07 October 2021

China’s museums find a Gen Z audience on Tmall (and brands want to partner)

China’s museums are tapping into consumer interest in historic design to exploit the commercial potential of their cultural IP, with brands keen to partner. 

Why it matters 

It’s a trend that has been building for several years, as the government has encouraged interest in traditional culture; an emerging genre of museum-related reality TV shows have brought this to a wider audience. Brands can harness this curiosity to reach a younger audience.

Context 

• Over the past year, online museum visits have exceeded in-person ones. 
• Earlier data has recorded 24 museums with stores on Tmall (including the British Museum); 1.6 billion visits to those stores included 100 million users born “post 1990s”.
• A high proportion of products sold through these stores (72%) were crossover collaborations between museums and brands, with around seven in ten buyers of such products being new to the brand. 
• Tmall reports purchases by young consumers doubling during this year’s Mid-Autumn Festival compared to the same period last year, with culturally-inspired products such as mooncakes in the lead.
• The National Museum of China, for example, launched a special mooncake gift box, with a design inspired by a lacquer plate from the Song Dynasty in the museum’s collection, which can also become a paper lantern.
  

Stumbling blocks

Brands need to tread carefully in their reinterpretation of an older Chinese culture: there are distinct generational differences as the experience of luxury brand Balenciaga last year demonstrated. Additionally, Vogue Business notes that “Aesthetic fatigue has already become a common response from many netizens to a surfeit of crossover collaborations”, but adds that digitisation – in the form of interactive products and limited edition NFTs – may be part of the future. 

Sourced from Vogue Business, CGTN, Tsinghua University