Turning a night market into a city-level cultural IP
A local night market wanted to become a destination. What it lacked was not traffic, but a story that could be told consistently and a repeatable content system.
+72%
Night-time footfall lift
41%
Share of repeat spend
12M
Annual topic readership
26
Cities deployed to
At kick-off the night market was a single street of stalls with a local regular crowd. Mature competitors nearby could not be beaten on price or scale. The city wanted a cultural flagship, but neither the budget nor the team could sustain long-form content investment.
「The biggest surprise was that the stall owners became the protagonists. They stopped being vendors being assigned a slot and started being people with something to say.」
- 1
Extracted 'Twelve Hours of the Canal' as the IP backbone — twelve time slots mapped to twelve ways of spending an evening, giving content a structure that could keep expanding
- 2
Built the 'River Lantern Program' with local craftspeople as co-creators, turning stall owners into the protagonists of the content and giving them their own reach
- 3
Designed a licensable cultural-product system — ice cream collaborations, stamp maps, night-only seals — shipping 40+ SKUs in a year
- 4
Ran a monthly 'Solar Term Night' event, turning online content into a place people actually visit
- 5
Synced local tourism media and top-tier short-video accounts to push the conversation beyond the city
A year in, night-time footfall was up 72%, repeat spend reached 41%, annual topic readership hit 12M, and the licensing model was replicated in 26 cities. What had been a local spot became a story the city could tell externally.