This article conducts a description of the customer profile for cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum (the Forbidden City) in the UK. Using 6 customer behavior concepts, this article finds out that the target customer group would be the residents from China and those who are attracted to the cultural and creative industry.
Chinese Customers that Share the Value
Although Chinese residents are considered ethnic minorities in the UK, the population has been increasing year by year. Take students as an example, approximately 106,530 Chinese students were studying in the UK in the 2017-2018 academic year, which ranked top one compared to other countries that send students to the UK (UKCISA, 2019).
However, about 20% of those Chinese students admitted that they felt stressed all the time, and getting in touch with Chinese culture or events in the UK helped them at least temporarily (Clarke, 2018). In this case, the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum net 1.5 billion yuan in China and overseas in 2017, which shows the significance those products are to Chinese people (Hong, 2019). This chapter analyzes this group of customers from the following perspectives.
Values
The cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum represent the values of Chinese customers to a certain extent. Especially in an unfamiliar environment, values are reflected in cultural behaviors for individuals. For example, the Palace Museum often launches festival-themed cultural and creative products, including traditional Chinese decorations such as spring couplets, Chinese paper cutting art, and so on. Values could be enduring, and memories formed from an early age may accompany people throughout their lives. These products can embody international students’ recognition of Chinese culture, which can lead to purchasing behavior.
It is true that individual behavior does not necessarily follow the social paradigm. However, from the perspective of national culture, traditional culture forms a cluster and has a potential impact on consumers. It should be noted that when promoting the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum to the Chinese customers living in the UK, a true, reliable, and gross generalizations strategy shall be adopted, without over-emphasizing traditional culture or forcibly rising it up to the values (Anholt, 2000).
Cognition and Affect
Cognition and effect have a positive impact on consumer purchasing behavior and loyalty. In the purchase decision-making process, consumers will go through three stages of cognition, affect, and behavior. Customers care about their preferences, beliefs, and perceptual qualities. These can predict the final behavior of consumers (Mooij, 2019). The cognition that customers have on the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum cognition refers to the process of cognition, memory, comprehension, and comprehensive thinking.
It is necessary to personally experience the occurrence and participation of an event or to have a clear understanding of the process of making a product, cultural background, attributes, and functions. This proves to generate trust, identity, desire, and purchase. The brand of the Palace Museum represents the image and commitment in the eyes of consumers, and whether the product is valuable, credible, satisfying consumers, trustworthy, and providing consumers with a positive experience are all part of the consideration whether the customers would purchase their products.
Considering the effect when designing products could make their appeal evoke people’s positive emotions. Such products will be better than ordinary products. Therefore, in order to show the characteristics of culture, the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum explore product design information from the elements of national culture, such as symbols, lines, stories, shapes, and colors. Chinese consumers, in addition to enjoying the actual functionality, can also perceive the cultural connotations that designers tend to convey through the product’s appearance characteristics in order to get moved and resonated.
Motives and Emotions
First, the target customers of cultural industry marketing are uncertain. Second, cultural products are born with regional and epochal cultural characteristics, so the extent to which they can be known and accepted by consumers is an important consideration in the analysis of consumer behavior (Zhang & Liu, 2016). Chinese students have a stronger motivation to buy cultural and creative products from the Palace Museum.
Maybe it’s because of a sense of belonging and familiarity; maybe it’s because of missing hometown; maybe it’s bought for relatives and friends to promote Chinese culture. These motivations may be internal or external, but they come from an emotional need deep inside. In addition, the products of the Palace Museum are full of national characteristics and are integrated into Chinese history and art, which can resonate with the emotions of Chinese students.
It is also necessary to consider that, as mentioned above, there are many Chinese immigrants living in the UK. Some of these parents are eager to let their children understand Chinese culture, which constitutes a family relationship based on culture. This part of the group is also an effective target customer of the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum.
Other Customers that are into Cultural and Creative Products
The creative industries contribute nearly 90 billion pounds of GDP to the UK. In the UK, culture plays an important role in the daily lives of residents. According to a survey, 96% of residents will participate in cultural and creative industries such as video games, museum visits, film and television programs, etc. (Kampfner, 2016). Furthermore, a lot of people are hot for imported products. 15% of shoppers in the UK purchase different products from other countries every day (Whistl, 2018). This situation implies that some certain customers in the UK are interested in foreign cultural and creative goods and are suitable as potential target customers of the Palace Museum’s products.
Personality
The reason to select this type of customers as the target one is that they have the need to show their personality through the items they use, this paper calls them the recipients of the cultural and creative products, such as young people, museum enthusiasts, greeting card users, and so on. Their consumption behavior is influenced by their personality and habits (Mooij, 2019). Connected this theory with the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum, which have been developed to have multiple functions and looks.
During this process, those products focus on market needs such as sales, giving gifts, public relations, and event promotion in order to provide consumers with a wide choice. In terms of functional aspects, cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum include practical items: clothing, accessories, stationery, daily stuff, food; and crafts: decorative crafts, practical crafts, and so on. These products are integrated with creative elements, have a clear cultural connotation, let consumers feel the value of the collection, and can show their personality.
Self-Concept
As a special consumer group, young people have very particular consumer psychological characteristics such as pursuing novelty and fashion, advocating brands and icons, highlighting personality and self-concept, and focusing on emotion and intuition. During this period of life, the awakening of young people’s self-awareness often also affects their consumption behavior. This group of people tends to choose unique, creative, and distinctive daily necessities, clothing, accessories, etc. to extend the concept of self.
In essence, this is a self-description and self-assessment through the appearance they create for themselves (Hard & Smith, 2008). Young people who are willing to buy imported goods also have the opportunity to buy products from the Palace Museum. Compared with Western design, the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum have brought a unique product design, even new product features, which could be very attractive to those young people looking for extended-self.
Lifestyle
Consumer behavior is deeply influenced by their lifestyles. We can even divide consumers into different groups according to different lifestyles in order to better make marketing strategies. To the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum, this group of the target customers is mainly young people who live in a relatively international environment and are willing to try new things.
It is conceivable that if a Chinese friend around someone strongly recommends traditional Chinese cultural goods to him, he may be more interested. If a friend gives such a gift, he may even develop his own desire for a deeper understanding of the new culture. The lifestyle of young people today is not limited to domestic products. Thanks to globalization, consumers can access special products from different countries. For the Palace Museum, these young people with diversified lifestyles are important target customers.
References
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Hong, Y. (2019). Palace Museum’s cultural and creative products net 1.5 billion yuan
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Kampfner, J. (2016). Creative industries are key to UK economy. The Guardian,
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UKCISA. (2019). Top Ten non-EU sending countries.
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