6 Chinese New Year online contest ideas for Spring Festival marketing
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Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year, or the Spring Festival, depending on which market or territory you’re in, is celebrated by approximately a quarter of the world’s population, and is marked by a public holiday in many countries.
It’s a festival celebrating the beginning of the traditional lunisolar calendar, marking the transition from Winter to Spring.
The occasion is based around various myths and customs, but from a marketing perspective, what’s significant are its focuses on happiness, wealth, longevity, and the tradition of gathering among friends and family to eat specific foods.
To put monetary values against it, domestic tourism in China spent approximately £69.7 billion in 2024, and this doesn’t take into account what was spent by those celebrating in other countries observing Lunar New Year, nor expat and second or third generation communities. So long as you’re building campaigns in relevant markets, marketing games are a great way to make them more fun and engaging, and elevate them above those of your competitors.
Read on for our top 6 marketing game and online contest ideas coded to the themes and traditions of Chinese New Year.
1. Zodiac Memory Match (Memory Cards)
According to Chinese traditions, each year is represented by one of 12 zodiac animals. The rat, the ox, the tiger, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the ram, the monkey, the rooster, the dog, and the pig.
This gives you plenty of distinct visuals and concepts to build a game of zodiac-themed memory cards.
Educate your audience: You can include informative pop-ups after each match with an image and some text. You could use this function to convey interesting information around particular zodiac animals, or potentially even tie them to your products. (Less is more with this feature, as a pop-up per match can really slow down the game play.)
Make it a contest: Memory cards is an engaging game mechanic in and of itself, but enabling the leaderboard adds a competitive element, which is one of the most effective levers you can pull when you gamify your marketing.
You could advertise that the top 20 will all be entered into a prize draw or an instant win game, and even host the leaderboard on its own page in your website or in your loyalty app.
2. Lucky Red Envelope (Scratch Card)
Chinese New Year traditionally involved the exchange of red envelopes, typically with money inside, known as “hongbao” in China.
You can customise a digital online scratch card along these lines, designing the outlay, or scratch area, to mimic the intricate red envelope designs with gold lettering and illustrations.
This is a perfect marriage of a well-known instant win mechanic with a well established Lunar New Year tradition.
Make it a 100% winning game: Red envelopes should have something in them, so look to include a promo code prize and set your scratch card to 100% winning game.
3. Dragon Dash (Pacman)
Chinese New Year is full of exciting imagery that can be applied to the game mechanics of Pacman, so you can create Dragon Dash – where your customers play as a dragon collecting red packets while trying not to be caught by beasts resembling nian. Whenever the dragon passes through fire, the player gets a power up and is able to kill the nian beasts.
In Chinese mythology, nian is a monster that looks like a flat-faced lion with the body of a large dog. At the beginning of Chinese New Year, nian comes out of its hiding place to feed on people and animals. Its only weaknesses are loud noises, fire, and the colour red.
Not the year of the dragon? Why not call it Tiger Trials, Monkey’s Mission, or Snake Slalom? The fire power ups can be swapped to drums or even fireworks.
4. Spin of Prosperity (Spin the Wheel)
Lunar New Year is ultimately a festival that’s all about celebrating prosperity, so a spin the wheel game customised in the trappings of that year’s zodiac animal alongside your branding is a great way to pay homage to this.
Live up to the name: Game two (“Lucky Red Envelope”) was all about everybody winning, but this approach is more about the big prize.
5. Which Zodiac Animal Are You Really? (Personality Test)
You can just take the year you were born to see which zodiac animal you are, but that’s not the most engaging thing in the world, and it also doesn’t encourage any real self-discovery.
Given that each zodiac animal has a set of values attached to it, you can customise a personality test around linking people to the zodiac animal that truly represents them.
You can also link specific pages for each zodiac animal, and link to them through a call to action button (CTA) on the end screen.
Play to your audience: If you’re a perfume or high fashion brand, the odds are, no matter how you dress it up, that your customers won’t enjoy being called a pig or a rat, so only create results for cute or glamorous animals.
6. Year of the… Quest (Dynamic Path™)
This article has barely scratched the surface of everything there is to know about Chinese New Year – for example, did you know the Spring Festival lasts 15 days?
You could look to use the Dynamic Path™ experience builder to create a multi-step marketing game, combining quizzes, instant win games, and more casual games – including all the ones listed here – to engage your audience throughout the Spring Festival.
You can create positive associations between your brand and the occasion, promote multiple products and offers, and generate loyalty through repeat engagements.
Expert advice
Promotions around Chinese New Year need to be culturally sensitive and relevant to your audience, but so long as those two boxes are ticked, there’s a lot of opportunity to use games to add to your Spring Festival campaigns. This is a commercial opportunity which – if open to you – is well worth maximising through interactivity as it’s such a welcome boost on the tail end of your winter sales.
The marketing game and online contest ideas listed here are just starting points and inspiration for your own gamified Chinese New Year campaigns. There are more than 30 different game engines on the Drimify catalogue just waiting to be adapted to your ideas.
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