Brands Celebrate Year of the Rooster With Emojis, Mobile Games, Art
Visitors to Apple’s Chinese homepage lately have been greeted by artwork of vibrantly colored roosters. Apple hired Chinese contemporary artists to use its computers, tablets and other products to create digital paintings for Chinese New Year, and artist Ni Chuan Jing celebrated this year’s zodiac animal, the rooster. People can download the digital paintings to use as wallpaper on their iPhone, iPad or MacBook.
The Lunar New Year begins Saturday, and brands are paying homage to local traditions some with roosters, and some with sweet commercials showing family reunions around the dinner table. (Apple did one of those too; watch it here.) For Western companies, it’s about creating messages to show how locally resonant they are in China, a market of over 1.37 billion people.
The rooster can be a symbol of a good start. It “crows at dawn, so people appreciate that the rooster wakes them up — it’s a symbol of people getting up early and working hard, it’s a symbol of diligence,” said Sapphire Zhang, PR director for local independent agency 180China. While the zodiac symbol is often depicted as a rooster, it can also be a hen, and brands are celebrating chicken of all sorts, with everything from social media stickers to art to luxury goods emblazoned with roosters.
