Burberry celebrates Chinese New Year with new online game

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Jan 14, 2020

Building on the success of its debut online game, B Bounce, Burberry has unveiled a second game as part of its 2020 Chinese New Year campaign.

Developed in honour of the Year of the Rat, the new online game is called Ratberry and features a world inspired by the limited-edition Thomas Burberry monogram motif.

Players can use Ratberry, the game’s central character, to explore the purple-hued universe, bounce upwards between platforms and collect gold coins and Chinese lanterns.

The game is available to play on Burberry.com from Tuesday 14 January.

This is the second online game launched by Burberry in the space of three months, as the luxury giant moves to capture the interest of China’s tech-savvy young consumers. 

In addition to Ratberry, Burberry has released Chinese New Year stickers on WeChat, China’s largest messaging app, allowing users to interact with Ratberry and products from the dedicated Chinese New Year capsule collection.

The digital interactive content supports a wider ad campaign fronted by a cast of Chinese models and celebrities including Zhou Dongyu, He Cong and Liang Jiyuan. The images were captured by the lens of photographer Leslie Zhang, and present a collection of hero pieces in vivid red.

In November, the release of Burberry’s interim results for the first half of the year revealed the luxury company is ramping up efforts to localise its communications in China. This included a dedicated campaign to celebrate Qixi Jie, China’s Valentine’s Day, in August - an initiative that resulted in over 200m views across local social media platforms.

Additionally, the company has recently entered into an exclusive partnership with Tencent to pioneer a concept that will create “digital and physical spaces for engaged communities to interact, share and shop”. The partnership kicks off with a first “social retail” store in Shenzhen, China in the first half of 2020.