Case Study: Brewing Chinese affinity for Luxury tea brand Galerie du Thé

Galerie du Thé, a premium tea brand that is part of the renowned Ahmad Tea brand from Winchester in the UK, wanted to grow its popularity amongst a young Chinese audience. GdT wanted to tap into the increasing popularity of a quintessentially British afternoon tea, to enhance its discoverability on key Chinese platforms like XiaoHongShu (Little Red Book), and ultimately to improve brand perceptions within the segment and grow sales.

Challenge

The GdT brand is a new global brand, and it was not yet established within a Chinese audience, and is not established in search volume terms on the major discovery platform in China, Xiaohongshu. 

Insight

Xiaohongshu is the discovery platform of choice to search for growing trends and themes that are related to tea drinking. We knew it would therefore be more impactful to associate with Afternoon Tea terms, which was showing strong organic activity, and gave us a better opportunity than just association with tea or the GdT terms. 

What we did

Leveraging Hot Pot’s proprietary Cultural Intel Community (CIC), a panel of 5,000 real Chinese consumers and tastemakers, we tapped into our network of influencers, its Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) in order to select a group of passionate and engaged brand ambassadors. We then used them to build a brand story on Xiaohongshu related to the relevant search terms associated with afternoon tea. For our KOLs with high levels of follower counts and sway on the platform, we briefed out content that was specifically related to Galerie du Thé’s tea-making process, origins and flavour profiles, whilst for our KOCs who are more native with lower followings, we briefed content that would be more visually stimulating and related to the brand’s superb heritage as a leading tea estate and producer.  

Results

Despite the campaign being small, the results were impressive. We achieved 129,000 impressions for GdT, which was an overdelivery of 22% over the objective, and 3,832 engagements, an over-delivery of 8%. As well as this, our KOC and KOL campaign drove positive perceptions around taste and fragrance, with engagement and comments being especially high around these aspects. 

Yihu He, Senior Account Manager at Hot Pot China, said the following about the GdT campaign: 

”The first step for emerging niche brands to enter in China is always to optimise your search results based on the trending key works at the time. Leveraging the platform’s organic traffic, other competitors’ influences and working with right KOLs all help to secure this”.

If you’re a brand looking to achieve similarly impressive marketing and commercial results in China, get in touch with our team to see how our KOL and Influencer team can grow the affinity and appeal of your products. Drop us a line at nihao@hotpotchina.com