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Editor-in-Chief | Yang Ming
Editor | Jing Xiangyuan
Source | Tourism Festival Marketing Intelligence
Abstract: Immersive experiences and scenario-based consumption have become "buzzwords" in the current era, exhibiting strong momentum in leading and driving new cultural and tourism consumption. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism's successive releases of national-level nighttime cultural and tourism consumption aggregation area cases, pilot project lists for new immersive experience spaces in smart tourism, and demonstration cases of immersive new formats have further fueled the "scenario revolution" trend.
Immersive experiences and scenario-based consumption have become "buzzwords" in the current recovery 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 cases of national-level nighttime cultural and tourism consumption aggregation areas, pilot project lists for new immersive experience spaces in smart tourism, and demonstration cases of immersive new formats, continuously fueling the "scenario revolution" trend. By creatively recombining and integrating different cross-border elements, it continuously deepens consumers' pursuit of interaction, experience, and immersion within the scenario, becoming its development path.
From City walks to immersive experiences, from industry integration to AI intelligence, 5D time travel, and virtual worlds, from "Zibo's barbecue craze" to "12 Hours in Chang'an." Unknowingly, the trend of tourism hotspots has shifted from "scenery" to "scenarios," and culture and tourism are deeply integrating into a "scenario-based era."
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, making it 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, facilitating dissemination through new media. It is foreseeable that "scenario+", characterized by immersive experiences and the integration of multiple formats, will be the trend and future of cultural and tourism development. Scenario-based consumption presents personalized, differentiated, and diversified lifestyles; it is becoming a new carrier and space for the shared well-being of hosts and guests. At the same time, it is forming a new format for the cultural and tourism industry, bringing together and integrating a new driving force and 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, facilitating dissemination through 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, making it more attractive than single-scenery tours.
First, cultural empowerment. It is often said that culture is the soul, and tourism is the carrier. The scenario must have a soul, which is local culture, themed culture, and culturally impactful IPs. New cultural and tourism scenarios are no longer simple viewing processes, but through multi-linear and multiple experiences and participation, allowing tourists to experience and enjoy different cultural immersion, story scenarios, and role identities, creating a strong sense of substitution and participation for tourists, obtaining higher-quality cultural experiences, and happily "paying" for quality experiences and enjoyment. For example, Shanxi's "Revisit Pingyao" uses walking performances to tell local culture, using a "sense of substitution" to interpret historical stories, vividly portraying the merchant culture and the centuries-old Pingyao Ancient City, allowing tourists to resonate emotionally, interact, and consume happily in immersive experiences.
Second, industry shaping. New cultural and tourism scenarios are a three-dimensional integration of industries, products, and services. As a lifestyle experience, it must have diversified consumer experience industries (formats), 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 industries and industry ratios, and continuously implement product iteration and industry 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 industries are down-to-earth, and tourists love them. Many rural homestays are becoming popular new scenarios for experiencing nostalgia and new spaces for a better life through industry 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 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 scenario of the Grand Canal culture, which is very popular. Zhangjiajie's "Revisit Dayong" uses technology to tell stories, creatively interprets scenarios, and uses innovative technology and environmental creation to create a plot-matching and contextual environment, 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 virtual and real, immersive digital cultural and tourism new scenario.
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, makes scenarios more fun, experiences more immersive, and consumption more diversified. And "micro-innovation" of space, adding new experiential content to the original physical space, creates a "new species." For example, "12 Hours in Chang'an" recreates the Tang Dynasty market scene in the original 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," a cherry blossom viewing product, creatively made into four scenarios: morning viewing, noon viewing, evening viewing, and night viewing, not only creating a brand, but also effectively increasing consumption.
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 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: New Everyday Life
"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 the new everyday life 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 "everyday life" refers to the daily life of ordinary people, the sounds, colors, smells, and tastes of life, but 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 everyday life have been managed and reconstructed, without "dirt, disorder, and chaos," retaining the real state of life and neighborly relationships, having 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 "new everyday life" and has become a "traffic password" in today's urban tourism.
With new streets represented by Shanghai's Wukang Road and Anfu Road, an ideal life picture of a new urban everyday life has been constructed: a residential area with a beautiful environment and full of cultural atmosphere and historical attributes, with everyday life-like 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.
Micro Wind Market breaks away from the noisy, messy, and crowded labels of traditional vegetable markets, instead creating a brand-new vegetable market concept. Micro Wind Market can be considered an upgrade of the vegetable market, reflecting a life scene different from traditional supermarkets; it is an interesting space with a temperature of life, creating a new business combination of "fresh produce + experience + new retail."
The overall design style of Micro Wind Market is cool 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 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 and allowing customers entering the market to feel more exhibition and shopping experiences. The attributes of the composite 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.
Community economy is a new world for opening up commercial traffic. As a fresh and artistic vegetable market, Micro Wind 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 second floor of Micro Wind Market has a community living room, where people's more independent activity situations and the open sales situation on the first floor proceed simultaneously, giving Micro Wind Market social attributes, making it a third space outside of home and work, and the "everyday life" collides with various different pictures in the house of new and old dialogues.
As the post-90s generation is becoming the main consumer force, the young, convenient, and multi-choice consumption methods require community commerce to undergo "new scene" changes. The construction and operation of "standardized community commercial centers" is to provide various functional module shops for community commercial 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 commercial environment and community atmosphere.
2. Art Integrated into Consumption Scenarios: Everyday Life Aesthetics
Discussions on "life aesthetics" began as early as the late 19th century, when Oscar Wilde spoke of "the ultimate union of life and art," referring to gaining aesthetic experience in daily life, i.e., "experience as art." It's about artisticizing the everyday and normalizing art. "Everyday Life Aesthetics" is not only a study concerning "aesthetic life" but also a path to happiness in pursuing "a good life." When basic needs are already met, "everyday life aesthetics" will become another form of "essential." Nowadays, "aesthetic freedom" has gradually become a new pursuit for people beyond "economic freedom"—it's a wonderful experience embedded in every dawn and dusk, allowing one to achieve a state of self-contented immersion through rich sensory experiences. Many literary figures have interpreted life aesthetics, but in the modern context, the normalization of art means that life aesthetics is not limited to literary elites but also belongs to many people who love life. In the eyes of the new generation of consumers represented by Gen Z, art is life; art can integrate into life, into consumption patterns, and can also lead life. This is a channel for experiencing life and a way of social interaction between people. For urban residents, if suburban and rural areas around the city belong to a one-hour living circle, then cultural, commercial, and tourism complexes with art themes are "half-hour living circle" light art vacation destinations.
Nourished by culture and art, at the "light vacation" destination of an art complex, one can experience the city's new aesthetic language in artistic everyday moments without the fatigue of long journeys. In the past, to perceive these, one had to travel to different places in various corners of the city—libraries, parks, art museums, art hotels... Now, in urban art complexes, these scenes are gathered together and presented with an immersive, slow narrative, creating a wonderful atmosphere of "light art vacation," connecting people and the city with more warmth. Whether it's an art commercial complex, an art park, a block, etc., the integration of art elements and scene atmosphere, through integrated art installations, art curation, and art activities, attracts various distinctive new retail formats and IPs. They take business as their bone and art as their soul, providing sufficient value and meaning for urban tourism breakthroughs, becoming micro-travel destinations for urban avant-garde trends. Under the thriving growth environment of the "Art+" model, various innovations have been developed. Many have already integrated experiential art into commercial spaces, and some leading players' innovative creations have continuously achieved "traffic + revenue," providing a reference model for the transformation and upgrading of physical businesses.
Shanghai Suhewan MixC World, with its concepts of boundless, stress-free, and purposeless experiences, focuses on natural ecological experiences to create a culturally and artistically vibrant gathering place with urban influence, rather than a single-purpose shopping mall. Suhewan is connected to the Bund, and building upon the introduction of experiential commercial, cultural, and artistic formats, it uses the "Urban Canyon" as a design concept, combining diverse backgrounds such as history, modernity, and future, to integrate historical humanities, green ecology, and retail experiences, creating a space that combines the openness and publicness of diverse scenes. While continuing the historical context, it will also host constantly updated cultural performances, art high grounds, fashion shows, and other public activities, providing a modern public cultural space.
The most striking feature is the large-scale outdoor permanent art installation—"Step Up!"—created by the creative brand AllRightsReserved in collaboration with the art group Inges Idee. This installation is located in the East Atrium and West Atrium, spanning two floors of commercial space. "Step Up!" depicts a little boy carrying an elephant backpack, who receives magical power from the elephant, takes a step, and strides up two floors.
Suhewan MixC World, with its open and diverse DNA, precisely caters to the contemporary urban dweller's desire for open natural spaces and a free social lifestyle, allowing consumers to experience art, humanities, and trendy commerce in the most comfortable way. As a cultural and artistic gathering place, the co-fusion of aesthetics and commerce runs through Suhewan MixC World, inside and out. It has partnered with UCCA Edge to jointly create "Dream Roaming MixC—Urban Public Art Season," showcasing a diverse and inclusive cultural atmosphere. UCCA also opened a UCCA store on LG1 of East Lane, a store themed around the first solo exhibition in China by Italian national treasure artist Maurizio Cattelan, and it is UCCA's first store in a shopping center. In an era where the boundaries between art and commerce are increasingly blurred, shopping malls are progressively advancing the forms of commercial artisticization and artistic commercialization, from architectural forms to spatial structures and commercial content.
3. The "new darling" of social life: Xiao Hong Xian
The term "Xiao Hong Xian" has quietly gone viral on new media. "Xiao Hong Xian" leverages its advantages in scene creation, becoming a powerful tool for attracting and retaining customers for the new generation, and an unrivaled magic weapon for gathering popularity and driving regional development. In an era dominated by refined operations, the concept of "Xiao Hong Xian" emerged, characterized by three main features: small scale, influencer appeal, and leisureliness. "Xiao Hong Xian" focuses on creating "exquisite" and "beautiful" elements within limited spaces, enabling small cultural tourism projects to unleash immense energy. These projects typically feature unique and distinct themes, based on which comprehensive scene design and layout are executed. By creating multiple check-in spots and highly-rated products, they cater to young people's desire for "planting grass" (discovering new things) and "pulling grass" (trying new things).
At the same time, "Xiao Hong Xian" places great emphasis on creating a specific atmosphere. They do not pursue high per-square-meter efficiency but instead focus on the comfort of visitors once they enter the project. By creating a leisurely environment, they mitigate the anxiety caused by the passage of time, allowing people to linger with a more relaxed and joyful mood. "Xiao Hong Xian" projects can not only meet consumers' offline social needs but also their desire to share on online social platforms, instantly sharing their check-in photos and videos on social media, thereby achieving a rapid "out of the circle" effect. New Art Landmark in Jing'an District, Shanghai
—The M+ Mari Creative Park, formerly the Shanghai Mari Paint Factory, has now transformed into a micro-art block that attracts many young people for check-ins. The most distinctive feature within the park is the collective experience store, "mamǎfufú Super Department Store," created through the first cross-industry collaboration between Happiness Collection and Mari Art Supplies, based on the concept of "colorism." Its name is derived from the "fu" (福) in Happiness Collection and the "ma" (馬) in Mari, aiming to continuously convey Mari's brand symbols and cultural values to the city and the younger generation.
Mamǎfufú has brought the concept of "Xiao Hong Xian" to its fullest, whether it's the overall scene style, the flexible use of colors, the interactive experience content, or the introduction of brand first stores, all of which have created highly photogenic results, attracting many young people for check-ins and consumption. Mamǎfufú Super Department Store is a cross-industry trend-setting cultural and creative space, occupying the best street-facing second-floor location at M+ Mari. Both the exterior walls and interior layout extensively use the highly expressive primary colors of red, yellow, and blue, weaving the "colorism" of the century-old Mari paint brand throughout the overall space design. Within the 1000㎡ space, 8 themed areas have been created, including the Mari Fun Factory, Mari Art Supplies, POP-UP Market, Color Ideal Kingdom, Inspiration Books, Color Life Market, and Color Salon, covering various business formats such as art exhibitions, handicraft studios, art supplies, books, home furnishings, art derivatives, and apparel retail.
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To further study and implement General Secretary Xi Jinping's important instructions and directives on tourism work, implement the relevant work arrangements of the National Tourism Development Conference, promote the positive innovation, quality improvement, and deep integration of the tourism, leisure and entertainment industry, and contribute to the modernization and high-quality development of the tourism, leisure and entertainment industry, the China Amusement Machine and Amusement Park Association will hold the 2024 China Tourism, Leisure and Entertainment Industry Development Conference in Zhengzhou from October 23-25!
