How Pop Mart Won Young Customers in a Fragmented Attention Economy

Harvard Business Review

2 days ago

In the Internet era, content is not only abundant but increasingly fragmented. Customers' attention is also becoming fragmented due to the short videos and other media they consume every day. As that happens, the traditional logic of consumer product innovation and marketing with sophisticated, big-budget development is becoming less efficient.
Instead, to win customers who grow up in today's attention economy, leaders need agile strategies tailored to these individuals' emotional and identity needs. My research on company cases and behavior patterns of digital natives indicates that young companies like Pop Mart, a Chinese toymaker that's reached global success by selling character-based premium products, offer valuable insights. During 2024, Pop Mart's stock price has more than quadrupled year-over-year.
Understanding Pop Mart's story—and the individuals it serve—can help consumer goods companies build up brand recognition among the digital-native generation and achieve financial success.
The lessons in this article also apply to business leaders running B2B operations, who must learn to cater their products to a group of digitally native decision-makers. This generation isn't just individual consumers. They are increasingly influencing an organization's purchasing decisions.
Appealing to Young Customers
Pop Mart is best known for its artist-designed collectible figurines and 'blind box' marketing strategy, in which buyers don't know which figure they've purchased from a themed set until opening the package, which can compel them to buy more. Pop Mart first created a sensation in 2017 by organizing comic toy exhibitions in China. It then began collaborating with luxury brands, creating a series of hit products, and opening hundreds of stores around the world.
In 2024, Labubu, one of Pop Mart's signature dolls with unique artistic design , wielded its charm across millions of fans in Southeast Asian countries, a market many multinational companies are actively competing for. Pop Mart's business outside mainland China now accounts for nearly 40% of its $1.8 billion total revenue.
What propelled Pop Mart's success lies in its agile strategies targeting millenials and Gen Z customers.
Leverage Real-time, Data-based Customer Insights
In an era of fragmented attention, companies need to upgrade their ability to rapidly identify—and promote—the right innovations, based on real-time consumer feedback. Coupled with swift adjustment in supply chain decisions and marketing resources, such insights help transform otherwise fleeting trends among young customers into tangible profits.
This sort of resource matching capability is akin to how TikTok's algorithm identifies emerging internet sensations. When the algorithm detects that a type of short videos is gaining traction, e.g., garnering high engagement through shares, likes, and completion rates, the algorithm automatically channels more traffic to the content, amplifying its visibility across the platform.
Similarly, when developing a new product series, Pop Mart collects feedback from the markets in real-time and iterates the design accordingly. Once it identifies characters that can foster strong connections with users, the company will swiftly adjust its product development resources so it catches trendy topics among young customers.
Such a doing-to-learn approach allows companies like Pop Mart and TikTok to maximize their chance of success in pushing forward the right innovations in a time when the audience's attention is highly fragmented.
One example of this 'algorithmic' operation—where smart use of consumer feedback data, not just creativity, drives the lifecycle of a new innovation—is the recent breakout success of Labubu.
Originally a niche figure from The Monsters series by artist Kasing Lung, Labubu rose to prominence through Pop Mart's agile and data-driven approach. When the company's monitoring caught global celebrities like Lisa of BlackPink and Rihanna organically promoting Labubu on social media and generating huge views, Pop Mart rapidly relocated resources to amplify the momentum. Recognizing higher user engagement with a soft, tactile type of dolls in plush form, the company created the 'soft vinyl plush' category by combining expressive rubber faces with plush bodies. This further enhanced shareability on social media as users posted more physical interactions with Labubu.
When expanding globally, Pop Mart leveraged Shopee and TikTok data on consumer feedback to localize offerings for new markets. Data analysis also influenced its marketing decisions for the Western customers, aligning with locally relevant fairytale themes and fashion culture.
Through data-driven operations from product innovation to marketing, Pop Mart demonstrated how product concepts—from the mischievous grinning, fanged Labubu to the pouty-lipped, perpetually unimpressed Molly with large emerald eyes—can be transformed into cultural phenomena attractive for global young consumers.
Companies across a wide range of industries, not just those in consumer goods and services, can learn from Pop Mart and TikTok to build more adaptive and data-informed product and brand strategies.
By continuously monitoring, testing, scaling, and iterating, firms can dynamically match concepts with shifting market signals, much like how algorithms amplify viral content. This requires having the infrastructure to track real-time consumer feedback and the organizational agility to swiftly adjust product development, marketing, and supply chain decisions.
While today's geopolitical uncertainties often complicate supply chain planning, these uncertainties also present an opportunity for firms to build more capabilities allowing for rapid responses. For example, Pop Mart's supply chain optimization to develop precise and operationally lean infrastructures enabled a 30-fold increase in production within a year.
Companies that adapt and develop sufficiently granular, responsive resource allocation systems—across a product's life cycle—will be rewarded with cost-effective growths, especially with the digitally native customers.
Tap into Young Customers' Individuality and Community Needs
For brands, winning the digital-native customers also means adopting marketing strategies that engage with their deep psychological needs and seizing on opportunities to create cultural phenomena associated with the brands and products.
Take the blind box marketing strategy. Although Pop Mart is known for the surprising and even addictive nature of its mystery figures sold in blind boxes, the company is not the first to use the strategy. The concept originated in Japan, where consumers purchase random, palm-sized toys sealed inside plastic capsules from a special vending machine without knowing the exact contents in advance. This approach encourages the collection of various editions, including limited or hidden ones.
What's special is that Pop Mart managed to turn users' collecting behaviors into a phenomenon: not only driving repeat purchases from existing users, but also attracting loads of new customers as loyal fans post their highly emotional unboxing reactions on social media.
Underneath the use of limited and hidden editions are strategies to attract and satisfy the emotional needs of young customers. Moreover, these strategies greatly enhance the user's sense of self identity. When someone secures a coveted, limited-edition item, they feel cool and unique. Owning a rare Labubu doll that no one else has? That is a bold statement of identity and individuality.
For other companies, they should likewise asses how their products and brands connect with young audiences on a deeper identity level, and explore innovative ways to enhance these touchpoints and foster more meaningful consumer relationships. The tangible benefits of such deep connection are evident across many consumer goods industries. It's seen in those IP-related merchandises purchased by K-pop group fans, and in Starbucks' seasonal themed products (such as its iconic holiday cups) that go beyond utility to evoke emotional resonance and deepen brand affinity.
Business leaders can also learn from Pop Mart's focus on offline experiences to engage young users and build a cultural phenomenon around their brands.
Different from its Japanese competitors selling blind box figurines, which are marketed via Internet sales and a distributor model, Pop Mart has built its own flagship stores with vibrant color and digital media to create a unique brand experience and encourage meet-ups. This is important for young customers who crave for human connections after the pandemic—some fans would even travel across continents to visit these iconic stores and engage with fellow enthusiasts.
Having such spaces encourages customers to spend more time in the stores, building a deeper sense of brand loyalty and community. And such loyalty can extend to online platforms as well.
In the case of Pop Mart, online communities for young customers from Instagram to Reddit further amplified the cultural phenomenon sparked by Pop Mart's art toys, building up a positive feedback loop between online and offline sales.
In a similar vein, Nike's seamless integration of physical stores, mobile apps, and online campaigns illustrates how a unified ecosystem can deliver for consumers—and the brand.
Companies aiming to foster robust engagement with Gen Z customers can draw important lessons from Pop Mart's success beyond the blind box tactics. At the heart of its appeal are strategies that spark user-generated content and help young consumers express their individuality and social identity. Equally critical is the creation of immersive offline experiences, offering customers dedicated spaces to connect, explore, and share, while digital communities amplify this sense of belonging and self-expression.
By skillfully tapping into the young customers' psychological needs, blending experiential touchpoints and community connections, companies are more likely to deepen young customers' ties to the brand and elevate their products into lifestyle symbols.
Cultivate Belonging and Loyalty Among Digital Natives
Like LEGO, Pop Mart has gradually developed its own unique brand language to further enhance users' sense of community and belonging. This is particularly important for consumer brands trying to appeal to the digital generation, as these young customers can often feel isolated despite constant online activity.
In the case of Pop Mart, the company has intentionally cultivated a series of buzzwords that's emerged within the brand's fandom space over time. Phrases like 端盒 (buy a whole set of blind boxes to get one's target doll) and 拆盒 (split a full box) have become an integral part of the community culture. Beyond blind boxes, other particular terms have also been augmented through user generated content across social media platforms, such as 娃友 (friends of doll), while enhancing Pop Mart's relationship with users.
Over the decades, successful brands—from Apple to Hello Kitty—often intentionally form a set of brand language choices in their interactions with users, strengthening their perceived identity and community engagement. Pop Mart's exclusive language is not so different. Language helps facilitate the deep rooting of a cultural phenomenon and drives a brand's continuous growth.
While this lesson may not be as broadly applicable as the previous two, it still offers meaningful implications for firms aiming to communicate more effectively with digital-native customers. Companies should actively monitor online conversations related to their brands among young audiences and participate in the emerging of unique expressions and trending word choices. By supporting the shared vocabulary and linguistic style within one's brand community, companies can foster a stronger connection with the young generation.
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One additional point: Many of these developments are taking place within the realm of social media platforms, such as RedNote in China and TikTok in Southeast Asia.
For companies seeking to engage with young customers, understanding these platforms and effectively leveraging their traffic and insights is essential. However, generational gaps often pose challenges in recognizing and capitalizing on emerging trends. To bridge this gap, companies need to ensure they have enough younger employees and creative talent to complement their typically older management teams.
Just like how Tecent's Pony Ma puts it: 'In business, maybe you didn't do anything wrong—the only mistake was being too old.'