The marketing war in 2025: how unpretentious it is

From the “Three Kingdoms” of the takeaway industry to the rise of cultural tourism in small towns, from the co-construction of regional culture to the excavation of emotional value, this year’s marketing war shows a new philosophy: altruism is self-interest. This article will delve into the logic behind this phenomenon and explore how brands can achieve a win-win situation for business and society by solving social pain points, tapping emotional resonance, and reconstructing media value.

Taking “end” as “beginning” is the most testing strategy, the most necessary strength, and the most sustainable strategy in the current business world.

When staying at the “beginning”, the momentum of the times is insufficient, and there is internal friction everywhere, and we have to be trapped in basic survival traps.

01.

Rotique Anita wrote in Business Fearless: “The key to business success is to find a feature that is free from competition and never dilute it. ”

The truth of the business war in 2025 is that the real “freedom from competition” comes precisely from the initiative to jump into the Red Sea, but it lights up for everyone.

02.

If I had to give a recent and most popular example, it would be this year’s takeaway “Three Kingdoms”.

You might as well think carefully about who has the biggest profits in this takeaway war involving many participants. One of the most unavoidable roles in the answer is the delivery man.

On the surface, JD.com set off a public opinion war with the “Open Letter to All Takeaway Rider Brothers”, but in fact, it fought for social security issues for the rider group, upgraded corporate competition to the level of social value co-construction, and followed up from multiple parties, and the protection of riders’ rights and interests was implemented on the ground.

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Of course, the most obvious perception is that ordinary consumers have more favorable choices. Taobao flash sale launched free order marketing, no routine accurate gifts, Meituan avoids public relations melee, and continues to strengthen minute-level delivery, which are real discounts and convenience.

Be sure to see the essence of this.

03.

Next, let’s talk about the three takeaways, which have been frequently out of the circle recently, especially when their names are played with, and celebrity marketing has begun to socialize.

Meituan: Huang Ling, takeaway, Huang Gengling (spokesperson Huang Ling);

Hungry: Blue, must win (spokesperson Lan Yingying);

JD.com: Red will win (spokesperson Hui Yinghong);

The names of the three stars correspond to the colors of the three brands, and the anti-refined expression, original sense of camouflage and low threshold of understanding hide the brand information in the daily context and social conversations, so that even passers-by can understand the joke in seconds.

The similarity with the public opinion war is that it seems to be a fight, but in fact it is a joint expansion of the instant retail cake. Of course, there must also be an element of zero-sum games in this, and it is clear who wins and who loses.

The great hadron still has two brushes.

04.

If the altruistic logic of the food delivery industry is still at the commercial level, then Su Chao, who has recently become popular all over the Internet, has upgraded the business war thinking to the height of regional cultural co-construction.

I thought that the internal discord in Jiangsu Province was only reflected in the twelve prefecture-level cities with strong economic strength, all of which wanted to squeeze Nanjing out of the position of the big brother on the list.

Behind the gunpowder-smelling regional battle between cities, elements such as Nanjing Brine Duck, Suzhou Pingtan, Xuzhou Diguo Chicken, and Nanchang Test Papers are popular on the Internet; Under the atmosphere of scolding the locust tree, yin and yang, provoking each other, and disobeying the counterattack, Jiangsu scenic spots are scheduled to soar by more than 300%, and will create more than 300 million yuan of comprehensive economic benefits throughout the season.

You see, even if you are loose, you can’t leave any of them behind when you debut as a group.

05.

At the same time, the director of the Handan Bureau of Culture and Tourism bowed and apologized, and the popularity of Yangzhou’s “Knocking on the Back Suite” jointly pointed to a new trend: small-town cultural tourism is abandoning the “tall” promotional video routine and instead using “altruistic” content to build emotional connections.

Handan’s self-deprecation of “I’m sorry, I failed to lose weight” essentially puts the tourist experience first – admitting that local snacks are too tempting, but dissolves the sense of distance in tourism promotion; The “Knocking on the Back Suite” cooperated by Yangzhou Cultural Tourism and TBWA will turn the market skills into music, so that traditional crafts can be seen in a more people-friendly way.

The common denominator of these cases is to use vivid local stories and regional “characters” to make small towns approachable, perceptible and disseminated, starting from “human feeling”.

06.

This is surprisingly consistent with the consumption preferences and paths shown by young people today.

According to Qunar’s big data, during this year’s May Day holiday, the county became the hottest destination for “reverse tourism”, with platform hotel bookings spread across 1,230 counties, covering nearly 90% of the country’s counties.

Young people flock to the small town with the original intention of going to the mountains, rivers, lakes and seas and checking in the humanistic temperature, essentially refusing to be alienated and embracing a flawed life – just like the director of Handan Culture and Tourism tore open the filter of tourism promotion with an apology video, Luckin Coffee printed the Chengdu panda emoticon on the milk tea cup, these pyrotechnic marketing just caught young people’s desire for “realism”.

Small town cultural tourism is rolled up in the heart domain traffic, and the winning is the emotional rigidity, and the essence is still “altruism”.

07.

I don’t know if you have noticed, which offline large screens in your city used to be gray and carousel standby screens, but now they have collectively incarnated as social mouths.

During the May Day period of Xinyang West Asia City, “Salary can’t be spent at all, really (balance: 0.00)”, Chengdu Tianjie interpreted “Mom, don’t you eat dragon meat tonight” in Sichuan-Chongqing dialect, and Nanjing Jingfeng Center presented “Why can’t I turn off the lights by myself”…… Or self-deprecating, or warm, or with the coolness of “crazy literature”, or full of market humor, accurately poking the life emotions of different groups.

The underlying logic of this change is the brand’s value reconstruction of the “altruistic medium” – when the large screen abandons the hard and wide output of self-hi and turns into an emotional microphone for ordinary people, it completes the qualitative change from commercial display screen to public emotional infrastructure.

08.

Similar marketing symbols also have various large and small festival nodes, which have now become emotional resonators for brands and users.

For example, May Fourth Youth Day is no longer a simple time label, but the anti-anxiety declaration of “To You Who Will Not Be Eliminated by Anxiety” has been output by Bilibili for many years; For example, World Smile Day has become an emotional outlet for MINISO to use AI irony to interpret “happiness without deep thinking”; For example, the “Classmates’ Day” uses the campus-like narrative of “all walls are doors” to build an identity for knowledge learners.

Abandon the simplicity and rudeness of the promotion window and start from the node itself to become the emotional spokesperson of a specific group. The altruism of node marketing is satisfying users’ “heart-price ratio”.

09.

After more than a dozen business war baptisms in recent years, a new social consensus has been formed: the business war philosophy has changed, or in other words, the business war philosophy with a marketing nature is completely different from the original.

It is reflected in the level of emotional value, which is the ubiquitous altruism. From provincial leagues and characteristic cities to carousel large screens and self-made festivals, traders are tapping the widest resonance of the collective will of society based on various angles.

Party A summarized the three principles of altruistic economics: (1) Pain points become public issues; (2) defects become emotional resources; (3) Media is a public service, when the brand is willing to start from a certain part of the social value fold and become an amplifier of the user’s emotional value, the market will naturally give back excess value.

10.

Altruism is the highest level of self-interest.

The gold content of this nonsense still dominates the business world at the bottom.