A founder came to me with a problem I’d heard before.

She was running a Dunhuang art derivatives business — exquisite hand-painted reproductions, replica Buddhist figurines, silk scarves printed with cave mural motifs. In China’s cultural tourism market, they were selling well. But in Europe, nothing moved.

“Our work is this good,” she said. “Why won’t it sell abroad?”

I asked her: what are you selling?

“Dunhuang culture,” she said.

“That’s the problem,” I told her.

You’re selling culture. But foreign consumers aren’t buying culture — they’re buying an experience. A feeling. The sense that this thing will make my life different, better, or more meaningful in some specific way.

Culture is the content. The product is the delivery mechanism.

Between those two things, there’s a gap. Filling that gap is the work.

That work is what I’ve spent the last decade systematising into a framework called CAAP™ — Culture As A Product.

Why Cultural Productisation Is Hard

The difficulty isn’t lack of quality or lack of ambition. It’s a structural mismatch between how cultural creators think and how product designers think.

A cultural creator asks: Is this content deep enough? Does it faithfully represent the tradition? Does it have artistic merit?

A product designer asks: Who is this for? What do they need? Will they pay for it? Can I scale it?

In most Chinese cultural projects, these two perspectives are split across different people, or ignored entirely on the product side. The result: extraordinary cultural content that reaches almost no one.

CAAP is a framework designed to bridge that gap — to help cultural creators think with product discipline, without losing what makes the culture worth building around.

The Six Steps

Step 1: Culture — What is your cultural core?

This is the starting point, and it’s the step most often skipped or fumbled.

“Cultural core” doesn’t mean “Chinese tradition” or “5,000 years of history.” Those are categories, not cores. A core is a specific, distinct, viscerally compelling cultural element.

For Lightopia, the core was: the Chinese craft of building stories with light — specifically, the tradition of Zigong, where craftsmen use silk and steel frames to build hand-assembled luminous sculptures that can stand fifteen metres tall.

That’s specific. It’s distinctive (nothing quite like it exists in Western art). And it has an immediate visual power.

Test: Can you describe your cultural core in a single sentence? If not, you haven’t found it yet.

Step 2: Emotion — What should your audience feel?

The engine of every cultural experience is emotion, not information.

Nobody weeps because they’ve learned a historical fact. But they weep when they walk into a cave and feel, physically, the presence of a craftsman who lived a thousand years ago.

For Lightopia, we defined four target emotions: wonder, warmth, family connection, childhood memory.

Every design decision we made — the colour palette, the music, even the timing of the water show finale — was evaluated against those four emotions. Does this intensify the feeling we’re going for? If not, we changed it.

Test: When someone walks out of your experience, what’s the last thing you want them to say to the person beside them?

Step 3: Format — What is the container for the experience?

Culture can be expressed through exhibitions, performances, festivals, games, films, physical products, hospitality experiences, and dozens of hybrid formats. Each format has a different audience, a different commercial logic, and different constraints.

The choice of format isn’t aesthetic. It’s strategic.

For Lightopia, we chose large-scale immersive outdoor festival because it:

– Suited family audiences, one of the largest spending groups in the UK

– Had a proven ticketing commercial model

– Could deliver the full visual impact of large-format lantern installations

Test: Does your chosen format have a successful commercial precedent in your target market? If not, what evidence suggests it could work?

Step 4: Story — What narrative are you inside?

“Story” here doesn’t mean a plot. It means the narrative frame through which your audience understands and enters the experience.

An exhibition without a story is a display. An exhibition with a story is an experience.

When we built Lightopia at Crystal Palace in South London, we built it around a specific story: Chinese lanterns reconstructing the Crystal Palace — the iconic Victorian glass structure that was destroyed by fire 86 years earlier. A piece of London that locals mourned and still spoke about.

That framing transformed the experience from “a Chinese cultural import” into “something that belongs to our city’s story.” Visitors weren’t watching from outside the narrative. They were inside it.

Test: Is there a story your audience already cares about that your cultural project can become part of?

Step 5: Interaction — How does the audience participate?

Modern audiences don’t want to watch. They want to be inside.

This doesn’t mean turning everything into a game. It means designing the experience so that the visitor feels like an active presence, not a spectator.

For Lightopia, this meant an obsessive attention to what I call emotional pacing — the route through the festival was designed as a narrative arc, with small moments of discovery early on, a visual crescendo in the middle, and an emotional peak at the finale water show. The audience wasn’t told this arc. They felt it without knowing why.

Test: At what moments in your experience does the visitor go from observer to participant?

Step 6: Price — What is your commercial model?

This is the step most cultural creators resist. Which is ironic, because it’s the step that determines whether everything else continues to exist.

Pricing is not just a number. It’s the architecture of your whole commercial operation:

– Who pays, and for what?

– How many different revenue streams do you have?

– How does the unit economics change as you scale?

– What happens if your primary revenue source contracts by 30%?

Lightopia’s model was: ticket revenue + venue revenue share + brand sponsorship + multi-city touring. That last element — the touring model — was what allowed us to grow from one city to fifteen. Each new city had lower marginal costs than the last, because we’d already built the infrastructure and proven the concept.

Test: If your primary revenue source dropped by half tomorrow, would the project survive?

CAAP Is Not a Formula

A framework is not a checklist. You don’t complete CAAP and receive a finished product.

CAAP is a set of questions that force you to think with discipline about the things that most cultural projects leave to instinct or luck.

Every project’s answers will be different. But the questions are the same:

1. What is my cultural core, specifically?

2. What emotions am I designing for?

3. What format best serves both the culture and the market?

4. What story can I put this inside?

5. How do audiences participate?

6. How does this sustain itself commercially?

If you’re working on a cultural project right now, run through those six questions. Most projects stall at Step 1 or Step 2 — they haven’t actually defined what the cultural core is, or they haven’t committed to an emotional target. That’s usually where the real work needs to happen.

In a future post, I’ll walk through a complete CAAP analysis of a real project — showing how each step shaped the actual decisions we made.

If you want to work through CAAP with your own project, get in touch.

Ian Xia is the founder of Xiangvision (英伦大像), Lightopia Festival, and the CAAP™ Culture As A Product system. He has spent over a decade commercialising Chinese cultural projects internationally.