This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on February 22, 2022.
Mixue Bingcheng’s breakout moment put the advertising world in an awkward position.
A deliberately simple earworm built around the line “you love me, I love you” was remixed by internet users into parody clips and spread far beyond the brand’s own channels, creating massive exposure. It felt like advertising’s version of encountering Little Apple in music or Wuling Hongguang in autos: easy to look down on, hard to outperform.
Was this planned? Much of the early spread looked less like a brand campaign and more like users “playing with” the brand. The more useful question for operators and marketers is why users wanted to play with it at all, and what this says about brand communication now.
Mixue Bingcheng was not the first brand to be turned into internet material.
Zulijian, a senior-friendly shoe brand, did not have the same song, but it had its own moment on Bilibili. Users would flood videos of people falling with comments such as “you need Zulijian elderly shoes.” One viral edit showed Joe Biden stumbling while boarding a plane, with users recommending the brand.
Other old advertising lines have also been reworked into jokes:
The underlying force is not only “tacky” culture, though that is part of it. In recent years, earthy short-video styles, meme formats, rustic pickup lines, and deliberately low-polish humor have spread widely.
Mixue’s song follows a logic familiar from old-school Chinese mass advertising: repetitive, simple, and built for recall. It resembles the Brain Platinum style of advertising more than a carefully engineered internet-native campaign. In that sense, the brand may have accidentally entered an existing cultural wave.
Examples such as NetEase’s Jiangnan Leather Factory recruitment parody, Wufangzhai’s retro ads, and Coconut Palm’s decades-long insistence on Word-like packaging design all point to the same pattern: audiences are receptive to brands that can be dismantled, remixed, and laughed with.
At a deeper level, the culture may be less about tackiness and more about deconstruction. Younger audiences often dislike brands that appear too elevated or self-important. When a brand stands on a pedestal, users want to pull it down. Brands willing to come down themselves can earn goodwill. Xiaomi’s early positive response on Bilibili came partly because even its CEO could become remix material.
Advertising has to account for cultural atmosphere. Culture is shared consensus, and behind consensus sits enormous communication energy.
At one point, foreignness carried prestige in China: English names and English packaging could make a brand feel premium. Later, as Chinese brands rose, products such as Palace Museum ice cream and Huawei phones showed that local cultural confidence could also become a communications asset.
The same applies internationally. What once counted as attention-grabbing advertising may now be criticized as outdated or exclusionary. Themes such as women’s independence, equality, deconstruction, “lying flat,” anime culture, and health all belong to their era. Brand teams have to understand the cultural context of the communities they want to reach.
Every account, company, and country has its own culture and language. Find the current and communication can travel quickly. Miss it and even strong effort may go nowhere.
The second issue is media. As Understanding Media argues, media are not neutral carriers; the medium itself changes the message.
A bag can carry objects, so it functions as a medium. If the bag is from LV, it also communicates financial capacity. If enough people use such objects to compare status, the medium has helped shape behavior.
The same logic applies to older forms of writing. Early recording media such as animal bones and bamboo slips were bulky and easily worn. Complex characters helped preserve legibility after wear, while concise classical prose reduced the amount of physical material needed. The medium affected writing style, sentence length, and narrative form.
In mass communication, Mixue Bingcheng is a clear example of offline content being reshaped by online platforms such as Bilibili and Douyin.
Offline, the brand’s song was simple, repetitive, and mnemonic. Online, its meaning changed. It became parody, dubbing material, remix content, and entertainment detached from the product itself. The brand may not originally have intended to be “earthy” or remix-friendly, but later even its official presence began using Bilibili-style jokes. Once Mixue had enough exposure on Bilibili, the exact content mattered less: users naturally read it as a youth-facing brand. The medium became part of the message.
This is why luxury brands prefer airport advertising over restroom advertising: the airport medium itself signals strength. It is why Rolls-Royce cannot casually use internet celebrities as endorsers: the influencer is also a medium with its own meaning. It is why many entrepreneurs publish books: books carry authority beyond direct sales.
Brands need to understand the attributes of different media, adapt content to each medium, and let the medium serve the message.
Many companies still treat media too generically: one culture, one content asset, one format. They hope a TV commercial, a few posters, and a slogan can solve every brand communication problem.
But slogans are less universally necessary than they once were. Brands such as Saturnbird and Heytea communicate strongly even if many consumers cannot recall a formal slogan. The reason is that the medium has changed.
In the past, key media were offline environments and television. Messages had to be remembered and repeated by people, so slogans, rhymes, and catchy lines mattered. Today, people share content through phones. Complex images, screenshots, and visual references can circulate with one tap on platforms such as Xiaohongshu. Consumers do not always need to memorize a line; they can save, revisit, and forward the content.
The smartphone has become a bodily extension and a new medium. That changes what content needs to do.
For practitioners, sensitivity to new media has become essential. Dongdongqiang observed that many advertising professionals still look only at classic commercials when thinking about creative ideas. That is risky. Strong creative work may now appear on Bilibili, Douyin, Kuaishou, or variety shows because the mainstream media environment has shifted.
A copywriter’s future work may not be limited to rhymes, posters, or TV scripts. It may require writing short scripts, understanding remix culture, or knowing how to tell a compelling story in short video. Bus-stop print ads and TVCs alone are no longer enough.
The same applies to brand writing across new contexts: how should brand copy work in a comedy show versus a highway billboard? What are the traits of podcast advertising? How should brands appear in offline markets, music festivals, stand-up comedy, or murder-mystery games?
New media formats bring new culture and new traffic. Creating for them is the job. The playbook has to keep changing.