The success or failure of a cultural tourism project begins with the strategic anchoring of its business model. Regardless of the type of cultural tourism project, a clear business model is the "survival law" that runs through its entire life cycle. If the core issues of "where the money comes from, where it goes, and how it appreciates" cannot be clearly resolved, the cultural tourism project will ultimately face the risks of broken capital chains and project suspension.

Overall, the business model, operation model, and product model are interdependent and indispensable; "business as the framework, operation as the pulse, and product as the soul" constitute the core competitiveness of a cultural tourism project. On the one hand, a cultural tourism project must have a clear business profit model to ensure its sustainable development, and the successful construction of the business model relies on a perfect operation model and product model; on the other hand, the construction of the cultural tourism project product model should be designed on the basis of overall profitability; thirdly, the profit model is inseparable from meticulous and precise operational management.

Product Positioning: "Cultural Excavation" and "Cross-Dimensional Breakthrough"

The product positioning of a cultural tourism project is essentially a "decoding and reconstruction of cultural genes": it needs to be deeply rooted in the local cultural soil to draw nourishment, and it must also dare to break through regional boundaries to achieve value fission.

For cultural tourism projects with rich cultural heritage, it is necessary to achieve "deep local exploration": develop regional culture, tell local stories; conduct "cultural decryption", extract "emotional codes", reconstruct traditional cultural elements with modern language, and transform them into experiential "memory points".

If local resources are scarce, new themes can also be introduced through creative designs of "creating something from nothing" and cross-dimensional breakthroughs, helping the project to break through; however, it is necessary to follow the "uniqueness principle" and the "unique breakthrough" principle to build unique memory symbols and achieve differentiated competition.

Product Business: "Demand Deconstruction" and "Experience Reconstruction"

The planning of product business for cultural tourism projects focuses on "demand deconstruction" and "experience reconstruction". "Demand deconstruction" means insight into demand, achieving "capillary-level scanning", and accurately grasping consumer needs; "experience reconstruction" means creating experiences, from "functional satisfaction" to "emotional occupation".

The operators of cultural tourism projects must be like detectives, meticulously investigating the market, consumers, and future trends, and like directors, weaving immersive narratives with scene thinking and designing real consumption scenarios for consumers. Only in this way can they open up "unmet blue ocean needs" in the red ocean market.

Preemptive Operation: "Practical Sandbox" and "Genetic Coding"

The operational logic of cultural tourism projects should not be a "remedial solution" after completion, but a "genetic code" in the planning phase, a precise calculation of "survival probability".

Preemptive operation requires operators to "start with the end in mind", making strategic choices in the blueprint stage, whether to adopt "open operation" or "closed management", whether to adopt a business model of "investment attraction" or "self-operation + investment attraction"; this requires operators to have a clear understanding of the operation methods and logic of each business, each category, and even each store.

Continuous Innovation: "Content Iteration" and "Experience Upgrading"

The vitality of cultural tourism projects lies in the courage to "self-subvert" to iterate product content and reconstruct experience boundaries; high-quality content output is a basic condition for all cultural tourism projects to maintain vitality.

Cultural tourism projects can set up innovative mechanisms, combine "limited narratives", use AR/VR and metaverse technologies to carry out continuous "content hematopoiesis", and create a "never-repeating stage".

Quality Service: "Standard System" and "Custom Surprise"

The service of a cultural tourism project is a "value contract" between tourists and the project site—it needs to guarantee the bottom line of experience through a standardized system, and also create memory peaks through emotional design. In the era of experience economy, service quality has been upgraded from an "additional item" to a "core competitiveness", directly determining the reputation of cultural tourism projects.

If a cultural tourism project does not form standardized quality services, it is difficult to form a good brand image; on the basis of realizing the "rigid rules" of service standards, adding the "flexible design" of emotional value enhancement and implanting "unexpected value" can help create unexpected moments.

System Integration: "Multi-Party Collaboration" and "Mutual Benefit and Win-Win"

The success of a cultural tourism project is a "victory of a complex system engineering", and its vitality is rooted in the ecological network of co-existence and co-prosperity of multiple entities.

The interaction between government, market, and industry chain is not a simple superposition of resources, but the construction of a dynamically balanced "super collaborative body" through value consensus, interest coupling, and risk sharing—the integrity and resilience of this system determine whether a cultural tourism project can continue to evolve in the face of policy fluctuations, market cycles, and competitive iterations.

Underlying Logic: "Cross-Disciplinary" and "Scientific Decision-Making"

The underlying logic of the cultural tourism industry has transitioned from "experience-driven intuition" to a new paradigm of "complexity science dominance"; the era of making decisions based on inspiration and gut feeling has quietly passed.

Following the underlying logic requires cultural tourism practitioners to use cross-disciplinary and systematic thinking to deconstruct the multi-scale and multi-level interactive relationships of cultural tourism projects, use scientific methodology for decision-making, and ultimately anchor value coordinates in the game between uncertainty and innovative opportunities.

The author is the director of Zhejiang Tourism Research Institute and an academic committee member of the Rural Public Service Research Institute of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism