On 16 January, Balenciaga released a follow-up to its rather underwhelming Chinese New Year (CNY) video campaign which featured actress Zhang Xiaofei, singer Yang Chaoyue and supermodel Liu Bingbing. In fact, it was an adaptation of its global New Year campaign only with local celebrities. Different from the 8 January video that emphasised the leisurely lifestyle during CNY, stage 2 took the Snake head-on.
It is a WeChat Mini Program version of the classic video game Snake. In it, the player controls a line resembling a snake, which consumes dots in the field to grow its length while trying to avoid colliding with itself and its surroundings. The game is designed in a Y2K-esque pixel art style that reminds players of old mobile phones. Users who complete the 8 stages the quickest can get on a ranking board and be in with a chance to win rewards.
Balenciaga released a video on social platforms to tease the mini-game. This time, it seems to have captured more attention. Since its launch on 18 January, the topic “Balenciaga CNY collection” (#巴黎世家新年系列#) has gained an impressive 40.99 million views on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent.
A current version of the genre, Snake Off also teamed up with Yonghui Superstores for a CNY campaign that has perks both online in the game and offline at the supermarket. Interestingly, back in the last Year of the Snake in 2013, 12 years ago, KFC launched a mini-game version of Snake on renren.com, a social media platform similar to Facebook that suspended its services last December.
With luxury brands making huge progress in their localisation campaigns for CNY this year, Balenciaga’s playful game is creative and nostalgic while ticking the box of the snake motif. By taking inspiration from snakes that consumers have seen before, instead of abstract symbolism, the Snake mini-game is likely to provide more “emotional value” to generations who grew up playing mobile games.
