Buick Canada Celebrates the Year of the Rabbit with Momentum Worldwide

2023 marks the Year of the Rabbit, and in Chinese culture the rabbit symbolises wisdom, tenderness and alertness. To truly connect with the Buick Canada audience, the brand wanted to show it understands the values and significance of the Lunar New Year holiday. Going beyond adding red and gold or animal illustrations to creative, we needed to reflect on how Chinese Canadians are celebrating with Buick Canada as a participant and a conduit.

Buick comments: “Buick recognises the contributions and importance of the Chinese community in Canada, and that's why we’ve chosen to speak directly to them through the WeChat platform for such a long time. This year, we wanted to authentically celebrate the year of the Rabbit together with the Chinese community and look towards the future.”  

This year, Momentum Worldwide helped Buick Canada create an engaging Chinese New Year campaign that recognises the most important cultural holiday to Buick’s Chinese speaking audiences. The brand partnered with Toronto-based emerging female artist Lu Yeah to provide her spin on the traditional and iconic Chinese character Lord of Rabbit, which most Northern Chinese families worship during Chinese New Year for prosperity and wealth.

Artist Lu Yeah leveraged traditional elements from Lord of Rabbit and turn them into a young and contemporary design on Qeeboo Rabbit Chairs, a popular modern furniture brand to celebrate Year of the Rabbit with its new, innovative and bold look.

By personalising these two rabbits with their own characteristics incorporating Buick’s iconic features, the red rabbit represents Buick Envision Avenir, which is a sleek and luxury five-seat SUV. The blue rabbit represents Buick Enclave Avenir, the highest expression of Buick’s luxury hospitality.

Based on this creative concept, Momentum Worldwide also developed a digital game on WeChat, the most popular and widely used platform for the Chinese community. It encouraged everyone to design their own version of the rabbit, where each of the designs composes a huge, pixelated Rabbit in the end of the game, which means the entire Chinese Canadian community is celebrating Chinese New Year together!

Nancy Kang, Canada content strategist, Momentum Worldwide, comments: “As a Chinese person who works and lives in Canada for so many years, Chinese New Year always makes me feel nostalgic. But celebrating Chinese New Year is not always about painting in red and gold, nor simply creating a zodiac sign on the product. It’s about understanding the core values and meaning behind why the community celebrates it. Chinese New Year nowadays is presented in a much more contemporary way to reflect Chinese aesthetics and cultural elements. That’s why for Year of the Rabbit, we helped Buick Canada partner with the artist to design branded rabbits to represent Buick as well as Chinese cultures.”