Does a schedule+coffee crossover reach office drinkers?

Heytea has partnered with the office software WPS Office on a "Monday" limited series, releasing co-branded cup sleeves and badges and placing Heytea asset templates in the WPS Docer mall. The cup sleeves arrive in stores nationwide on November 14, with the badges following on November 21. The tie-up moves the tea brand from film and television IPs into everyday office scenarios.

The collaboration fits a broader push by new tea beverage brands into the coffee track, including Heytea's investments in specialty coffee brands Minority and Seesaw. As these crossovers become routine, the strategic question is whether a schedule+coffee style tie-in with a workplace tool can widen a brand's user scenarios or mostly generate short-lived social media attention.

Heytea has made another collaboration move, and this time the partner is the nationally popular office software WPS Office. The two parties launched limited-edition cup sleeves and badges themed around "Monday," and simultaneously made Heytea asset templates available on the WPS Docer mall. From film and television IP to office scenarios, Heytea is attempting to break out of its user scenario boundaries. At the same time, the trend of new tea beverage brands entering the coffee track is becoming increasingly obvious, and Heytea's moves to invest in specialty coffee brands such as Minority and Seesaw have also attracted attention. This article will analyze the strategies and challenges of new tea beverage brands against the backdrop of normalized collaborations, starting from the creative details of this collaboration, WPS's brand background, netizen feedback, and Heytea's recent series of moves.

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Heytea's collaboration frequency this year has been astonishingly high. On social platforms, some netizens even joked, "Even the production team's donkey isn't as hardworking as Heytea," and others teased whether the designers simply have no creative bottleneck period. With a series of密集 collaborations, Heytea has long been labeled in the industry as a "collaboration maniac."

Yesterday, Heytea and WPS Office jointly released the "Monday" series limited surprises. The collaboration cup sleeves and badges are scheduled to launch in stores nationwide on November 14 and 21, respectively. At the same time, Heytea-related elements officially entered the WPS Docer mall, where users can download and use all Heytea asset templates for free, covering multiple templates, icons, and cutout-free materials, adding fun and vitality to PPT creation.

Entering the second half of the year, Heytea's collaboration pace has clearly accelerated. First, it partnered with the hit drama "A Dream of Splendor," then with the famous dance poetry drama "Only This Green," successively launching Chinese-style inspired expressions incorporating Chinese tea culture and calligraphy and painting art. In addition, around "Empresses in the Palace," which has aired for more than ten years but remains popular, it absorbed and presented the exquisite Chinese lifestyle aesthetics in the drama, conveying Heytea's unique "Chinese inspiration" style. Besides these, brands such as 3CE and Genshin Impact are also on the collaboration list, with local pop culture IPs accounting for a relatively high proportion.

Choosing to collaborate with the user scenario WPS Office this time can be said to firmly grasp the office worker group. This software is the tool that millions of office workers cannot do without in their daily work. It is reported that the design of Heytea's cup sleeves and badges integrates elements from WPS's three major components—Writer, Spreadsheets, and Presentation—and adds unique creative design and exclusive memes for office workers, hoping to bring some relaxed and interesting moments to the daily work of the "working class."

WPS was born in 1989 and is China's first office software with independent intellectual property rights, having now gone through more than thirty years. It is known for advantages such as low memory usage, fast running speed, compact size, and strong plug-in platform support. Combined with rich template resources, it is attracting more and more young people to use it. The latest data shows that WPS's monthly active devices have exceeded 560 million, including 238 million monthly active on the PC version and 336 million on the mobile version, making it a truly national-level office software.

And office workers have also become a group on social media that can inspire a sense of belonging, with related topics always arousing widespread resonance. In the tea beverage circle, memes related to working, such as lying flat, slacking off, involution, and drawing pies, emerge endlessly. This WPS and Heytea collaboration exactly uses "Monday," the topic most discussed by office workers, as its entry point. After the campaign launched, it quickly attracted the attention and resonance of many consumers. Many netizens left comments such as: "Even WPS can be connected, you really understand collaborations," "I never expected this collaboration," "I've actually drunk WPS hahahaha"...

Now the trend of new tea beverage brands entering the coffee track is becoming more and more obvious. Compared with coffee brands such as Luckin and Manner that are built around office scenarios, Heytea's investment layout in Minority, Seesaw, and others is mostly in specialty coffee or coffee bean roasting brands, with relatively weaker connections to office scenarios. Compared with previous collaborations with games and film and television cultural IPs that achieved breakthroughs in "user age groups," this collaboration may be intended to achieve a breakthrough in user scenarios.

In addition to collaborations, Heytea recently also announced the establishment of transparent windows for freshly peeled real fruit, launched the first "Axi Full-Body Portrait Collection Contest" inviting fans to draw Heytea's full-body logo, and expanded business partnership operations in non-first-tier cities with suitable store formats, among other moves—one after another.

For a long time, Heytea has adhered to products of "real quality, not expensive" and a brand spirit full of inspiration and joy, bringing consumers more relaxed and pleasant experiences, continuously deepening the emotional connection between the brand and consumers, giving it stronger brand connectivity, and promoting new tea beverages toward a broader audience.

When collaborations become an industry norm, brands not only need to create a collaboration that breaks out, but also need to clarify their own goals. They need not only compatibility between the two brands, but also, from the consumer's perspective, to create excellent collaborative products and convey the collaboration concept to consumers in a way they enjoy.

Image source: Internet

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.