The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2021
Mixue's 13-word ice-cream anthem goes viral — 9.5 billion exposures for Snow King
June 2021: Mixue posts a 13-word jingle to Bilibili; fans remix it into dozens of languages, pushing total exposure past 9.5 billion.
Mixue Bingcheng (蜜雪冰城)
What it had to solve
Mixue, a budget ice-cream-and-tea chain built on 2-6 yuan drinks in smaller cities, was recognizable at street level but barely known as a national brand. Its agency Hua & Hua had created the Snow King mascot in 2018 and a store jingle in 2020, but neither had broken online.
How it works
In 2018, agency Hua & Hua gave Mixue Bingcheng a mascot: Snow King, a chubby snowman holding an ice-cream staff, in flat red and white. The chain — known for 2-6 yuan drinks in smaller cities — was familiar at street level but barely a national brand, and it had no money for glamour advertising.
On June 3, 2021, Mixue pushed its store jingle online: 'You love me, I love you, Mixue Ice Cream and Tea,' 13 words repeated over the 1847 American folk tune Oh! Susanna while Snow King danced. The 24-second MV was deliberately crude — the point was that anyone could copy it.
Fans did the rest. Bilibili creators produced English, Russian, Japanese, Thai and dialect versions, ghost-edited parodies, and 'embarrassing moment' clips of customers singing in stores. The official MV passed 12.8 million plays and 650,000 likes, and the remixes climbed the site's trending lists.
By late June, Weibo topics had drawn over 1 billion reads and Douyin topics 1.38 billion views; Mixue's official encyclopedia later recorded cumulative exposure above 9.5 billion. The brand issued a meme and let the audience scale it — its cheap, cheerful image became the joke people wanted to share.
Why it lands
- Thirteen words and one melody were trivially easy to memorize, so the song survived past the first viewing.
- Setting the jingle to the public-domain folk tune Oh! Susanna made it instantly familiar to ears of all ages.
- The simple mascot and melody lowered the remix barrier, turning Bilibili's creators into volunteer ad agencies.
- Store visits to sing the song gave the meme a physical, human moment beyond the screen.
- The 'cheap and cheerful' tone made the brand's low price part of the joke instead of a weakness.
What it did
The official MV passed 12.8 million Bilibili plays with 650,000 likes; Weibo topics drew over 1 billion reads and Douyin topics 1.38 billion views. Mixue's official encyclopedia records cumulative exposure above 9.5 billion.
What you can take
For a budget brand the asset is a remixable meme: 13 words, a simple melody and a mascot let millions of fans broadcast it, and the brand's cheapness becomes part of the joke.
Since then
The anthem became Mixue's permanent brand property: it still plays in stores, anchored the Snow King animated series that launched in 2023, and is cited in the brand's official encyclopedia at 9.5 billion exposures. The episode became a textbook case for Chinese marketing — a remixable jingle as a launch asset with the audience as the media channel — and Snow King went on to lead Mixue's global expansion.
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