Why did the Luckin Coffee Biluochun Latte campaign draw criticism?

Luckin Coffee launched its spring Biluochun Latte on March 6 and named male model Lu Xianren as its recommender, which triggered heavy criticism online. Complaints centered on two points: inviting a male endorser just before March 8 Women's Day, and spending a large sum on a lesser-known model instead of issuing more coupons. Higher new-product pricing and excessive caffeine content also fueled the discussion.

Lu Xianren is known for videos that turn everyday materials into fashionable clothing and use mountains as a runway. The backlash reflects how closely Chinese consumers now watch Women's Day marketing, pricing, and caffeine levels, especially as women cafe customers make up a large share of the specialty coffee and tea-coffee market. The full incident has stayed heated across comment sections.

Luckin Coffee launched its spring new product "Biluochun Latte" on March 6 and invited male model Lu Xianren as its recommender, which unexpectedly sparked intense controversy among netizens. The controversy focused on two points: Why invite a male model to endorse just before March 8 Women's Day? Why spend a large sum on a lesser-known model instead of giving out more coupons? In addition, issues such as the new product's higher price and excessive caffeine content also kept the discussion heated. This article will sort out the entire incident in full and retain the related recommendation information from Front Street Coffee.

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Recently, Luckin Coffee's new product has received a lot of complaints... and the reason behind it turned out to be the choice of new product recommender (endorser)??? In response to this situation, the author looked through the comment sections below several Luckin new product posts and found that netizens' dissatisfaction with this endorser mainly focused on two levels: First, why choose a male model for March 8? Second, this model is not particularly well-known, so why spend heavily to invite him as an endorser?

From these two controversial points, other topics also emerged that drew netizens into the argument: the pricing of new products is getting higher and higher, and since they have money to invite an unknown model, why not use this budget to give out more coupons? First, let's return to Luckin's new product itself. This product, named "Biluochun Latte," was launched on March 6, with a theme positioned around the spring season when all things bloom. In addition to launching floral-flavored drinks like many coffee brands, Luckin also launched a tea-coffee series this year and invited male model Lu Xianren to serve as the endorser.

You may not have a deep impression of Lu Xianren, but most people have probably seen his videos in which he first transformed readily available materials around him into all kinds of highly fashionable clothing and used the mountains as a runway.

With his own persistence, passion, and innate fashion sense, he quickly attracted the attention of the global fashion circle and was invited to walk the runway at Paris Fashion Week. His experience is quite inspiring. Luckin chose Lu Xianren as the endorser for this new product precisely because, when walking the runway in the mountains, he blended nature and fashion just right, highly matching the tone of this new tea-coffee product. So the brand invited Lu Xianren to return to a natural setting and took endorsement photos.

But coincidentally, the new product launched just two days before March 8 Women's Day, so many netizens concluded that this new product was specially launched for Women's Day and were extremely dissatisfied that Luckin invited a male model to endorse it, immediately causing an uproar. Although Luckin's original intention in inviting Lu Xianren to endorse was simply to match the theme of nature and fashion, because the controversy among netizens was too intense, on March 8, Luckin also invited Gao Ye, who played the sister-in-law in the TV drama "The Knockout," to serve as a one-day endorser, and used spring-season paper bags to make small bouquets, wishing all girls a happy holiday.

However, netizens still did not buy it and said one after another: Wouldn't it be better to directly make everything 3.8 yuan or give out 3.8 discount coupons? At the same time, they were still very dissatisfied with the male model endorsement.

In the past, after Luckin launched new products, the discussion around the products was very high, but this time few netizens commented on the drink itself. More voices focused on beliefs that the poster disrespected women and that the drink price was too high and exploited regular customers. Many friends who had tried the new product also said that after drinking it in the morning, they still stayed awake all day by evening, and they advised Luckin not to launch drinks with such high caffeine content next time...

Luckin really has it tough... Image source: Internet

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