The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2015–2021
PX Mart's 'Economic Aesthetics' makes saving cool — 4A Grand Prix, a yearly franchise
Taiwan's PX Mart and Ogilvy reframe saving as 'Economic Aesthetics' — street-style ads pass 100K views in two days and win the 4A Grand Prix.
PX Mart (全聯福利中心) · Ogilvy Taiwan (台灣奧美)
What it had to solve
PX Mart was Taiwan's no-frills discount supermarket, positioned on 'cheap' but read as old-fashioned; under-30s made up just 9% of loyalty-card members. Ogilvy Taiwan had handled the brand since 2012 and needed to win young 'drifters' without betraying the frugal positioning.
How it works
In March 2015, Taiwan's discount supermarket PX Mart and Ogilvy Taiwan launched PX Mart Economic Aesthetics: 14 street-style posters and 10-second films in which ordinary young people declared lines like 'Looking good is capital, spending money well is a skill' and 'I know the 20 places to visit in a lifetime — I've decided to go to PX Mart first.' The idea was to make saving money feel like a fashion statement rather than a shame.
The brief came from data: under-30s were only 9% of PX Mart's loyalty members. Ogilvy had worked with the brand since 2012, learning from an earlier 'My Dream' series that young people did not want to be lectured; this time the copy was co-written by copywriters, art directors, strategists and the client, and every ad was short enough to mimic and share.
The work broke through in two days with more than 100,000 views. It won the 2015 China 4A Creative Awards Grand Prix plus four golds in print, film, outdoor and craft, and the 38th Times Chinese-language Advertising Awards, with judges calling it 'creating a trend, changing perception'.
The campaign then became a yearly franchise: DIY shopping-bag 'chao bags' in 2016, a runway of ten elders totalling over 700 years of age in 2017 (460K views in two days on the official page), home-and-kitchen themes in 2018, and a fitness-themed 'Jianmeixue' edition in 2020, each extending the same frugality-is-cool stance.
Why it lands
- It inverted the shame: instead of hiding frugality, the ads presented it as a deliberate, stylish choice young people could be proud of.
- The format was shareable by design: 10-second single-shot films and poster one-liners were easy to quote, copy and re-shoot, so consumers became the media.
- It stayed true to the brand: the campaign never changed the 'save money' promise, it changed what saving money meant.
- The idea had legs as a system, not a stunt: a new theme each year kept a decade-old positioning feeling fresh.
What it did
The films passed 100,000 views within two days. The campaign took the 2015 China 4A Creative Awards Grand Prix plus four category golds (print, film, outdoor, craft), and won the 38th Times Chinese-language Advertising Awards top prize; judges said it 'created a trend and changed perception'.
What you can take
When the barrier is social shame, fix what the behavior means, not the price: give people language that turns a 'shameful' choice into an identity they want to broadcast.
Since then
PX Mart repeated the Economic Aesthetics formula every year from 2015 to 2021, adding DIY tote-bag tutorials, an elders' runway, family-and-kitchen films and a COVID-era 'Home Economics Aesthetics' filmed remotely across 27 locations — the first cloud-shot campaign in Taiwanese retail. The series became a standard reference case in Chinese-language advertising education, and its copy lines are still quoted in marketing retrospectives years later.
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