Taobao Qixi Campaign: Key takeaways:
- Taobao’s Qixi film spotlights five real female merchants and their craftsmanship
- Wordplay connects today’s sellers with Qixi’s history as a celebration of female dexterity
- Humanising makers helps heritage products compete on meaning rather than price
Qixi (七夕) narratives tend to work on a Valentine’s Day formula: pink hearts, brimming bouquets, everlasting love. This year, Taobao (淘宝) has dropped all that. They’re going back to the traditional narrative of women and their crafts.
The suggestion is that anything clever, beautiful, or unexpected can be found on Taobao
Their campaign film 女子巧在淘宝features five real Taobao shop owners – all women – plying their trade. One repairs broken jade, another recreates deceased pets in needle-felt form. Bamboo weaving and traditional crochet make appearances too, and all crafted products come with a view of their production.
Offline, 12 posters play on written Chinese, replacing the hand radical in verbs with images of a merchant’s hand. The slogan, ‘好巧，在淘宝’, carries several meanings. ‘好巧’ can mean ‘how clever’ or ‘what a coincidence’, while ‘巧’ also describes skill and ingenuity. The suggestion is that anything clever, beautiful, or unexpected can be found on Taobao.
The character qiao (巧) is also the campaign’s anchor in its traditional narrative. Qixi may be marketed as Chinese Valentine’s Day, but it was traditionally also known as Qiqiao Festival (乞巧节). Women threaded needles beneath the moon and prayed to the Weaver Girl for dexterity. Taobao’s ads give that tradition a modern twist.
The Dao view: This Qixi campaign gives Taobao merchants real character
There’s good commercial sense behind this message. The thousands of sellers and prices on large e-commerce platforms make products feel interchangeable. Search rankings, discounts and recommendation feeds reduce merchants to their thumbnails.
Taobao gives these products value beyond price and those 35,000 merchants an identity beyond the thumbnail
Traditional crafts and intangible-cultural-heritage products are an antidote to that and have large sales potential. The category has reached around RMB100 billion (US$14.9 billion) in transaction value across more than 35,000 Taobao and Tmall (天猫) merchants.
By placing their creators at the centre of the campaign, Taobao gives these products value beyond price and those 35,000 merchants an identity beyond the thumbnail.
