‘Tastes like milk’: boss of Chinese firm eats bar of soap in live-stream promotion video to prove product is safe and natural, shocking social media
- Sales manager says company representatives have been eating soaps in marketing campaigns for many years
- Publicity stunt attracts huge amount of interest on mainland social media, with 20,000 comments left on Douyin
What’s the best way to convince customers your product is safe and top-notch?
For a senior executive of a Chinese household cleaning product company, the answer was to be filmed eating a bar of his firm’s soap.
Qi Dexi, chairman of Hongwei Soap Enterprise, based in northern China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, caused a sensation after consuming the product during a live-streaming session in an attempt to prove it was safe and of high quality.
Holding a bar of yellow clothes-washing soap in his hand, Qi said: “It does not contain any poisonous elements. It is made of fat of sheep or ox. We have never added gutter oil or other additives, like talcum powder, in our 70 years’ history.”
As he began to eat it, Qi realised the soap was harder than he’d assumed.
“Oh, it’s already dry. Maybe because it has been exposed to the air for a long time. It’s difficult to bite it now,” Qi said in the video.
The boss later managed to bite a slice of the product before drinking some water to help him chew and swallow it, a clip of the live-streaming event showed.
“It tastes like the fat of ox or sheep, or like milk. Eating the soap will not pose any side-effects, but to decompose the fat in your body,” he said.
“I don’t mean that our soap can help you lose weight. But it really can help decompose the fat,” Qi claimed.
A Hongwei sales manager, known as Huangpu, said representatives of the company had been eating the soaps in marketing campaigns for many years.
“It’s not for showing what our products are, but for showing that our products are so safe they can be eaten,” he said.
The publicity stunt garnered a huge amount of interest on mainland social media, with 20,000 comments left on Douyin and many saying Qi was “working too hard to promote the product”.
“He used the most plain and most direct way to introduce his products. He has to do this since there’s no trust among people in this society,” one person posted.
“I think this demonstration method is not appropriate because soap is not for us to eat. But the bite by him has saved the company millions of marketing dollars. So it’s quite worth it,” one online observer pointed out.
Offbeat marketing activities often trend on social media in China.
Last year, a newly-opened bank in central Hubei province came under fire for offering customers free paper tissues if they could pull them from a giant roll within five seconds.
A tour site in Henan, central China, caused controversy some years ago for exempting visitors’ ticket fees if they kowtowed to their parents at the entrance.
