Ad Review: Temu "Shop Like a Billionaire"

 Again, going way back to my marketing roots and just looking at Ads that have exposed themselves to me in recent times. Today's is going to be "Temu" and their "Shop Like A Billionaire" Campaign, which if I had to guess serves to take a large booming phenomena and take it mainstream. From Tiktok using kidults to TV watching Boomers:

The only thing notable about Temu's ad, when compared to say K-mart and Target ads of yesteryear is the brazen honesty. Similar to my previous post about Virgin's "Bring on Wonderful" campaign that makes no apologies for just making work shitter for their employees.

In Temu's case I'm going to use some terminology that comes from my marketing degree - high-context vs low-context cultures. This was probably at the time one of the revolutionary discoveries in behavioural psychology, because to that point psychology had been conducted by universities like Stanford (who conducted the Stanford experiment) by paying tertiary students in New England $20 to be test subjects and then the findings were generalised to people everywhere.

The point being someone did an experiment where they asked western students to describe a picture of an aquarium and then they also asked Japanese students to do the same thing. And the picture was something like this:

 

And it turns out westerners hone in on describing the fish as the central figure, and Japanese students were more likely to notice the context, the background details and comment on them or something. So the Japanese would say "I see a spiral snail shell and some weeds that a fish is swimming past" and the westerners would say "it's a picture of a fish that has like a silver blue stripe and transparent fins and an orange body with red cheeks" or whatever.

Now obviously, there's huge cultural differences between countries like Japan and China, even quite pronounced antipathy. But broadly speaking "the West" which goes back to Europe vs the Ottomans, is more individualistic or "low context" (the fish) vs "the East" now more associated with Asia than the middle east, so China, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia etc. are less individualistic or "high context" (the tank).

This translates into the West looking at the individual driving the Porsche and inferring the story of the Porsche eg. look at that finance douche skimming some pension fund etc. and the East looking at the Porsche and inferring who the driver must be, eg. look there's someone from the aristocratic class or who runs a successful business.

Theory over, I must confess that I am through-and-through a Westerner and just have that blind spot where I can't imagine the advantages of the Eastern high-context way of thinking. I must confess I can't even muster my imagination to the point where I can believe that people from high-context cultures can actually believe their own beliefs - like that someone who is rich must therefore be a great person. People who think this way from and in my own culture - people who thought George W Bush must be smart because he was President, same with Trump, I think of as idiots. 

Bringing us finally to "Shop like a billionaire" as a slogan. Clearly if you think billionaires shop like a young woman who blows through her wages impulse buying crap, you are frankly, a moron. 

I'm getting ahead of myself "shop like a billionaire" though squarely aimed at the proletariat, is a reasonably succinct way to sell Temu's core competitive advantage over market leader Amazon, and other companies I know little about like Shein. "Shop like a billionaire" though a farcical characterization of billionaires does explain why to give Temu a try over whoever you are currently using. They could have used "your dollar goes further on Temu" as a slogan, but then you may not be able to run this ad throughout the Anglosphere without having to dub a "your pound goes further" in the case of the UK, "your beaver-fur goes further" in Canada, "your dogecoin goes further" in Silicon Valley etc.

But back to the East meets West, this ad may represent a cultural convergence in a market like Australia depending on how successful the campaign is. My feeling is the true slogan of Temu should be "get all your crap in one place" but I don't know much about Temu, as I've previously stated I basically buy nothing myself.

So the lyrics to the jingle are "I like it/It's mine/the Prices blow my mind/I feel like a billionaire" and then we follow this girl out into her cartoon toy-town fantasy land where the prices are so cheap she can impulsively buy crap for everyone she sees. 

The audience targeted I have to infer, are people with very very low awareness. Just as Trump was famously described as "a poor person's idea of a rich person" or something like that, Temu is targeting people who may be residents of rich countries like the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, but are not themselves rich. 

There's something akin to a 12 year old child thinking that if they could just earn $100 they would spend it all on candy like it was Halloween everyday, and although I live in infantilised times with obese adults probably actually often fulfilling these childhood aspirations when presented with disposable income, hopefully most people are changed through a process called maturation that changes them such that by the time they have $100 lying around they don't blow it on chips, candy and cola, but maybe they want to stick it in a savings account, or assemble a cheese board or maybe buy some LSD or MDMA. 

This ad campaign, isn't even puffery, I think its an astute observation of how people with no money assume the asset class disposes their income - buying whatever they want. 

It has to also be said, the twee aesthetics of the ad gloss over the question of where Temu's low low prices come from. That's the brazen part of this Temu campaign - though thought provoking for someone like me, I'm clearly not the target market, Temu is an invitation not to think, to just consume.

In which case, this campaign also deserves its place as a sign of the times, it can pierce through the misaprehensions of anyone addicted to news media. There is a large targetable market of people with no concern for the environment, growing wealth inequality, eroding middle classes and democracy, the repeal of labour laws.

This market, clearly targeted is one that sees progress as moving toward a world that does not frustrate their impulsive consumption. 

Now, I actually am agnostic as to how to approach sweatshops and cheap labour. The footage never looks good when you see textile factories in Bangladesh, or China or wherever, but this isn't to say that no manufacturing jobs is better than sweat shop jobs in some places. It may be that or starvation, I don't know.

What we face since the 20th century when Capital got mobile, is the problem of labour movements in countries like the US, UK, Australia and Canada and Europe winning important victories enabling unionisation and establishing minimum wages, penalty rates, the 8 hour day etc. It's one thing for a court to rule that Globo-corp has to pay its Australian workers $32 per hour and 1.5 times that if they go overtime, that the company is liable for any injuries suffered by workers on site and that they are not allowed to call an employee on their weekend to bother them about work, and Globo-corp just being able to move operations to a country where for $10,000 you can have some guy round up local villagers and trap them in a work camp to work themselves to death as slave labour.

These are all really complicated, and would lead away from Temu into the discussion about Tariffs and what not, of which I'm agnostic also. The thing is, there's going to be a reason that Temu's "prices blow my mind/I feel so rich" and its probably a reason consumers cannot think about lest it take the candy sheen off of living in Temu-land, where a young 20 something can bounce and strut and cover up all the bald heads with wigs for just $4.99 a piece. 

It may even be the case that this Temu ad, by depicting whatever Temu's equivalent of an Amazon fulfillment center worker is as a white guy with a beanie, has gone beyond the legal protections of puffery. 

I don't know but am happy to bet, Temu represents one of our global "races to the bottom" where even if its practices are effectively identical to Amazon, and the price differences come out of Temu reducing their margins (which would mean if you buy an identical dress from Temu that is priced at $9 that was $19 on Amazon, the difference is Amazon is making $11 profit and Temu is making $1 or something) this just means human suffering has gotten cheaper for consumers, that's the good news.

When the EU launches an investigation into Chinese EV exports, or Trump promises tariffs on Chinese goods - these are people crying no fair. This cry of no fair is in some degree a cry of impotence that our societies are divided into nation states and economic blocks whose regulatory powers only extend so far.

The brazen joy baked into Temu's ad, is one in which we are rejoicing that the workers party that is the CCP has done absolutely nothing for Chinese workers who enjoy some of the worst working conditions in the world.