A group of four entrepreneurs has started a marketing campaign for rice produced in Pingtung County’s Donggang Township (東港), employing a manga-style character known as “Dongjin Moemi.”
Simon Creative Marketing Co’s campaign is the latest incarnation of the company’s mainstay — marketing Taiwan’s cultural events and domestic products using fictional female characters created in the Japanese manga and anime styles.
Speaking of the company’s manga spokeswomen created for other events and products such as the Christmas Festival at St Mary’s Church in Pingtung County’s Wanjing Township (萬金) and blackfin tuna sold at Donggang, Simon Creative Marketing founder Yang Chia-yu (楊家宇) said that the motto of the creative team is: “Everything can be rendered into anime cuteness.”
Photo courtesy of Simon Creative Marketing
Simon Creative Marketing’s most well-known creations are the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Girls, a series of fictional characters created for Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp, used by the transit authority’s public information campaigns to promote traffic safety and train-riding etiquette, and with comic books that showcased the characters’ adventures.
The four 30-somethings who comprise the core of the company, are graduates of National Pingtung University of Science and Technology and the National Kaohsiung Marine University, Yang said, adding that they were all prominent members of their schools’ manga and anime clubs.
Two years after graduating, they began a commercial design company together using the type of art they love, Yang said.
The project to market Donggang rice started last year when the company got in touch with the Taiwan Rice Plant Association, which was eager to advertise Kaohsiung-145, a high-quality strain of rice grown by the township’s farms, Yang said.
Taiwan Rice Plant Association president Lin Ching-yuan (林清源) said that he was touched by the effort the group put into the project, adding that Yang and his team worked in the fields and participated in every step of the planting, fertilizing and harvesting process to get a feeling for the product.
Yang said the character was named Dongjin Moemi in reference to Dongjin and moe, the old name of Donggang Township, and the anime aesthetics of her character design.
The use of the character will help the sale of the rice by generating attention among Taiwan’s anime and manga community and spreading awareness of the product to the general public, Yang said.
He added that a serialized comic book, Facebook fan group and a marketing Web site have been launched for the rice and its spokeswoman, and that the company is pursuing possible collaborations with musicians, game designers and other workers in creative industries to increase the visibility of rice from Donggang.
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