Every society decides what it does for entertainment and fun. It changes with values, culture and age. China is no exception. What has changed in China is bigger than a list of hobbies. The money itself has moved. Ten years ago a rising middle class chased objects: a bag, a car, a bigger apartment. Today that same consumer chases moments. A concert, a trip, a weekend under a tent, a murder mystery night with friends. This is the real story of the leisure market in 2026, and most foreign brands are still reading the old script.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of GMA. I have run marketing campaigns in Shanghai since 2012 for travel boards, F&B chains, sports and lifestyle brands. I have watched Chinese spending shift from “what I own” to “what I felt”, and I have seen which brands adapted and which ones stalled.
The shift is real: China is spending on experience, not objects
Here is my position, and it is not soft. A brand that only sells a functional object in China, with no experience and no story around it, is losing ground every quarter. The numbers back this up. China’s experience economy reached about 18.4 trillion yuan at the end of 2025 and is expected to pass 22 trillion yuan in 2026, up 22.6% year on year. During the 2026 Spring Festival in Guangzhou, service and experience spending hit 58.3% of consumption, the first time it beat spending on goods. Read that again. Half of the wallet now goes to things you cannot put in a box.
The engine behind this has a name in Chinese: 情绪价值, emotional value. People no longer buy only the function of a product. They buy how it makes them feel, and how good it looks when they share it. The emotional consumption market in China is projected at 2.72 trillion yuan in 2026, heading toward 4.5 trillion by 2029. In February 2026 the State Council even put “experiential and emotional services” on its official list of consumption growth points, pushing immersive culture, night economy and hands-on craft. When policy chases a trend, the trend is already mainstream.
Where the money actually goes now
The old article listed hiking, martial arts, majiang and painting. Those still exist. But the growth is somewhere else, and it is loud. Live shows are the clearest signal. In 2025 the national box office for commercial performances reached 61.65 billion yuan. Large concerts alone pulled 29.55 billion yuan, up 13.7%, with close to 38 million attendees, up 30.8%. And here is the part brands miss: big shows drag other spending with them. The China Association of Performing Arts measured a multiplier of 1 to 6.85. Beyond the ticket, large events drove over 220 billion yuan in transport, hotels, dining, tourism and shopping. A concert is not a concert. It is a weekend of spending in a city.
Outdoor and camping tell the same story. China’s camping core market grew from 149.4 billion yuan in 2017 to about 214 billion yuan in 2024, a compound annual growth rate near 46%. Glamping spread because it photographs well, not because people suddenly love mosquitoes. Then there are the newer categories that did not exist in the first version of this article. Script murder games, 剧本杀, built a market worth 17 billion yuan back in 2021 and turned empty storefronts into weekend social hubs. And 谷子, the collectible “goods” tied to anime, games and idols, hit 168.9 billion yuan in 2024, up more than 40%, with forecasts crossing 200 billion in 2026. Young people are not buying a keychain. They are buying belonging to a fandom.
- Travel and tourism. Domestic trips keep climbing and Chinese travelers plan around one photogenic moment, not a checklist of monuments.
- Dining out as a night, not a meal. Restaurants that offer a set, a theme or a story now beat cheaper competitors on the same street.
- Live performance, e-sport and music festivals. Large festivals hit 2.89 billion yuan in 2025, up 22%, most single events near 10,000 people.
- Immersive exhibitions and theme parks. People pay to walk inside a story and leave with content to post.
What this means for your brand: sell the moment, not just the object
So what do you do if you sell a product, not a concert ticket? You graft the product onto an experience. A functional object on a shelf is a hard sell in 2026. The same object attached to a pop-up, a collaboration or a place people want to visit becomes a reason to travel and post. The lesson from brands that got this right, like the one I covered in the IKEA and Ctrip case, is simple. Give the consumer a moment worth sharing, and the product sells itself in the background.
The test I give every client is one sentence. Would a customer take a photo of this and post it without being asked? If the answer is no, you are selling an object. If yes, you are selling an experience, and the experience carries the object into thousands of feeds for free. That shareable memory is now the real product. Your physical item is the souvenir.
You still need to be found: Baidu, plus AI search
Google has limited reach in China. Most classic search still happens on Baidu, so your SEO needs simplified Chinese pages, local hosting and Baidu-friendly structure. That part of the old advice holds. What changed is that search is no longer only Baidu. A large share of young consumers now start a decision on Xiaohongshu, typing a place or a brand into its search bar to read real user notes before they go. And a fast-growing group asks an AI assistant like DeepSeek or Doubao directly. This is why GEO, generative engine optimization, matters now. You want your brand quoted inside the AI answer, not buried on page two. The mechanism is the same idea as SEO, but the target is the model’s response, so you seed clear, factual, well-structured Chinese content that these engines can cite.
Xiaohongshu is where the memory gets shared
For an experience brand, Xiaohongshu is the center of gravity. It is where the moment turns into content, and where the next customer decides to copy it. The loop is tight. A visitor posts a note from your pop-up. A stranger searches, sees fifty similar notes, and treats the visit as a proven plan, not a risk. Your job is to design a spot in that space that people want in their photo. A wall, a set, a signature dish, a limited item. Then seed the first wave of notes with KOC, everyday users with small but trusted audiences, through affiliation rather than one expensive celebrity post. On Douyin the same content plays to interest-based discovery, where a good clip of the experience reaches people who never searched for you. If you want the mechanics of that format, read our guide to Douyin live streaming.
Client case: Hannes and a German outdoor brand
Hannes runs a German outdoor equipment brand. Solid tents, good jackets, a name that means something in Europe. When he came to us, his China store had traffic but weak conversion. He was spending on Baidu keyword ads for “camping tent” and paying for a full price catalog on Tmall. His problem in numbers: a cost per acquisition around four times his European figure, and a repeat rate close to zero. He had tried the obvious fixes, more ads, more discounts, a celebrity KOL post that cost a lot and moved almost nothing. People saw a functional product at a functional price and scrolled past.
We stopped selling the tent and started selling the weekend. GMA worked with three camping sites near Chengdu and Hangzhou to build small branded glamping corners, with a photogenic setup using his gear and a signature evening spot. We seeded around forty KOC notes on Xiaohongshu from real campers, tied to an affiliation code, and ran matching Douyin clips of the setup at golden hour. The product was there, but the post was about the night, not the tent. Why it worked: the content gave strangers a plan they could copy, and 情绪价值 did the selling. Over about five months his cost per acquisition dropped by close to half, Xiaohongshu became his top traffic source ahead of paid search, and, more telling, people started buying the tent to recreate a night they had already seen. Slower than a viral fantasy, but real and repeatable.
One warning from that project. When your experience works, copies appear fast. Register your marks and design early, because a good pop-up gets imitated within weeks. We cover the basics of how to protect your brand in China before you scale.
The takeaway for foreign brands in 2026
Chinese consumers are trading objects for moments. Travel, live shows, sport and outdoor, camping, theme parks, e-sport, immersive exhibitions, 剧本杀 and 谷子 all feed the same appetite: a feeling worth paying for and a memory worth sharing. If your brand only offers a function at a price, you compete on price, and in China you will lose that race. Wrap the product in an experience, make it photogenic, put it where the moment gets shared, and let 情绪价值 do the work. For the data behind these trends, see the iiMedia 2026 new consumption white paper and the 2025 China performance market report.
About GMA. We are a digital marketing agency based in Shanghai. We help foreign brands turn a product into an experience Chinese consumers want to share, across Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Baidu and AI search. If you sell lifestyle, travel, sport, F&B or outdoor, drop us a line and one of our specialists will map your experience strategy for China.
FAQ
My product is functional, not fun. Can it still ride the experience economy? Yes, but you stop selling the object alone. You attach it to a moment. A kitchen brand runs a cooking class. An outdoor brand builds a glamping corner. A skincare brand opens a pop-up spa. The product stays the same. The reason to buy, and to post, becomes the experience around it. That shareable moment is what pulls new buyers in.
Do I still need Baidu SEO if young consumers search on Xiaohongshu? You need both, and now a third. Baidu still handles a large share of classic search and older buyers. Xiaohongshu handles discovery and trust for younger consumers deciding where to go. And AI assistants like DeepSeek and Doubao answer a growing share of questions directly, so GEO matters too. Spread your presence across the three, because a Chinese consumer rarely checks only one before deciding.
