Re-Tooling Entertainment Retail in China

Over the last few years there has been a lot of news about a slumping Chinese economy.  Home sales and retail revenues are down from their highs just a few years ago.  With this boom and bust cycle there are some opportunities developing for well leveraged private developers. There is a very strong market for tourism in China.  With an ageing population and greater disposable income, there is a demand for entertainment-based tourism.  Many local governments have built elaborate entertainment retail venues over the last few years in an attempt to capture visitors.   Unfortunately, many of them are struggling due to singular seasonal programming dependent on the local population.  It’s the one-time visit and the inability to retain visitors that have these venue’s owners wondering what to do.

On a recent trip with a client, we were invited by the Chinese government to come up with new ideas to help struggling venues become year-round attractions.  The majority of these venues saw attendance peak during the summer months with 2 to 3 million visitors.  This is an incredible number of people in a very short time.  To put this into perspective, Knott’s Berry Farm averages about 3.5 million visitors a year.  Many of these venues have populations of 30 to 40 million people within a two-hour drive.  With such a large local market to draw from, we found it critical to create compatible programming that is locally-centric and contextual, not forced.

We conducted workshops, with both public and private entities, to develop strategies with the goal of increasing both new and return visitor attendance.  We created a dialogue that identified these key programming opportunities:

– Celebrate local culture by designing contextually

– Create a lingering retail experience

– Increase food-based programming

– Introduce or increase hospitality for longer visits

– Increase soft, year-round event programming

With China’s population of ±1.4 billion people, the theme-based entertainment retail market will continue to grow.   It’s critical for these venues to differentiate themselves from their competitors without loosing sight of their local market.  By implementing simple strategies and programming, themed-based entertainment retail will remain strong for years to come.