Bluemoon's Mother's Day ad told Mum to do the laundry, then its PR made it worse

In early May 2024 Bluemoon ran an elevator ad for its premium 至尊 laundry detergent with the slogan '妈妈，您先用' (Mom, you use it first), selling it as a Mother's Day gift while framing laundry as a mother's job.

Netizens pushed back hard, calling the ad a gender stereotype and asking why a brand would give a mother cleaning tools on Mother's Day instead of washing clothes for her; some even pasted protest stickers over the posters.

Bluemoon fought the story for four days: customer service first called it a 'misunderstanding', an official statement cited a statistic that women do 120 minutes of housework a day — which backfired and was later deleted — then finally offered a ¥1 million prize for new ad copy.

Commentators called it an 'epic PR flop' because the brand never directly acknowledged an error or apologised, and its own history of showing women doing all the laundry in its ads was dragged back into the argument.