adventure"

"At first, this was just a brand marketing move, but when combined with Tmall's data operations and secondary consumer reach, it resulted in excellent conversion and sales," said Dong Xin. "Brand and performance must have a meeting point. Only by driving traffic from social media to in-site resources and then to the product, and then having the product feed back into the sales loop of communication, is marketing upgraded."

Another case of brand marketing and sales achieving win-win results was during Double 11 in 2016. Mondelez collaborated with Trolls to create customized packaging, targeting movie audiences and fans across multiple platforms. During the campaign, they also tried personalized storefronts for the first time: all consumers who entered the flagship store through the Trolls traffic entry saw a store design entirely in Trolls style, completely different from the regular homepage, greatly improving conversion rates during Double 11.

Fang Wai defined "performance" as: communicating with the most precise consumers at the fastest speed and most efficiently. "New retail is a broad topic, but it all comes down to data integration. We will also help brands get closer to consumers, solve cost issues, solve membership management, solve comprehensive operational management, and connect with Alibaba's ecosystem to empower merchants."

A 105-Year-Old "Veteran" Unlocking New Consumption

As a synonym for chocolate-flavored sandwich cookies globally, Oreo has always performed strongly in the Chinese market. Especially since 2015, when Oreo's parent company Mondelez changed its global strategy, making e-commerce one of its three strategic growth priorities, it began investing more resources to support its e-commerce business.

In recent years, as consumer preferences shifted, sandwich cookie sales represented by Oreo have faced challenges. Despite $2.9 billion in sales keeping Oreo firmly at the top of the global biscuit rankings, it still faces slowing or declining sales in both the U.S. and Chinese markets.

Some consumers are increasingly cautious about high-sugar products, forcing Oreo to innovate in flavors and categories to attract consumers. Therefore, innovating on the basis of Oreo has become a clear direction for Mondelez's development.

In terms of products, the Chinese market has successively launched different specifications of biscuits such as Thins and Mini Oreos. Following the release of the Oreo Music Box, Dong Xin revealed, "Subsequent Oreo products will also be upgraded, with changes in flavor and thickness, and adjustments to sweetness and size."

In overseas markets, Oreo's innovations and varieties are even more impressive: Oreo Dipped with separated biscuit and cream, Oreo Fried Dough, Oreo Soft Baked Cookies. There are even 48 flavors including broccoli, beef burger, ramen, fried chicken, watermelon, bacon cream, luncheon meat, and butter beer.

In the latest ad in the North American market, Oreo enlisted three celebrity endorsers to reinterpret the brand's ritualistic eating instruction, simplifying "Twist, Lick, Dunk" to the "Oreo Dunk Challenge," featuring fancy dunking methods like riding a bike on a tightrope and doing a handstand while dipping the biscuit in milk.

Using different poses to give the biscuit more play and meaning is probably the secret to Mondelez Oreo's "staying young."

Alibaba and Mondelez signed a strategic cooperation agreement in 2016. Since then, the two sides have accelerated their online cooperation. Tmall has worked around the clock for Mondelez on port development and technical customization, and both sides plan to achieve more innovations in the new year across the entire chain, from marketing creativity and product development to backend data.

In recent years, Alibaba has also signed strategic cooperation agreements with global giants like Nestlé and Mars, leveraging Alibaba's platform advantages and big data support to complete innovative experiments, thereby sparking waves of consumer revolutions.

Source: Food Commune (ID: foodcommune)

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