Semiotic Snack: Amazon and Tmall

Online shopping in China made $80 million in 2010, 185 million people bought at least one item, and that volume is set to increase fourfold by 2015.  Recently, we saw ads from two giants of the Internet, Amazon.cn and Tmall.com, that take different approaches to communicating the experience of online retail. Let’s look at some of the codes they use to tell a story…

Amazon.cn emphasises the joy of online purchasing through capturing the breadth of its offering – everything for everyone. It makes a deliberate point of emphasising shopping is for both men and women – an important case to make as men are now spending more on luxury goods than women. The tonality of this ad is inviting and inclusive. The ad focuses on the moment of receiving – the delight of opening the box – characterised by the close-up smiles of the recipients faces and the halcyon, golden light that permeates the advert.  However magical – it’s all kept ‘real’ via proximity – what you want is available at the click of a button, a swipe of a screen. Everything is practical – expensive luxury items are made quotidian by arriving in context – an expensive Canon L lens arrives for the photographer in the studio, a child’s present isn’t wrapped in paper – it comes straight out of the Amazon box. It’s not about indulgence, it’s about logic and pragmatism.

Tmall uses a metaphor of the city closing down to illustrate how their service is also conveniently open 24 hours – but the female protagonist is different to the characters in the Amazon spot. She appears disappointed, lonely and melancholic as she wanders the city and sees lights off, doors closed and luxury items out of reach. It’s not the inconvenience of the high-street that stands out – it’s about her desire for consumption, characterised by the nocturnal, the transgressive costume of the mannequins, the neon of modernity, and the signifier of the high-heel. The window licking (leche vitrine) and gazing at products through the display of  a fashionable, urban shopping environment suggests shopping at Tmall satisfies a lustful and transgressive experience that happens late at night – it’s not related to the convenience or rationality of daytime shopping – it’s borne from the irrational and erotic desires of the night.

So, where do we end up?

Both ads cursorily dramatise the convenience of online shopping, but what’s more interesting is how each comments on the act of online shopping itself. On one hand we have the pragmatist –  reduces distance, time and space, an infinite inventory delivers whatever anybody needs as quickly as possible to fulfil any context. On the other hand we have the hysteric – technology enhances our impulses and lust for the indulgent and the luxurious, not for things we need, but for things we desire.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2011 at 12:20 pm. It is filed under Advertising, China, Retail, Video and tagged with featured, semiotics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.