Crazy Thursday: The Phenomenon of Value Co Creation in Brand Marketing

At the moment when the digital wave is sweeping the world, the digital era has arrived. The deep integration between brand marketing and Internet culture has given birth to the new concept of value co creation. Take KFC’s “Crazy Thursday” activity as an example. At first, it was just a regular promotional activity, but under the promotion of Internet culture, it gradually evolved into a popular cross platform network. This phenomenon not only breaks the limitations of the traditional marketing activity lifecycle, but also develops into a cultural symbol that is self-organized and spontaneously spread by users, fully demonstrating the complex and profound interactive relationship between user generated content (UGC) and subculture communities. This study focuses on the typical case of “Crazy Thursday” and deeply analyzes how brands can leverage value co creation with subcultural communities to successfully transform short-term promotional activities into long-term cultural symbols, with a particular emphasis on exploring the key core role of UGC in this process. By combining the theory of value co creation and semiotics, this study analyzed UGC data on platforms such as Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili from 2018 to 2024, revealing the characteristics of cultural symbol generation mechanisms at different stages, and providing theoretical guidance and practical paths for brand culture co creation in the digital age.