Results and Effectiveness

"Taobao Hijack hit shoppers with “you kill when you overbuy” at the most relevant time but most unexpected place, right at the spot of purchase. In just 7 days, Taobao Hijack earned media coverage from over 70 publications, estimated equivalent to RMB 1 million. We got over 20,000 forwards on social media (Weibo and Wechat), and over 7,000 pledges of “Think Twice before you buy” from supporters. On the 8th day, Taobao found out and closed our shops. But the fire had been ignited. With zero prompting, anonymous shops mushroomed, following our act of hijacking Taobao. The movement has just begun. "

Creative Execution

"The team adopted free media to implement our idea, so as to keep our idea true to growing a social movement organically. Our initial media reach comes from organic search traffic on Taobao, through investigating Taobao Index we identified fast fashion is the most searched and the most overbought category. We decided to put the focus on jeans, children wear and sneakers in ""Taobao Hijack"". We hijacked Taobao and sold items that cause the most dumping pollution; instead of showing fashion items our “shop” displayed the photos of pollution problems i.e. dead fish, dead birds, etc. This awakened the shoppers to take a pledge to ""think twice before you buy"" and created a social movement to stop overconsumption. We invited shoppers to take a pledge of ""think twice before you buy"" on social media, Weibo and WeChat, and this spread digital word-of-mouth for us and drove more visitors to our shop to learn the inconvenient truth. This in turns resulted in more supporters taking the pledge and generating a bigger buzz on social media."

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Business objective is to reduce "overconsumption" to save the environment. Marketing objective is to build public awarness of "overconsumption" killing the environment. Communications objective is to create a social movement of "think twice before you buy" to stop overconsumption. Many clothes and apparel manufacturing practices harm the environment. To add to the problem, “fast fashion” causes consumers to overbuy. They consider textiles as disposables. The challenge is, people in China rarely or never associate shopping with harming the environment. We decide to reveal the blood on their hands just as they’re about to buy clothes, on the China’s largest platform for textile consumption, Taobao, where 35 billion sales turnover is generated for a single day! We hijacked Taobao awakening shoppers the fact that "You Kill When You Overbuy" right at the spot of purchase.