Editor's Note:
On November 19th, the "New Cultural Creation Empowers New Cultural Tourism" of the Guangdong Cultural Tourism Interest Camp "Deep Enjoyment +" Sharing Session was successfully launched in online form. Wang Xu, Secretary General of the SMART Resort Industry Expert Committee and Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the AIM International Design Competition, shared his years of practical experience and experience in the fields of cultural tourism, cultural creation and rural innovation for the participants of the interest camp. The sharing session was led by Li Xuanning, a third-term student of the Interest Camp and a sophomore student of Jinan University.
Where is the border of cultural tourism?
Let's start with an open-ended question: "If our goal is to occupy more of the user's time, where is the boundary between games and cultural tourism?" "In the future, we conservatively estimate that the online time after 00 will account for more than 50% of the overall user time, and the offline user time may be compressed to less than half." There will be many non-cultural tourism enterprises in the market, such as Wenheyou and Aranya, which are also occupying the experience time of offline users and sucking up a lot of traffic. Then the traditional scenic spots and towns can only be desperately rolled in 25% of the time. Now that the discussion of the "metacosm" is very hot, why can't we try to open the boundaries between online and offline, virtual and physical? If we can choose to ignore the boundary between virtual and reality, how big can the boundary of cultural tourism be? How many cross-border diversified content formats can it incorporate? I believe that different types of talents, different perspectives, and different logics can be incorporated into the cultural tourism industry. All time except work and home time, we can define it as the time of users of cultural tourism.
I think that in the future, many students majoring in cultural tourism should think about where is your battlefield? It is likely that it is not in the field of cultural tourism in the traditional perception, but involves multiple industries and perspectives. We need compound talents, cross-border thinking and excellent coordination and leadership to create a comprehensive user experience.
Cultural tourism destination IP creation
We start with the birth of a destination. The end of the world in Hainan is a very well-known attraction in Sanya. Before the epidemic, its annual tourist volume was about 4 million, and the revenue of 400 million yuan was basically ticket revenue, and the proportion of consumption of second sales and above was very small. What needs to be done if we want to create higher unit prices in this destination and allow tourists to stay longer? This is also something we will always need to think about in the future. I would like to share with you a few well-recognized cultural tourism destination projects in the circle, such as Aranya, which captures the loneliness of the urban middle class, in order to extend all the story lines, relying on strong community operation capabilities, and holding more than 1,300 activities in a year, creating such a successful destination. Anaya has also become a representative of this segment of the market.
Who is the destination IP in the segment? What path do we need to take to get to it? Here are some examples for everyone to understand. For example, Hainan Changjiang wants to create an IP of the March Three-year-old Art Limiao Intangible Cultural Creation; in Chongli, which is about to hold the Winter Olympics, they want to do the destination IP of "more than white", spring, summer and autumn have their own content and experience, hoping to achieve all-season operation; Lijiang Ancient City, as a destination that has been on fire for more than 20 years, is also thinking about how to "start again".
Lanzhou is the headquarters of Reader, which claims to be the number one magazine in Asia. The neighborhood where Reader is headquartered has been transformed into a reader's block after urban renewal, and it needs to re-energize the city through a complex with bookstores as the core. In addition to providing us with a commercial lifestyle in the city, it is also an important part of cultural tourism. Weinan, Shaanxi Province, is building "China's first silver-haired friendship city", and Qinhuangdao, which is relatively close to Beijing, is building "China's first child-friendly community". Every city, every region, every destination, they are trying to find the most suitable IP for themselves, and have unique and differentiated IP.
You can imagine a bloody road in so many destinations on the map of the country, to find a different and unique market segment. Our students, whether committed to urban renewal or rural revitalization in the future, will face the same question – what is your subdivision track? Have you ever found a unique IP for your project? At this time, we must think backwards and really take the side of the sword. Not being unique means losing traffic and the project will soon be lost. This is one of the most challenging issues facing cultural tourism.
Aggregate group wisdom and empower the cultural tourism industry
In 2018, we are talking about the concept of "fuzzy ecology", just like the question at the beginning, is it necessary for us to distinguish between online and offline? If we treat our own projects or cities as an app, they are uniformly competing for user time, in fact, the core indicator is the length of time occupied by users. There is no need for us to make a particularly clear boundary demarcation of many different formats. On a larger scale, we may have more room to maneuver.
In 2019, we are more concerned about platform empowerment. Because no large enterprise in the future is likely to create an ecosystem on its own, the platform becomes particularly important. Organizations like AIM and SMART are platform-based organizations that work together to learn, break boundaries, and seek a composite solution.
In 2020, due to the outbreak of the epidemic, the "resonance restart" we advocate hopes to be able to meet the demands of the same frequency resonance by various industries through culture and cultural creation as the medium, and achieve symbiotic development. At present, people and viruses must coexist, digital and physical beings must coexist, and at the same time, our various industrial ecosystems must also achieve a new symbiosis. How to study cross-industry ecological research and this symbiotic composite model is also a very professional thing in itself.
Many friends who are familiar with SMART know that the slogan we often mention is called "group wisdom", and we are a platform for aggregating group wisdom. How to aggregate the wisdom of the group to find complex and innovative solutions? This is one of the things that we are very good at and willing to do in the cultural tourism. In the past few years, we have been trying to continuously expand the boundaries of the cultural tourism industry ecology, like the cultural creation we see, the consumption upgrade of the creative economy, artificial intelligence, big data, art, homestays, camping, research and so on, are our practice accumulation in the expansion of the ecological boundary of the industry.
The core four elements of the success of cultural tourism projects
According to the main body of operation, we divide cultural tourism into four scales: "XL, L, M, S". "XL" represents a large-scale cultural tourism development complex in global tourism, generally led by the government, such as Yunnan Yuxi global tourism; "L" represents state-owned enterprises, central enterprises, private enterprises or listed companies and other developers, typical projects such as Nianhuawan Town, etc.; "S" is called a single operator, which can be a private small business owner who operates a homestay, boutique hotel, catering, research and learning, and experience camp. Thousands of makers and group wisdom is our "S" scale, and it is also one of the most core contents. Because we believe that the basic cell unit of the entire cultural tourism industry must be talent. Above the single operator, there is a unit "M" that we are most interested in, which we call the Cultural Tourism Settlement Characteristic Block, which is also a smallest trial and error unit, and the more prominent is the reconstructed Snow Mountain Village in Ya'an. If we put some individual industrial ecosystems in this unit, they can still survive very well. That proves that the project is sustainable and it can be replicated and amplified.
Cultural tourism projects, which are often successful, generally have four elements: discovering IP, aggregating talent, creating content, and building communities. These four elements come in order, first we have to create an IP, in order to attract talent, so as to aggregate talent. With quality talent, you can create unique, attractive and innovative content. Around good content, it will produce a highly sticky, product-based user community.
The first case about IP upgrading is the intangible cultural and creative IP of the Spring Festival in Hainan Changjiang, March, which I mentioned in the cultural tourism destination. In fact, there are beautiful scenery and customs that can be appreciated and tasted all over the country, but the key question is whether we can transform the local culture and natural scenery into consumerable products. So we launched a cultural and creative competition on "Yi Yi Li Miao", so that hundreds of cultural and creative teams paid attention to Changjiang in the same time period, and translated local patterns, totems and tapestries into figurative and fashionable cultural and creative products with a very young vision and method, increasing the opportunities for the second and third sales of local intangible cultural and creative products.
The second case of talent upgrading. We came to a newly created street in kaifeng, the ancient capital of the millennium, called Shuanglong Lane. Although it is theoretically a big IP with the blessing of Zhao Kuangyin, the grandfather of the Song Dynasty, it lacks the core attraction of the core content. So we launched a contest for it about content. We hope that they can fold the Song Dynasty and the contemporary together, and the formats inside are vague and borderless, but there is a very strong operation and strong experience of innovative formats dominating the space. Through compound operation and planning, it is presented in the same space. And this space needs to meet the multi-format, multi-time operation, how can the design team reuse the space and increase its activity? In the future, we will need this kind of generalized design more than a narrow design that is only responsible for physical space.
Designers in a broad sense are responsible for the entire product experience and achieve their goals with composite solutions. He is not only the leader of the team, but also knows how to link and coordinate various fields so that they can work together to produce the greatest value. At present, the cultural tourism industry is indeed particularly short of compound talents, and this demand for talents cannot be met by college courses and professional settings.
The third example is our content upgrade. I chose the 2018 competition about land art that we did in Nanjing's Lishui District. Lishui wants to do global tourism around Wuxiang Mountain, but what is global tourism? In this destination, we try to let tourists stay as much as possible, so that there is enough time to deeply connect with localized people and things; at the same time, we also activate the countryside and villagers, so that they can form a very good interaction with foreign tourists. This is the practice of a land art season that I think has been very successful, and it is also a tribute to Kitagawa Sensei.
The last one is called "Natural and Promising." This case is located in a small village in Sanya. Its vegetation is very good, and the animal diversity is also very rich. We are thinking about using the innate conditions of nature to do education, and build it into the first village of natural natural history research in China. This time we are launching a research competition for natural history, inviting senior experts in the field of natural sciences, documentary filmmakers and editors-in-chief of geographical magazines to form a jury. The scenes in the work can be all-encompassing and the output is also colorful. This involves achieving a dual-track merger of "museum + cultural tourism" through IP, talent, content and community. When two traditional tracks merge, a new subdivision will be opened up, giving us a very good grip and competitive advantage, and there will be a lot of excellent natural research ideas happening here.
After we have obtained a lot of artistic creations, the next thing to do is the mainstream of creativity and the follow-up operation of IP. Our IP is defined by us, and the talent is convened by us. Content is created by these people, and community is aggregated by good content. Through this process, you can empower any place with quality IP, traffic, and influence.
The tournament will be assembled and operated throughout the season
The tournament is a particularly important platform for us to gather the wisdom of the crowd. I hope that in it, we can break the information asymmetry, so that interested young teams can see us, and they will also get a stage to show creativity and ability, fair play. The differences between the competition works are very large, and a large part of it is based on the wisdom of the group that everyone will have very different interpretations of the same topic. This is exactly what we want to see. Use a word in the computer, computing power, to explain the logic of the event. Many computers will form a huge computing power after being networked. Now we generally use "cloud computing". The same phenomenon is found in terms of creativity.
If 38 people in our class think about a topic together for an hour, we will have 38 hours of computing power. What if it expanded to 380 or 3800? For the same hour, we have 3800 hours of hash rate. Among these 3800 people, each person's background, creativity, and experience are different, and it will be a very large "computing power" when gathered. Therefore, when we consider the success rate of a cultural tourism project, the talents in the unit time or unit area and the computing power they bring are very core indicators. Because cultural tourism projects mainly rely on creative innovation to support, it is unlikely that they will be copied quickly.
Next is the question of the development path of the full-season operation. In the future, urban renewal needs to establish a management and operation mechanism, rather than simply putting together business formats through investment promotion. In our eyes, the cultural tourism project is more like a movie than a real estate development project. Because it needs a script, a good screenwriter, a good director, these businesses as actors need to act in a play according to the script. When we have a set of management and operation mechanism and a 365-day annual operation plan, and then introduce different cooperative institutions into the space, the "actors" play creative and operate according to the "big script", which is the basis for us to activate a space.
We divide the operating partners into three layers, the first type is that they can be unstricted by space, and can be branded together, such as Central American, Tsinghua Cultural and Creative Institute, etc., which are very good brand partners; the second type is long-term operating partners, which can operate the space in years; the third type is short-term operating partners, who can release online traffic offline in days or weeks. So how to build these three levels of partners, forming a matrix or pyramid, this is a matter that needs to be considered when operating.
Cultural and tourism compound talent training
In the past three consecutive years, we have been building the Hainan International Cultural and Creative Week, relying on the Cultural and Creative Week, we established the organization of the Boao Cultural and Creative Institute, hoping to empower the platform through the vague industrial ecology and realize the possibility of resonance symbiosis and more track integration. What we really want to teach our students is the cross-border compound power of learning, leadership, organization, innovation and so on. This is also our response to the future industrial ecology under the logic of industrial development.
At present, there are three things we can do, the first thing is to choose a differentiated competitive strategy based on big data; the second thing is called mobilization, do we have the ability to mobilize so many institutions and industries to enter together? The third is the ability to create an industrial ecology, which is inseparable from your research, insight, determination, and courage.
Finally, I would like to pay tribute to the bad boys of the cultural tourism circle. There are so many good children in China that everyone is accustomed to writing your answer based on the correct answer. But cultural tourism is an industry without the right answer, and if there is a correct answer, it will become the same. When I interacted with very high-quality founders and traders in the cultural tourism circle, I found that these people are not good children in the traditional sense. They are very naughty, very playful, have a distinct personality, and do not play cards according to common sense, but when they have what we just call innovation, organization, and leadership, they can make a very good cultural and tourism differentiation product. I also especially look forward to the emergence of more compound talents in the future industry, and everyone can respect our industrial ecology and obtain the ability to continuously innovate, and will eventually go far.
Interactive sessions
Teacher Luo Qiuju, School of Tourism, Sun Yat-sen University: How do we solve the property rights problem in the process of collecting works, and how can more people be willing to put very creative works into the competition? What is the proportion of the development cost of the competition to the total cost?
Wang Xu: As a contestant, a young team, participating in the competition itself is self-training. In fact, they are thinking about their own questions and finding their own answers through the competition questions. Under the premise of voluntary participation, we will also sign an agreement with the participants, the official ownership of the right to use the work, but the participant still retains the right of attribution; if there is no official signing agreement, all rights to the work belong to the participant himself. In the end, we usually promote further cooperation between the winning team of the competition and the government or platform company. In addition to the bonuses, there are entrepreneurial opportunities for these young teams.
So far, the cost of our competition is about the same as the cost of inviting two or three teams to do the design. We released a contest that can get hundreds of proposals, but the same fee may only get three commissioned design proposals.
Li Xuanning, a sophomore at Jinan University: Do you think the "Silver Romance" project in Tianliu Village, Weinan City, Shaanxi Province, has the potential to be universally implemented? After we create a featured IP, can such a professional model be promoted to other scenarios?
Wang Xu: This is certainly possible. In fact, what we call IP uniqueness refers more to the theoretical aspect. From the perspective of cultural tourism, everyone only recognizes the first, not the second, and the head destination occupies a great advantage. But we can think of "silver-haired" and "child-friendly" as a philosophy or standard. At that time, we divided the "Silver Romance" competition into three tracks: aging space design, silver-haired product design and silver-haired friendly service design. These three tracks are actually a set of standards, from hardware to products to services and other aspects of the implementation of the "silver hair friendly" standards and concepts, greatly enhance the friendliness of the city. When we build a system from a point of view, it can have very good scalability and universal value.
Li Xuanning: You mentioned before that "soft service and culture are the biggest selling points". I think art is also an important part of culture, but I also find that the transmission of intangible cultural heritage is difficult to sustain, and intermittent transmission methods such as theater festivals or markets have limited effect. I would like to ask you what suggestions do you have for the sustainable development of intangible cultural heritage activities into the countryside?
Wang Xu: First of all, I think this is a topic that is particularly worth exploring. We want future talents to have design thinking on the basis of becoming compound talents who understand business, marketing, operation and the Internet. We want to pass on the intangible cultural heritage through activities such as theater festivals, and we must also understand commercial operations. We may build a sustainable business model for the event through sponsorship, co-creation, crowdfunding, commodities, government subsidies, etc., not just because the appearance is very good and looks lively.
Second, I agree with a point of view of Huang Xinzhang, a teacher designed by Kenmo in Taiwan, the first is called drainage, the second is called experience, and the third is called conversion. In Aranya, for example, it may rely on theatre festivals, concerts, and book events to divert traffic and allow visitors to get more experiences in community interactions, but our profit point is not here. Traffic and attention are how scarce things are in this era, we use activities and communities to attract audiences and potential users, so that they can fully experience in the scene, stimulate the impulse of tourists to buy derivatives, and complete the consumption conversion.
Wu Dan, Director of Guangdong Cultural Tourism Interest Camp: Regarding the platform of Hainan International Cultural and Creative Week, I would like to know, how do you build this continuous interactive exchange mechanism? In what ways?
Wang Xu: I think the core point is the interaction mechanism. We've spent two years learning how nonprofits build people-to-people connections and manage and run communities. In fact, I think that there are so-called social fears in human nature, and at the same time, people need to connect with others. We want everyone to have a sense of belonging as much as possible, for example, the Cultural and Creative Week, we have a manager mechanism, which can be the main person in the form of individuals and institutions. There will be many community leaders here, to organize, to organize, to serve everyone. In addition, I think leader's organizational logic is also very important, which is also the embodiment of humanistic thinking and nurturing mentality.
Text: Li Xuanning Gong Lu
Image source: Courseware PPT