How Extreme Coffee Fans Reacted to the Nayuki Harry Potter Drinks
Nayuki launched four limited-edition drinks tied to the Hogwarts houses in its Harry Potter collaboration, but the reception has been rough. The Slytherin drink, a kale and kiwi fruit-and-vegetable mix, was compared to a potion by fans, and the other three drew complaints as well.
Dispute also fell on the merchandise: uneven distribution of blind-box transparent cards led consumers to question how stores handled stock. The episode shows how much weight extreme coffee fans place on flavor and fair release when a large IP meets a tea and coffee chain, and it has dented the campaign's goodwill.
Harry Potter, the globally renowned IP, has teamed up with Nays Tea for a collaboration, launching limited-edition drinks and merchandise inspired by the four Hogwarts houses. However, controversy has surrounded the campaign since its launch: the Slytherin representative drink, featuring a kale and kiwi fruit-and-vegetable combination, was mocked by fans as tasting like a "potion," while the other three were also criticized for various flaws; the uneven distribution of blind box transparent cards in the merchandise further led consumers to question store operations. As an experienced collaboration brand, Nays Tea's performance this time has disappointed many Harry Potter fans, dealing a double blow to the event experience and brand favorability.
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Cross-industry collaborations between tea beverage and coffee brands have long been commonplace, but there is one IP that has consistently been highly anticipated yet rarely appeared in China: the Harry Potter series, which has countless book fans worldwide.
Recently, this world-famous major IP finally reached a collaboration with Nays Tea, and the news immediately had many domestic book fans eagerly looking forward to it.
In the setting of *Harry Potter*, characters are divided into different factions, with the most well-known being the four houses of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: the red Gryffindor (Lion House), the yellow Hufflepuff (Badger House), the blue Ravenclaw (Eagle House), and the green Slytherin (Snake House).
Nays Tea drew inspiration from this, launching four limited-edition drinks and special packaging cups corresponding to the four houses.
For many Harry Potter fans, they identify with a particular house faction because of their favorite characters, so as soon as the collaboration was announced, fans of each faction were eager to try, planning to use drink sales to win glory for their house in this "Nays Tea-sponsored House Cup."
However, when the kale and kiwi drink echoing the Snake House's representative color appeared on the promotional poster, fans hoping to help Snake House top the sales charts instantly "turned green in the face," with many directly joking that "Snake House has been eliminated right from the start."
It is reported that this drink is Nays Tea's first fruit-and-vegetable product, and it was already on the market before this collaboration campaign.
Recently, the popularity of fruit-and-vegetable tea drinks has continued to rise, with multiple brands following suit to launch related products in response to consumers' pursuit of healthy diets. However, the combination of vegetables and fruit juice is still not widely accepted by the general public, and some even find such pairings taste like "dark cuisine," making people recoil at the mere mention.
Thus some netizens speculated that the reason this drink was included in the collaboration menu might be that the brand wanted to leverage the IP's popularity to promote fruit-and-vegetable juices and encourage more consumers to give them a try.
But for Snake House fans, many said they were put off as soon as they heard it was a fruit-and-vegetable juice, while others chose to buy it and give it a try, only for most to report that the taste was unexpectedly bad: "It's so awful, it tastes like health," "I drank it like Polyjuice Potion," "What kind of diet meal is this," "It tastes like a potion brewed in Professor Snape's cauldron."
As for the other three drinks, in fans' eyes they were equally "two of a kind," each with its own flaws: "What kind of iron stomach do you Ravenclaws have? I threw up halfway through drinking it," "Our Badger House one is so watery...," "The Gryffindor one tastes like artificial flavoring."
Besides the limited-edition drinks, the campaign merchandise also became the most discussed topic among netizens.
Many consumers reported that they deliberately bought multiple cups of the specified drinks hoping to get non-duplicate gifts, but the actual situation was the opposite of expectations—they all received the same style of merchandise, leading customers to question whether multiple Nays Tea stores had failed to shuffle the blind box transparent cards, and that the merchandise distribution method was unreasonable.
Many Harry Potter fans said they had extremely high expectations for a collaboration with the Harry Potter IP, and the partner Nays Tea had also accumulated considerable experience in collaborations. It should have been a mutually beneficial win-win cooperation, but unexpectedly the campaign had frequent problems, making people question the competence of store employees. Fans' event experience was greatly diminished, and their favorability toward the brand decreased accordingly.
Image source: Internet
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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
