Dove's Qixi Ad Backfired — and Taught Everyone the Word 翻车
On the eve of Qixi — China's own Valentine's Day, which fell on August 19 this year — chocolate giant Dove found itself trending for all the wrong reasons.
The story
Dove's online flagship store posted a promotional video for its Qixi gift box. The campaign's hook line: "Who still hasn't received a Dove Seven-Colour gift box from their boyfriend?"
The plot, however, took a sharp turn. The video showed a woman, frustrated that her boyfriend hadn't yet bought the box, messaging a flirtatious acquaintance ("暧昧对象") for help. The acquaintance then drove two hours to deliver the gift personally — with the caption leaning hard into the ambiguity.
Chinese netizens did not find it romantic. The dominant reading: the campaign was promoting emotional boundary-pushing and romanticized cheating-adjacent behavior. The comment sections filled with criticism, and the hashtag went from "recruiting" to "disaster" in a day.
Why it matters in China
Qixi is one of the most commercially intense shopping festivals on the Chinese calendar, and chocolate that positions itself as the "romance gift with status" lives and dies on brand sentiment. An ad that reads as "ask your backup to buy you chocolate" collides with deeply held norms about relationships and 分寸感 (a sense of appropriate boundaries). Chinese consumers are quick to police brand values, and the backlash moved from the video itself to the brand's taste as a whole.
Dove's parent company did not issue a full recall of the campaign; the video was removed or re-cut from storefronts after the wave of criticism. Analysts framed the episode as a textbook Qixi marketing miss.
The word that carried the conversation
The moment the backlash started, Chinese netizens reached for one word: 翻车 (fān chē) — "the cart flipped." It is the all-purpose word for a public failure that everyone witnessed:
翻车 implies the failure was visible — you flipped in front of an audience, and now everyone is watching. Dove's Qixi blunder is now likely to be cited in Chinese social-marketing post-mortems for the rest of the year.