“Cultural productisation” gets talked about a lot. Most of the time, it refers to surface-level things: a merchandise range, a touring exhibition, a brand collaboration.

These are outputs. They are not methods.

I want to explain what cultural productisation actually means in practice, and what a systematic approach to it looks like — because I’ve spent fifteen years building one.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Let’s start with something that makes a lot of cultural practitioners uncomfortable:

Culture is not a product.

Culture is a body of content, a tradition, a set of meanings, a form of human experience accumulated over time.

A product is something a person will pay money for.

These are not the same category. The gap between them — the distance between a rich cultural tradition and an experience someone will cross the city to pay for — is real, significant, and largely unaddressed in how Chinese cultural projects are built and exported.

Cultural productisation is the process of closing that gap.

Why Cultural Creators and Product Designers Think Differently

The difficulty isn’t inability. It’s a structural mismatch in how these two types of thinkers approach their work.

A cultural creator’s questions: Is this content deep enough? Am I being faithful to the tradition? Does this have genuine artistic or historical value?

A product designer’s questions: Who is this for? What problem does it solve for them? Will they pay for it? Can I deliver it consistently? Can I scale it?

In most Chinese cultural projects, these two perspectives either belong to different people (and don’t communicate well), or the product thinking is absent entirely.

The result is predictable: extraordinary cultural content that reaches a tiny fraction of its potential audience, then fades.

The CAAP Framework: A Path from Culture to Product

The framework I’ve developed is called CAAP™ — Culture As A Product. It maps the journey from cultural origin to viable product in six steps.

Culture → Emotion → Format → Story → Interaction → Price

Let me walk through what each step actually requires.

Step 1: Culture — Define your core with precision

The starting question is not “what is our project?” It’s “what is our cultural core?”

And the answer has to be specific.

“Chinese traditional culture” is not a cultural core. “The Zigong tradition of hand-building steel-and-silk luminous sculptures — craftsmen using techniques passed through generations to create glowing structures that stand fifteen metres tall” is a cultural core. It’s distinctive. It has visual force. It’s not replicable by anyone outside a specific tradition.

The more precisely you can define your cultural core, the more clearly it can function as a genuine differentiator.

Step 2: Emotion — Target emotions, not messages

Your audience will remember how they felt, long after they’ve forgotten what they learned.

Define — specifically — the emotional state you want your audience to be in when they leave. Not general positivity. Not “inspired.” Get to something like: wonder at something they’ve never seen before, warmth toward the people they came with, a feeling of connection to something much larger than themselves.

Every design decision — visual, sonic, spatial, narrative, temporal — should be evaluated against those target emotions. The colour palette, the music, the route through the experience, the timing of the climax. All of it is serving the emotional design.

Step 3: Format — Match the container to the market

Cultural content can live in many forms. Festivals, exhibitions, performances, games, films, hospitality experiences, physical products, digital formats, and combinations of all of these.

The choice of format is not purely creative. It’s strategic.

You need to ask: Does this format have a proven commercial model in my target market? Does it suit my target audience’s behaviour and spending patterns? Can my cultural core be fully expressed within the constraints of this format?

For Lightopia, the answer was immersive outdoor festival. Family-accessible, proven ticketing model, and able to showcase large-scale lantern installations at their full visual impact.

A different cultural content, a different target market, might point to a completely different format.

Step 4: Story — Build a narrative frame

Audiences don’t just experience things. They experience things as part of a story.

The question isn’t whether your project has a story. It’s whether the story is one your audience can place themselves inside.

When we built at Crystal Palace, the story was: Chinese lanterns reconstructing the Crystal Palace, the great Victorian glass palace that burned down 86 years ago. A piece of London’s own history, re-told in a form that was entirely new.

That framing meant that local audiences weren’t encountering a foreign cultural import. They were inside their city’s story. The Chinese cultural element became the vehicle for a deeply local emotional experience.

Step 5: Interaction — Convert observers into participants

The default of most cultural experiences is spectatorship. You stand, you look, you leave.

Contemporary audiences want more than that. They want to feel that their presence matters — that the experience is in some sense shaped by or responsive to them.

This doesn’t require elaborate interactivity. It requires thoughtful design of the visitor’s journey: moments of surprise, choice, discovery, pacing that builds and releases tension, sensory details that make the experience feel intimate despite scale.

For Lightopia, we designed what I called an emotional arc — the route through the festival was choreographed so that small delights early on gave way to a growing visual crescendo, culminating in a water and light finale that was timed to produce a very specific emotional peak. No one was told this structure. They felt it.

Step 6: Price — Build a commercial architecture, not just a price point

This is where cultural projects most often fail to do the serious work.

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

– Multiple revenue streams, not one

– Unit economics that improve with scale, not worsen

– Resilience when any single stream contracts

– A replication model that makes the second and third city cheaper than the first

If your commercial model collapses when one thing goes wrong, your product isn’t finished yet.

The Self-Test

Six questions. Honest answers.

1. Can you describe your cultural core in a single specific sentence?

2. Have you defined the specific emotions your audience should leave with?

3. Does your chosen format have a successful commercial precedent in your target market?

4. Is there a story your local audience already cares about that your project can enter?

5. At what moments does your audience participate rather than just observe?

6. If your primary revenue source dropped by 40% tomorrow, would the project survive?

Three or more gaps means there’s real productisation work to be done before you go to market.

Cultural productisation is not a threat to cultural integrity. It’s the mechanism by which culture reaches the people who need it.

The goal is not to make culture commercial. The goal is to give culture a form that people can actually encounter, pay for, return to, and carry with them.

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.