When you are waiting for a flight, you can enjoy more than 10 minutes of massage service by using your mobile phone to scan the payment QR Code; when you are waiting for a movie to start, you can go towards the crane machine and insert a few coins. Maybe there will be unexpected gains. In this fast-moving era, waiting seems to be the worst part for Chinese people. However, many businessmen seize these opportunities to let people still have something to do except playing on their mobile phones. Hence, new things such as mini KTVs, crane machines, massage chairs, lollipop machines, VR games stores, gashapon machines, blind box vending machines etc., frequently appear in every corner of shopping malls, cinemas and restaurants. These machines or venues designed for fun can be operated through mobile payment or automatic coin selling devices without special supervision. The fast, convenient, fashionable and fragmented consumption mode brings consumers a fresh experience.
In the past, fragments of time were like “chicken ribs”. Consumers have no good choices, and businessmen could do nothing. Nowadays, the high-intensity working state cuts modern people’s life into pieces of time. The rapid development of new Internet formats and new payment methods provides more possibilities for enriching and integrating fragmentation time. “An Economy in Waiting” is aimed at the fragmented consumer demand of modern people and preferences for their experiential consumption. Different fragments of time require different experiential formats to satisfy people’s needs. In the past, people might use a whole day to do one thing. But now, when you go outside, you can taste snacks, claw dolls, and have time to watch a small show. Fragmented consumption therefore enables consumers to experience more diversified entertainment in shopping.
Don’t underestimate this fragmentation of consumption, it might be small consumption but it contains great business opportunities. Taking mini KTV as an example, the overall market scale in 2018 reached CNY 1.39 billion, with a year-on-year growth of 15.1%; and the number of operating equipment reached 70,000, up 25.0% year on year. POP MART, the domestic leading brand for blind boxes, its Molly Series products sold 4 million units in 2018, with sales of more than CNY 200 million in China. This year, at least, the sales volume is expected to double to 8 million. According to market research and analysis, the demand for gashapon machines in the Chinese market in the future could be as high as 6 million, while the current market holding is only tens of thousands. If IP copyright, the update speed, and professional problems of gashapon machines can be solved, the capsule toy industry may become the next entertainment category of new retail outlets. According to the "China VR offline experience store industry market competition status research report 2019-2025", China's VR offline experience store market is expected to grow further, and could exceed CNY 4 billion in 2020. The new directions of entertainment in the "An Economy in Waiting" are slowly moving towards their respective locations, so don’t miss it!
※The article is published in the GTI Magazine Issue No. 181 in November 2019 |
