The archive · Marketing & Growth · Marketing decision · 2020
Wen's Food turns a million JD reviews into 'poems to meat' in a Shanghai wet market
A poultry giant staged its million-plus five-star JD reviews as poems across a wet market, adding an a cappella ode and a 37m scroll.
Wen's Food (温氏食品) · JD Fresh (京东生鲜)
What it had to solve
Wen's, one of China's biggest poultry and livestock producers, was known to supply chains, not households. In December 2020 it wanted its 'safe, good meat' claim to feel real during JD Fresh's 'Fei Chang Big Brand Day' promotion, but it had little consumer-facing brand story of its own.
How it works
In December 2020, Wen's Food (温氏食品) — the consumer brand of livestock giant Wen's Foodstuff Group — joined JD Fresh's 'Fei Chang Big Brand Day' promotion with a question most food suppliers never answer: how does a company that sold to kitchens for 37 years get households to choose its meat by name? The creative answer was to stop inventing praise and start collecting it.
Wen's JD flagship store held more than a million five-star reviews, each one a customer sentence about taste, safety or family meals. Agency 无二 treated those reviews as 'poems to meat' and staged them in Shanghai's Fushan wet market from December 1–7: poems hung stall by stall, a flash choir sang the ode 《温氏好肉颂》 a cappella, and a 37-metre scroll painted by artists covered the market. The claim 'safe good meat, everyone says so' was printed in the shoppers' own words.
The market show became news, holding a Weibo hot-search slot for two days with over 100M reads on the topic, while a Douyin challenge (#方言花式夸好肉#) passed 24M plays and the campaign reported roughly 150M total online reads reaching an estimated 250M people. Traffic was pushed back into JD: on brand day, store traffic ran 86% higher than it had on Double 11 day, sales grew 370% year-on-year, the shop gained 300,000+ followers, and JD Fresh recorded three category records within 24 hours.
The case later won the 2021 Jin Tong Award (金瞳奖) Grand Prix; by October 2021 it had accumulated 16 honors including gold, silver and bronze at Jin Tong and Jin Tou Shang, making 'poems to meat' the signature work of both Wen's consumer marketing and the young agency.
Why it lands
- The ad used real customer sentences, so the campaign's core claim was evidence rather than assertion — nobody could accuse it of inventing praise.
- A wet market is where meat buying decisions actually happen in China, putting the proof in the exact moment of purchase.
- The execution gave one idea several physical and digital forms — exhibition, song, scroll, challenge, livestream — so each channel reinforced the same line.
- It converted a promotional day (JD's brand day) into a brand story, building memory the merchant could keep after the discount ended.
What it did
The exhibition drew mainstream coverage (Dragon TV, Shanghai TV, Xinmin Evening News) and the hashtag #肉菜市场成最热打卡地# held a Weibo hot-search slot for two days with 100M+ reads; Douyin topic plays passed 24M and the campaign reported 150M total online reads reaching an estimated 250M people. On brand day, store traffic ran 86% higher than on Double 11 day, sales grew 370% year-on-year and the shop added 300,000+ followers, setting three JD Fresh category records in 24 hours.
What you can take
Social proof can be the creative itself: take the words customers already wrote and stage them where the buying happens, so the claim feels witnessed rather than advertised.
Since then
Wen's Food kept the 'poems' idea as an annual consumer-marketing thread (later campaigns included 《守味人》 and follow-up content), and 无二 cited the case when it became one of China's fastest-rising independent creative shops of the early 2020s. The campaign is frequently used in Chinese marketing casebooks as an example of turning e-commerce reviews into offline brand assets — showing that a company without a heritage of consumer advertising can borrow credibility from its own customers.
Sources
- 温氏食品：100万首写给肉的赞美诗 (Wen's Food: 1,000,000 poems of praise written to meat)
- 温氏食品打造菜市场赞美诗展 体现安心好肉强口碑
- 双喜临门！无二斩获金瞳奖、金投赏多项荣誉
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