JD.com’s take on how to live a ‘better life’

JD.com’s take on how to live a ‘better life’

The popular online shopping website, Jingdong, or simply JD.com for short, has their 12th anniversary coming up. JD.com of course plans to celebrate their cyber birthday with an online sale because what would an online Chinese birthday party be without a bunch of discounts? Leading up to the online anniversary sale, JD.com has created an HTML5 that shows people how to live a ‘higher quality’ life by showing how you can turn something ordinary into extraordinary.

‘618’ also written as June 18th is the JD.com’s anniversary date and the day of the online sale. It’s pretty typical for the Chinese to turn dates or numbers into holidays that then are used to make some sort of online sale.

So, lets have a look at JD.com’s campaign

Below are some screenshots from the HTML5 that show how normal products can make you look cool if you present them in a ‘different’ way, and honestly by different, I just mean super strange.

In this example, a boy bought a new pair of shoes, but then if you click on the animated shoe button, it makes the boy do a weird sort of kick that makes other people notice just how ‘cool’ his new shoes are and how ‘awesome’ he looks while doing whatever sort of kick he is doing.

This screenshot uses a chair that appears normal, but then if you click on the animated chair button, the guy acts like he is driving a race car, which makes the girls at the other table ‘super interested’ in him.

This last image is of a girl who starts off with some cheap instant noodles, but then once the animated dish button is clicked, the meal is suddenly turned into a five star meal.

So, how did JD.com do?

So basically the point of JD.com’s HTML5 page is to show how you don’t have to have a lot of money or buy expensive things to look cool or have a higher quality life.

The HTML5 page is supposed to teach you how to look better by just changing the way you act

I think the reasoning and meaningfulness of this HTML5 page might be a little off, but what JD.com does have going for them is the weird factor, which Chinese people seem to flock to. Chinese can’t seem to get enough of strange things and then they love to share those strange things with their friends and so on. So even though this HTML5 page is pretty odd, it’s oddness is going to be what gets the Chinese to share and spread the news of JD.com’s anniversary sale.

So weird is what sells in China.