The Marketing Dilemmas and Strategic Breakthroughs of Trendy Toy IP: Challenges of Creative Bottlenecks and Audience Change - a Case Study of Pop Mart

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_127How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Trendy Toy IP; Pop Mart; Creative Bottlenecks; Audience Change; Cultural Connotations

Abstract

With the vigorous development of the trendy toy market, while it has significantly attracted new consumers, it also faces the dilemma of losing old customers. How to address the challenges of creative bottlenecks and audience change in the trendy toy industry has become a major problem. Based on the case analysis of Pop Mart’s notable market performance in the Thai market in the first half of 2024, while markets in Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the United States were less impacted, and Pop Mart’s appeal is less than that of Disney and Pokémon in mature markets, this study uses process-tracing and small-N comparative methods to analyze why Pop Mart is less attractive than other IPs with rich cultural connotations in mature markets. Innovatively, the study constructs a three-dimensional breakthrough model of “creativity-audience-strategy” through creative reconstruction, audience segmentation, and interactive mechanism upgrading. This expands the theoretical boundaries of IP marketing under the background of Generation Z, providing a new perspective for academic research; it also offers path suggestions for trendy toy brands in IP renewal, user segmentation, and interactive content design, actively promoting the industry’s transformation from a “product-oriented” to a new IP ecosystem of “user co-creation and emotional connection.”

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chenxi Lyu
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/11/03
TI  - The Marketing Dilemmas and Strategic Breakthroughs of Trendy Toy IP: Challenges of Creative Bottlenecks and Audience Change - a Case Study of Pop Mart
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 International Conference on Financial Innovation and Marketing Management (FIMM 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1110
EP  - 1118
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_127
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-874-5_127
ID  - Lyu2025
ER  -