Understanding Blind Box Consumption: Psychological Mechanisms in the Chinese Blind Box Market

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_39How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Blind Box Consumption; Uncertainty; Intellectual Property (IP); Brand Loyalty

Abstract

In the Chinese toy market, blind boxed products have gained popularity. As a result of the experience economy, the consumers’ demand for emotional and symbolic value is increasing. Unlike conventional products that enhance buying decisions through lessening uncertainty, blind box consumption purposefully builds uncertainty into the buying decision that offers a buyer with a distinctive experience. Nevertheless, the existing studies still do not offer an adequate explanation of the psychological process of consumers’ repeated purchase behaviours. The psychological processes of consumption of blind boxes in the Chinese market are discussed in this paper. The paper developed a two-way step framework to describe consumer behaviour through a summary of the existing literature. The former path is concerned with the stimuli living off information gap, where the information gap results in curiosity and impulsive purchasing, emotional reinforcement and cognitive bias promote repetitive consumption. The second direction focused on the internalisation of the worth of the Intellectual Property (IP) as symbolic meaning and emotional attachment, which might contribute towards the perceived value and thus yield consumer satisfaction, brand loyalty and collection behaviour. The results show that blind box consumption is not a mere probabilistic marketing tool, but a hybrid mechanism, which integrates the thrill of the unknown with the internalisation of the emotional long-term value. The framework can be useful in receiving the emotion-based consumption behaviour, and the insights it offers can serve the creative brands which wish to balance the short-term stimulation as well as the long-term brand building.

Copyright

© 2026 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  - Wanqing Sun
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - Understanding Blind Box Consumption: Psychological Mechanisms in the Chinese Blind Box Market
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 3rd International Conference on Public Relations and Media Communication (PRMC 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 352
EP  - 361
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_39
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-609-3_39
ID  - Sun2026
ER  -