Meituan, Ele.me, and JD.com compete fiercely in the takeaway market, and each platform uses homophonic meme marketing to compete for users’ minds, escalating from traffic wars to ecological showdowns, and the final winner will be the one who understands users better, optimizes the experience, and builds a win-win ecosystem.
The takeaway war has entered a metaphysical state.
Some time ago, Meituan Takeaway invited Shanghai singer Huang Ling to be the spokesperson, and Huang Ling sang the brand advertising song “Takeaway, Huang’s More Spirit” in Shanghainese.
Among them, Huang Ling’s “yellow” fits perfectly with Meituan’s yellow brand color, and “Ling” is homophonic with the Shanghai word “ling” (meaning easy to use and reliable), forming a creative selling point of a pun; The advertising slogan “Takeaway, Yellow is More Spiritual” cleverly combines the name of the star with the brand advantages to deepen the user impression; At the same time, Huang Ling is translated as Yellow Zero, which echoes Meituan’s recent “sweep 0 to get 0” activity, that is, the divine coupon of 15 yuan minus 15 yuan and finally pay 0 yuan.
This wave of operations has attracted a lot of attention. At that time, some netizens said: “Ele.me can only win back a city by inviting Lan Yingying.” ”
B-end product manager’s ability model and learning improvement
The first challenge faced by B-end product managers is how to correctly analyze and diagnose business problems. This is also the most difficult part, product design knowledge is basically not helpful for this part of the work, if you want to do a good job in business analysis and diagnosis, you must have a solid …
View details >
This may be just a joke, but I didn’t expect it,On June 1, Ele.me actually officially announced that actor Lan Yingying became the spokesperson of its event, playing a homophonic stalk, saying that “the blue must win”. After adopting the suggestion, Ele.me also publicly shouted to thank the two netizens who made the proposal, and promised to give away 18.8 yuan × 365 days of annual red envelopes.
At this moment, all the pressure is on JD.com – how will it take action? Is it to invite Hui Yinghong (the red one will win), or Liu Genghong (Liu Qiangdong is more popular)? Yesterday, some netizens even used AI to help JD.com make a poster, except for the font that needs to be repaired and cannot directly use the face of the star, the overall is very close to the commercial level, just waiting for JD.com’s official announcement.
Source/Public account @龍爪槐 Watcher
This kind of metaphysical marketing duel reflects the deep game of the food delivery industry from traffic competition to brand mental occupation.
It is JD.com that provoked this takeaway melee in 2025.
At the end of 2024, JD Miaosend began to test the waters of the takeaway business, and in February 2025, it officially launched the recruitment of “quality dine-in catering merchants”, and announced that merchants who settled in before May 1 would be commission-free throughout the year; At the same time, it was also announced that it would pay five insurances and one housing fund for takeaway riders. Then, Meituan and Ele.me responded and followed up on social security policies.
JD.com’s offensive goes far beyond strategy releases. In early April, Liu Qiangdong, who had not appeared in public for a long time, forwarded an article in the circle of friends that JD.com’s takeaway riders exceeded 10,000 and the platform undertook the full amount of five insurances and one housing fund, speaking out for the “brothers”, calling on the whole industry to improve the treatment of riders, and deeply binding the “brother culture” label to JD.com’s takeaway.
On April 21, Liu Qiangdong personally delivered food, eating at the same table with the delivery workers, drinking and chatting, and quickly detonated social media, and ranked first on the Weibo hot search list, and even riders from Meituan and Ele.me “joined” on the spot.
In the face of JD.com’s challenges, Meituan is not indifferent. On the one hand, executives personally confronted each other, Meituan’s core local business CEO Wang Puzhong sharply commented on JD.com’s food delivery business, and JD.com responded with “don’t fight a worthless war of words”, emphasizing social value creation, air confrontation, and full of gunpowder.
On the other hand, Xue Bing, general manager of Meituan Takeaway, announced that it will invest 100 billion yuan in the catering industry as a whole in the next three years, with the core goal of promoting 100,000 restaurants to achieve “bright kitchens and bright stoves” and improve food safety transparency and back-end quality. This is seen as a positive response and defense upgrade to JD.com’s “quality takeaway” positioning.
The two sides go back and forth, so lively.
At the same time, the takeaway war has gradually escalated into an ecological showdown.
On April 15, Meituan officially released the “Meituan Flash Sale” independent brand, countering JD.com with everything to the home, and even launched the “Meituan Flash Sale 618”, the original price of 5,999 yuan iPhone 16 was sold to a minimum of 3,799 yuan after superimposing national subsidies, platform discounts, and black diamond member red envelopes, directly into the hinterland of JD.com’s 3C.
Ele.me finally ended up, using the Alibaba ecology to launch a blitzkrieg, officially launched the platform’s “Hunger Supplement of More than 10 Billion” promotion, and announced that Taobao Tmall’s instant retail business “Hourly Delivery” was officially upgraded to “Taobao Flash Sale”, and won the prime position of the first-level traffic entrance on the homepage of the Taobao App.
Alibaba’s full ecological resources began to tilt towards “flash sales”: Alipay began to test Taobao flash sales in grayscale; Clothing brands such as Uniqlo, ONLY, and VEROMODA have appeared in the Taobao flash sale information flow, and after clicking, they jump directly to their Tmall flagship store, initially realizing the connection between online traffic and offline store inventory and instant delivery.
The smoke of May temporarily dissipated, and various platforms showed their report cards: on May 26, Taobao Flash Sale x Ele.me claimed that the peak daily order exceeded 40 million; According to a late report on May 30, Meituan’s average daily order volume was 80 million to 90 million orders, and on May 21, the daily order volume of “God Hot” exceeded 10 million orders; On June 1, JD Takeaway announced that its daily orders reached 25 million.
It is foreseeable that as the war continues to ferment, flash sales may be cultivated into a new shopping habit – placing an order on a mobile app and delivering all goods to your door in a few tens of minutes.
With Meituan, Alibaba, and JD.com starting the Three Kingdoms Kill, the competition in the food delivery industry is evolving into an all-round competition of comprehensive strength, including the intensity of capital investment, the breadth of user scale, and the density of distribution efficiency, as well as deeper ecological integration capabilities, refined polishing of user experience, empowerment level for merchants, and adherence to industry compliance.
In this contest of comprehensive strength, “metaphysical marketing” has become a coup to compete for users’ minds with its unique interest and communication power. Whether it is Meituan’s “Yellow Spirit”, Ele.me’s “Blue Win”, or the “Red Huiying (Will Win)” envisioned by netizens for JD.com, they have successfully aroused widespread attention and discussion, injecting distinctive labels into the platform.
However, what determines the final outcome of this Three Kingdoms kill is by no means the temporary subsidy or the size of the marketing volume. Who can truly understand the changing needs of users, continue to optimize every experience detail from order to delivery, and build a win-win ecology where consumers, merchants, and riders can share value, who can have the last laugh in this battle around “immediacy”.
