In the "scenario consumption era" of the tourism industry, "content + experience" creates new consumer momentum
Immersive experiences and scenario-based consumption have become buzzwords in the current revival of the cultural and tourism industry, and are showing strong momentum in leading and driving new cultural and tourism consumption. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has successively released case studies of national-level nighttime cultural and tourism consumption gathering areas, pilot project lists for new immersive experience spaces in smart tourism, and demonstration cases of new immersive business formats. The "scenario revolution" continues to heat up, using creative methods to reorganize and integrate different cross-border elements, constantly deepening consumers' pursuit of interaction, experience, and immersion in the scene. From City walks to immersive experiences, from industry integration to AI intelligence, 5D time travel, and virtual worlds, from "Zibo barbecue" to "Chang'an Twelve Hours." Unknowingly, the trend of tourist hotspots has shifted from "scenery" to "scenarios," and culture and tourism are entering a "scenario-based era" in the process of deep integration.
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Editor-in-Chief | Yang Ming
Scenario-based cultural tourism, as a new form of tourism consumption, transcends history and modernity, reality and virtuality, allowing tourists to experience fun in an imagined world, which is more attractive than single-scenery tours. By integrating the space, culture, values, and lifestyle of the tourist destination, it forms a field and context with a sense of immersion, experience, and interactivity, which is easy to disseminate through media such as new media. It is foreseeable that "scenario+", characterized by immersive experiences and the integration of multiple business formats, will be the trend and future of cultural and tourism development. Scenario-based consumption presents a personalized, differentiated, and diversified lifestyle; it is becoming a new carrier and space for the beautiful life shared by hosts and guests. At the same time, it is forming a new business format in the cultural and tourism industry, bringing together and integrating a new driving force and new productivity for promoting and stimulating new consumption.
"The Scenario-Based Era of Cultural and Tourism Integration"
So-called scenario-based cultural tourism is the integration of the space, culture, values, and lifestyle of the tourist destination to form a field and context with a sense of immersion, experience, and interactivity, which is easy to disseminate through media such as new media. Scenario-based cultural tourism, as a new form of tourism consumption, transcends history and modernity, reality and virtuality, allowing tourists to experience fun in an imagined world, which is more attractive than single-scenery tours.
First, cultural empowerment. It is often said that culture is the soul, and tourism is the carrier. The scene must have a soul, which is local culture, theme culture, and culturally impactful IPs. New cultural and tourism scenarios are no longer simple sightseeing processes, but through multi-linear and multiple experiences and participation, allowing tourists to experience and enjoy different cultural immersion, story scenes, and role identities, creating a strong sense of substitution and participation for tourists, obtaining a higher quality cultural experience, and happily "paying" for the quality experience and enjoyment. For example, Shanxi's "Revisit Pingyao" uses walking performances to tell local culture, using immersive scenarios to interpret historical stories, vividly portraying Jin merchant culture and the centuries-old Pingyao Ancient City, allowing tourists to resonate emotionally, interact, and enjoy consumption in immersive experiences.
Image: Cultural Empowerment of New Cultural Tourism Scenarios | Source: Shandong Culture and Tourism
Second, business format shaping. New cultural and tourism scenarios are a three-dimensional integration of business formats, products, and services. As a lifestyle experience, it must have diversified consumer experience business formats (forms), which is often referred to as "content is king" and "product is king." New scenarios should scenarize the six elements of tourism closely related to life: "eating, lodging, traveling, touring, shopping, and entertainment," such as "eating" scenarios, "lodging" scenarios, "traveling" scenarios, "touring" scenarios, "shopping" scenarios, and "entertainment" scenarios; and according to consumer needs and preferences, select appropriate business formats and their proportions, and continuously implement product iteration and business format innovation. For example, the fisherman's journey in Hangzhou's West Lake wetland creatively designed some micro-experience points in the original scenic area, such as boating, fishing, vegetable picking, and tourists cooking a meal with the ingredients they obtained... New business formats are down-to-earth, and tourists enjoy them endlessly. Many rural homestays are becoming popular new scenarios for experiencing nostalgia and new spaces for a better life through business format innovation in "characteristic eating, quality lodging, smart travel, personalized tours, creative shopping, and trendy entertainment."
Third, technological empowerment. The deep application of virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, light and shadow technology, 5G, metaverse, and digital technology, and audio-visual technology represented by VR and AR make immersive experiences possible and empower the experience quality of new cultural and tourism scenarios. Through the perfect combination of technology and art, it presents a visually and audibly stunning feast for tourists. "Chongqing 1949" perfectly combines cool stage technology with red stories; Yangzhou's Grand Canal Museum uses 5G+VR, projection technology, and infrared technology to create an immersive experience scene of Grand Canal culture, which is very popular. Zhangjiajie's "Revisit Dayong" uses technology to tell stories, creatively interprets scenes, and uses innovative technology and environmental creation to create a scene that matches the plot, comprehensively mobilizing the audience's five senses of "sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch," making the experience more vivid and profound. Wuxi Hollywood Scenic Area uses film and television industry + metaverse technology to create a digital cultural and tourism new scene that combines reality and virtuality and is immersive.
Image: "Chongqing 1949" | Source: Publicly available online
Fourth, creative innovation. New consumption gives rise to new gameplay, and new scenarios create "new species." Adapting to the needs and preferences of the new generation of consumers from "watching" to "playing," new gameplay such as script killing, cultural tourism + music, cultural tourism + e-sports, cultural tourism + orienteering, cultural tourism + research study, intangible cultural heritage markets, book and tea gatherings, national style and national tide, camping and RVs, etc., makes the scene more fun, the experience more immersive, and consumption more diversified. And "micro-innovation" of space, adding new experiential content to the existing physical space, creates a "new species." For example, "Chang'an Twelve Hours" recreates the Tang Dynasty market scene in the existing commercial real estate, allowing tourists to change clothes and enter the experience, experiencing a journey through the prosperous Tang Dynasty. Wuxi's Yuantouzhu Scenic Area "cuts time to change space," creating a cherry blossom viewing product into four scenes: morning viewing, noon viewing, evening viewing, and night viewing, not only creating a brand but also effectively increasing consumption.
Image: Chang'an Twelve Hours "Extreme Joy Banquet" Performance | Source: Publicly available online
Fifth, life bestows beauty. Tourism consumption is not only moving towards the experience economy, but has also entered the era of "aesthetic economy" and new aesthetics. An attractive scene must be a beautiful and magnificent landscape, a delicious feast. By introducing tourism aesthetics, life aesthetics, urban aesthetics, and rural aesthetics, we paint a picture, tell a story, and create a scene, allowing tourists to enter this story, appreciate this scene, and become participants, experiencers, and sharers of the story and scene. New tourism scenes are essentially high-value, high-quality life scenes, and are scenes that create and guide consumption. "Entering through culture, exiting through tourism, entering through tourism, exiting through life." Taking Lingshan Nanhua tourism as an example: from Lingshan's Buddhist culture, Nanhua Bay's Zen culture, Nishanshengjing's Confucian culture, Jinling Town's elegant culture, Kongtong Wonderland's landscape culture, to the ongoing Huishan Guoyue culture, and Dalianhua Bay's health preservation culture, etc., they all create exquisite products with ingenuity; express beauty with technology; present beauty with aesthetics; and allow tourists to experience beautiful life scenes in the beauty of scenery, music, color, pictures, and art, striving to build beautiful life destinations. Another example is the currently popular immersive night tour, which is a new time and space of beautiful life shared by hosts and guests. In the "Two-thirds of the moon in Yangzhou" night tour of Slender West Lake, people experience the night and beauty of Yangzhou in the stories and scenes of Tang and Song poems, walking into poetry and the distance; Chengdu's "Jinjiang Night Tour, Dream Back to Jin Guancheng" uses the method of reconstructing the "Jinjiang Story Scroll" of Tianfu culture and telling wonderful Chengdu stories to fully restore the five local cultures and lifestyles of "tea, food, wine, boat, and leisure"; while the immersive block, Wuxi Liangxi District's ancient canal historical block's "Tonight's Good Night", "City Inside, Old Time, Modern Style", allows people, especially young people, to feel history, wander the city, and experience life in the midst of daily life. From "brightening" to "beautifying", from "culture" to "life", immersive experiences and scenario-based consumption are becoming the main stage and fashion in "constantly realizing people's yearning for a better life."
Keywords for Creating New Tourism Scenes
(1) Building Nearby Life: Neo-Smokefire
"Nearby" is gradually disappearing. Anthropologist Xiang Biao mentioned the "disappearance of nearby" in the interview program "Thirteen Invitations," especially for the younger generation, who are far more familiar with the restaurant list on the takeout APP than with real restaurants. At this time, some new community public spaces have emerged. They give meaning to space through practice and form collective memories through promoting common exchanges. Some scholars believe that a good community public space is extremely important for "creating a sense of community belonging." The creation of market space under neo-smokefire is one of the directions for the high-quality development and transformation of community space and cultural, commercial, and tourism consumption space, and it is also a reconstruction of consumers' nearby life. The traditional "smokefire" is the daily life of ordinary people, the sounds, colors, smells of life, and it may also contain the chronic diseases of dirt, disorder, and chaos. Different from the purely market-like streets in old urban areas, the new streets with smokefire are managed and reconstructed, without "dirt, disorder, and chaos," retaining the real state of life and neighborly relationships, with a certain cultural background, and at the same time meeting the diverse needs of leisure, tourism, commerce, and residence. This emerging model, which has filtered out "impurities," is called "neo-smokefire" and has become a "traffic password" in today's urban tourism.
Image: Tianfu Twin Towers Market | Source: Public Network
Taking the new streets represented by Shanghai's Wukang Road and Anfu Road as examples, a picture of ideal life with a new urban smokefire is constructed: a residential area with a beautiful environment and full of cultural atmosphere and historical attributes, with smokefire vegetable markets, grocery stores, and other necessary community businesses. Such streets are no longer simply a simple commercial complex, but also a social field, a decompression space, a lifestyle, and even a city landmark.
Image: Breeze Market | Source: Public Network
The Breeze Market gets rid of the noisy, messy, and crowded labels of traditional vegetable markets, instead creating a brand-new vegetable market concept. The Breeze Market can be considered an upgrade of the vegetable market, reflecting a life scene different from traditional supermarkets, a fun space with the warmth of life, creating a new combination of "fresh produce + experience + new retail".
Image: Breeze Market | Source: Public Network
The overall design style of the Breeze Market is cold and light, mainly white, but it is precisely this light white that perfectly highlights the colorful fruits, vegetables, and meats. Considering the rich and relaxed spatial atmosphere that the entire building wants to create, the layout of various businesses on the first floor presents an open and semi-open combination, coupled with sufficient movable shelves, breaking the conventional layout of traditional vegetable markets, allowing customers entering the market to feel more exhibition and shopping experiences. The attributes of the compound space are also amplified. In addition to the daily market state, it can also accommodate various exhibitions and public activities related to food and lifestyles.
Image: New Scene of Community Economy | Source: Public Network
The community economy is a new world for opening up commercial traffic. As a fresh and artistic vegetable market, the Breeze Market combines traditional commerce with a creative atmosphere, exploring various forms and new appearances combined with the vegetable market, upgrading the vegetable market function to more than just a place to buy vegetables. As an extension of the market culture, the Breeze Market has a community living room on the second floor, where people's more independent activity situations and the open sales situation on the first floor proceed simultaneously, giving the Breeze Market social attributes, making it a third space outside of home and work, and "smokefire" collides with various different pictures in the house of new and old dialogues.
Image: New Scene of Community Economy | Source: Public Network
As the post-90s generation is becoming the main consumer force, the young, convenient, and diverse consumption methods require community businesses to undergo "new scene" changes. The construction and operation of "standardized community business centers" is to provide various functional module shops for community business centers under multiple needs, using unified management to provide stable and standardized services to the community, and establishing a "harmonious and different" relaxed and pleasant community business environment and community atmosphere.
(2) Art Integrated into Consumption Scenes: Daily Life Aesthetics
Discussions on "aesthetic living" date back to the late 19th century, when Oscar Wilde spoke of the "ultimate union of life and art," referring to acquiring aesthetic experiences in daily life, namely "experience as art." It's about making the everyday artistic and the artistic everyday. "Everyday aesthetics" is not only a study of "aesthetic living," but also a pursuit of a happy "beautiful life." When basic needs are already met, "everyday aesthetics" will become another "essential." Today, "aesthetic freedom" is gradually becoming a new pursuit for people beyond "economic freedom"—a wonderful experience hidden in the daily morning and evening, allowing one to achieve a self-satisfied immersive state through rich sensory experiences. Many artists have interpreted the aesthetics of life, but in the modern context, the daily life of art means that the aesthetics of life is not limited to literati and elites, but also belongs to many people who love life. In the eyes of the new generation of consumers represented by Generation Z, art is life, art can be integrated into life, into consumption methods, and can also lead life; it is a channel to experience life and a social lifestyle between people. For city dwellers, if the suburban and rural areas around the city belong to the one-hour living circle, then the art-themed cultural, commercial, and tourism complex is the "half-hour living circle" art light vacation destination.
Image: Art scene of the integration of culture, commerce, and tourism | Source: Public network
Nourished by culture and art, in the "light vacation" destination of the art complex, one can experience the city's new aesthetic language without the need for long journeys, even in the midst of artistic daily routines. In the past, to perceive these, one needed to go to different places in various corners of the city—libraries, parks, art museums, art hotels… Today, in the city's art complex, these scenes are gathered together and presented in an immersive, slow narrative way, creating a wonderful atmosphere of "art light vacation," allowing people to connect with the city more warmly. Whether it's an art commercial complex, an art park, or an art district, the integration of artistic elements and scene atmosphere, through integrated art installations, art curations, and art activities, attracts various distinctive new retail formats and IPs to enter. They use commerce as their bones and art as their soul, providing sufficient value and meaning for the city's tourism breakthrough, becoming a micro-travel destination for the city's avant-garde trends. Under the booming growth environment of the "art+" model, various tricks have been played. Many people have incorporated experiential art into commerce, and the innovative creations of some leading players have continuously achieved "traffic + money-making," providing a reference model for the transformation and upgrading of physical commerce.
Image: Art installation of culture, commerce, and tourism | Source: Public network
Shanghai Suhewan Mixc, with the concept of boundless, stress-free, and purposeless, focuses on natural ecological experiences, creating a cultural and artistic life gathering place with urban influence, rather than a single-purpose shopping mall. Suhewan is connected to the Bund. Based on the introduction of experiential commercial, cultural, and artistic formats, using the "urban canyon" as the design concept, combining historical, modern, and future backgrounds, it integrates historical humanities, green ecology, and retail experiences, creating a space that combines the openness and public nature of diverse scenes. While continuing the historical context, it will also host constantly changing cultural performances, art highlands, fashion shows, and other public activities, providing a modern public cultural space.
Image: Shanghai Suhewan Mixc | Source: Public network
The most eye-catching is the large-scale permanent outdoor art installation—"Step Up!"—created by the creative brand AllRightsReserved, together with the art group Inges Idee. This installation is located in the East and West atriums, spanning two commercial floors. "Step Up!" depicts a little boy carrying a large elephant backpack. He receives magical power from the elephant and takes a step, stepping up two floors.
Image: Large-scale permanent outdoor art installation "Step Up!" | Source: Public network
With its open and diverse DNA, Shanghai Suhewan Mixc perfectly matches the current urbanites' desire for open natural spaces and free social lifestyles, allowing consumers to experience art, humanities, and trends in the most comfortable way. As a cultural and artistic life gathering place, the fusion of aesthetics and commerce runs through Suhewan Mixc inside and out, working with UCCA Edge to create the "Dream Journey—Urban Public Art Season," showcasing a diverse and inclusive cultural atmosphere. UCCA also opened a UCCA store on LG1 in the East area, themed around the first solo exhibition in China by the Italian national treasure artist Maurizio Cattelan. This is also UCCA's first store in a shopping mall. As the boundaries between art and commerce become increasingly blurred, shopping malls, from architectural form to spatial structure and commercial content, are gradually promoting the form of commercial art and artistic commercialization.
Image: UCCA store | Source: Public network
(3) The "new favorite" of social life: Xiaohongxian
In 2022, the term "Xiaohongxian" quietly "became popular" on new media. "Xiaohongxian" utilizes its scene creation advantages to become a new generation of "attracting and retaining customers" weapons, and is also the best tool for gathering popularity and driving regional development. In an era dominated by refined operations, the concept of "Xiaohongxian," characterized by small size, internet celebrity appeal, and leisure, has emerged. "Xiaohongxian" focuses on creating "excellence" and "beauty" in a limited space, allowing small-scale cultural and tourism projects to release enormous energy. These projects usually have unique and distinct themes, and based on this, they conduct comprehensive scene design and layout, creating multiple check-in points and reputable products to satisfy young people's desire to "plant grass" and "pull grass."
Image: mamǎfufú Super Department Store | Source: Public network
At the same time, "Xiaohongxian" pays great attention to the creation of scene atmosphere. They do not pursue high-efficiency use of space, but focus more on the comfort of tourists after entering the project. By creating a leisurely environment, they weaken the anxiety brought about by the passage of time, allowing people to stay here with a more relaxed and pleasant mood. "Xiaohongxian" projects not only meet consumers' offline social needs but also satisfy consumers' desire to share on online social platforms, sharing blockbuster photos on social media immediately to achieve a rapid viral effect. Shanghai's Jing'an newly emerging art landmark—M+ Mali Creative Park—was formerly the Shanghai Fine Arts Pigment Factory. Now, it has transformed into a micro-art district attracting many young people to check in. The most distinctive feature of the park is the "colorism-themed" integrated experience store—mamǎfufú Super Department Store—jointly created by Xingfu Ji Hui and Mali Painting Materials for the first time. Named after the "Fu" of Xingfu Ji Hui and the "Ma" of Mali, it aims to continuously convey Mali's brand symbols and cultural values to the city and the younger generation.
Image: mamǎfufú Super Department Store | Source: Public network
Mamǎfufú fully embodies the concept of "Xiaohongxian" (Little Red Leisure), creating a highly photogenic environment through its overall scene style, flexible use of color, interactive experiences, and the introduction of its flagship store, attracting numerous young people to check in and consume. Mamǎfufú Super Department Store is a cross-border collaborative trendy cultural and creative space, occupying the best street-facing second-floor location in M+ Mali. Both the exterior walls and interior decor extensively utilize the high-impact primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, weaving the "colorism" of the century-old paint brand "Mali" throughout the overall space design. Within the 1000㎡ space, 8 themed areas are created, including a Mali Fun Factory, Mali Art Supplies, POP-UP Market, Color Utopia, Inspiration Books, Color Life Market, and Color Salon, encompassing various business formats such as art exhibitions, handicraft studios, art supplies, books, home goods, art derivatives, and clothing retail.
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