Keywords

1 Introduction

Because of the development of regional brand culture and the construction of intangible cultural heritage, cultural and creative industry is increasingly rising under the dual influence of national policies and markets. Both tourism and museum cultural and creative products are deeply loved by consumers. Under the background of new media, the cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum are not only sold in the physical store, but also popular by costumers online. Combined with multimedia communication and cross-branding collaborations, the annual revenue of cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum have reached 1.5 billion in 2017 [1]. In early 2020, the cultural and creative industry of the Palace Museum together with a cosmetics brand launching a series of lipsticks called ‘Hebao’ has been followed with numerous interests through WeChat Subscription. The number of readers broke through 20000 rapidly which brings a great promotion before the sale. It can be seen that the cultural and creative industry of the Palace Museum is well-known, influential and has a huge consumption market under the influence of new media. As a new economic form, the cultural and creative industry is paid more and more attention to the new marketing model. At the same time, the mode will also affect and change consumers’ purchasing decision-making factors. It is hoped that this research can summarize the advantages of the development model of cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum in the context of new media through the consumers’ decision-making factors, and bring useful enlightenment for the development of cultural and creative products.

2 Literature Review

In the field of cultural and creative industry, numerous studies have been conducted by researchers.

Through literature research and observation of the current situation of cultural and creative products, it is found that as early as 2002, the Taiwan government proposed to take the cultural and creative industry as one of the most important development industries to inherit regional culture and promote cultural and artistic vitality, which is a trend of globalization. It includes three aspects: cultural and art core industry, design industry, creative support and derivative creation industries [2].

The meaning of ‘cultural and creative products’ is extremely wide, and UNESCO defines it as consumer goods with ideas, symbols and lifestyles. Chen defines it as a product transforming through creativity with market value, which originates from cultural themes. In short, the obvious difference between cultural and creative products and ordinary products is that cultural products have cultural functions and cultural symbols [3]. Through the retrieval and integration of a large number of documents, the classification of cultural and creative products can be divided into three main categories: Museum Cultural and creative products, regional cultural and creative products and derivative cultural and creative products [4].

Plenty of scholars have already explored the design and development of cultural and creative products as follows. In terms of design, Wu believes that ‘creativity’ can be the use function beyond the expectation of the product, innovation in the selection of materials and technology, new interpretation of the cultural connotation of the product itself, etc. In addition to the artistry of the products, the essence of cultural and creative products is still a commodity. We should improve the cost-performance ratio of the products except for broadening its consumers [5]. After studying the Japanese tourism market, Ruan discussed the design of cultural and creative products in four aspects: cultural history, market demand, manufacturing technology, and sales channels [6]. In terms of development, Wang believes that cultural and creative products can be divided into two categories: one is the interpretation and reconstruction of art, the other is the substance and the non-material service to meet people’s needs. He mentioned that the product should also be designed according to the living environment. In the relatively undeveloped areas, the information on material loss and cost should be fed back to users in time to avoid unnecessary burdens on them. For users in developed areas, designers can pay more attention to the combination of cultural and creative products and modern science and technology. In this way, the design method can promote the intelligent development of cultural and creative products [7].

New media is one of the dissemination ways for the development of cultural and creative products in the new era. Therefore, in the context of new media, scholars have carried out the following research: He classified the communication path of the cultural brand of the Palace Museum in the new media era into three categories: Micro communication, e-commerce products, and TV program production [8]. Shi integrated the cooperation cases of cultural and creative products and crossover brands in the Palace Museum and defined this marketing method as an open crossover development mode [9]. Luo believes that the cultural creation of the Palace Museum has made a breakthrough in the new media social age through emotional expression, art and culture restart, and narrative integration [10]. Cao believes that with the arrival of the new media marketing era, the museum has also begun to pay attention to the use of new media for the marketing and promotion of cultural and creative products, and meanwhile, it is a good way to promote its history and culture when promoting products [11]. Zheng believes that the Palace Museum can move from electronic screens to broad consumers through new media. In this way of marketing, it is more necessary to combine the actual situation of production to achieve the high cost-performance ratio of cultural and creative products in order to show the traditional culture vividly in a new way [12].

In the study of consumers’ decisions, Qian studies the internal causes of consumers’ decisions of cultural and creative products from comprehensive creativity, exterior design, manufacturing techniques, local characteristics, collectible value, functions and cost-performance ratio [13]. Guo studies on Customer-perceived Value by five dimensions: perception of culture, perception of usefulness, perception of purchase cost, satisfaction and intention of consumption [14]. When investigating cultural and creative products in remote areas, Ying-Jye Lee asked subjects to evaluate cultural and creative products through four dimensions: cultural image, utility, preference, and intention to purchase [15].

Through the collection and collation of the literature, it is found that the existing literature on customer decision-making mainly studied on the product itself and consumer perception, but few quantitative studies combined with the new media background. In the context of new media, online publicity and marketing will play a certain role in the decision-making of users. The point of this paper is how the product marketing model in the new era will affect the traditional model and how the traditional culture will be inherited. Therefore, this paper studies the influence of various factors on consumers’ purchase of cultural and creative products in the context of new media by using Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), which leads cultural and creative workers to rethink the intrinsic value of cultural and creative products, and summarizes the more optimized development direction of cultural and creative products in combination with the development of new media.

3 Research Design

3.1 Method

This study uses Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to analyze the data collected by the questionnaire. DEMATEL can analyze the correlation between various factors to find out the key decision-making factors for consumers to buy cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum and the relationship between various decision-making factors. Besides, in order to ensure the effectiveness of the questionnaire collection, the data are obtained through personal in-depth interviews and one-to-one questionnaire survey.

DEMATEL was proposed by scholars A. Gabus and E. Fontela of Battelle laboratory in the United States at a conference in Geneva in 1971 [16]. It is a systematic analysis method using graph theory and matrix tools. DEMATEL’s experimental steps are as follows: (1) Determine the main influencing factors of consumers’ purchasing decision and establish the scale; (2) Subjects were invited to estimate the direction of influence and the priority of each major factor when compared with other major factors by one of the five levels; (3) Deal with the questionnaire data and establish the direct relation matrix; (4) By normalizing the original relation matrix, the normalization direct influence matrix is obtained; (5) By normalizing the direct influence matrix, the direct/indirect relation matrix is calculated; (6) From the direct/indirect relation matrix, the Influence Value (D), Affected Value (R), Prominence Value (D+R) and Relation Value (D–R) of each element are obtained; and (7) Draw the causal diagram to extract the key influencing factors and find out the relationships between the main factors.

3.2 Questionnaire Design

In order to mine the information on what factors have strong effects when consumers make purchase decisions, a large number of consumers who are interested in culture and creative products are investigated by multiple user research methods such as brain-storming, observation and in-depth interview. Meanwhile, numerous information has been analyzed by reviewing related literatures and news interviews.

After a large quantity of information and suggestions gathered by channels motioned above are processed and analyzed, thirteen factors are summarized and defined as the preliminary influencing factors. In the earlier interview, it is found that in the dimension of marketing models under the background of new media, the factors of ‘Micro communication’ and ‘TV program production’ are close to each other. So, these two factors have been combined into ‘Multimedia communication’.

At last, this study divides consumers’ purchasing decision-making factors of cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum under the background of new media into 12 factors, 3 dimensions in total, which are the attributes of cultural and creative products, the characteristics of the Palace Museum and the marketing models under the background of new media. The attributes of cultural and creative products consist of artistry (whether the shape and exterior are creative and aesthetic), connotation (whether the connotation is creative), manufacturability (whether the material is satisfactory and the manufacturing process is exquisite), utilitarian functionality (whether the function meets the customer’s requirements), commemorative collection (whether it has collection value and commemorative significance), cost-performance ratio (whether the pricing is reasonable compared with its quality). The characteristics of the Palace Museum include local characteristics (local characteristics of Beijing), historic value (cultural relic value, architectural value, historic value), brand (brand rejuvenation of the Palace Museum). The marketing models under the background of new media contain multichannel selling (the physical store and online store), multimedia communication (WeChat, Weibo, TV programs, etc.) and cross-branding collaborations (such as selling products or designing limited packaging in cooperation with other brands, etc.), as shown in Table 1:

Table 1. List of factors.
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Subjects need to compare and score each factor. The scale of this study is divided into five measures, namely “no impact (0 point)”, “low impact (1 point)”, “moderate impact (2 points)”, “high impact (3 points)”, “extremely high impact (4 points)”. This questionnaire survey received 24 valid answers.

3.3 Experimental Analysis and Discussion

After sorting out and normalizing the questionnaire data, the normalization direct impact matrix of consumers’ purchasing decision-making factors for cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum can be derived, as shown in Table 2:

Table 2. The factors in direct relation matrix.
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Calculate with developed DEMATEL tool [17] to find out the relationships among various factors and get the direct/indirect relation matrix, as shown in Table 3. The threshold of 0.52 is calculated by quartile method, so Factor 4 (‘utilitarian functionality’), Factor 6 (‘cost-performance ratio’) and Factor 10 (‘multichannel selling’) that do not reach the threshold are deleted in the table.

Table 3. The factors in direct/indirect relation matrix.
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The Prominence Value (D+R) and the Relation Value (D–R) are calculated and listed in Table 4.

Table 4. Prominence and relation values.
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In the overall valuation, the larger the Prominence Value (D+R) is, the more important the factor is. Chosen the factors above the mean value of 10.83, the rank in importance of decision-making and evaluation factors for consumers to buy cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum is Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’), Factor 1 (‘artistry’), Factor 9 (‘brand’), Factor 2 (‘connotation’), Factor 12 (‘cross-branding collaborations’), Factor 7 (‘local characteristics’), Factor 3 (‘manufacturability’) and Factor 8 (‘historic value’).

In the table of Relation Value, when the positive value of the Relation Value (D–R) is larger, it means that this factor directly affects other factors, while when the negative value of the Relation Value (D–R) is larger, it means that this factor is affected by other factors. As the value of Factor 4 (‘utilitarian functionality’) does not reach the threshold 0.52 in the direct/indirect relation matrix, it has been excluded from results. As a result, Factor 1 (‘artistry’) is the main factor affecting other factors, Factor 11 (‘multimedia communication’) is mainly affected by other factors.

The following table shows the first three items and the last three items of Prominence Values and Relation Values.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

The causal diagram (Color figure online)

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According to the direct/indirect relation matrix (Table 3), the causal diagram (Fig. 1) is drawn above by Prominence Value (D+R) as X-axis and Relation Value (D–R) as Y-axis. In the causal diagram, the author distinguished the factors in different dimensions through different colors. Yellow represents the dimension of Attributes of cultural and creative products, orange represents the dimension of Characteristics of the Palace Museum and blue represents the dimension of marketing models in the context of new media.

The arrows indicate the direction in which one factor affects the other. The solid line and the dotted line show strong influence relation (>0.6) and sub strong influence relation (0.52–0.6). Figure 1 in combination with Table 5 and Table 6 shows:

Table 5. The top and the last three factors in Prominence.
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Table 6. The top three factors (>0) and the last three factors (<0) in Relation.
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  • Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’), Factor 1 (‘artistry’) and Factor 9 (‘brand’) are the most important key purchase decision-making factors because of the top three values in Prominence Values. Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’) is the maximum value of Prominence Value (D+R), which shows that the most critical decision-making factor is the commemorative collection of cultural and creative products of the Palace Museum. Therefore, we need to focus on strengthening the collectible and commemorative significance of the Palace Museum. On the other hand, Factor 1 (‘artistry’), Factor 2 (‘connotation’), Factor 3 (‘manufacturability’), Factor 7 (‘local characteristics’), Factor 8 (‘historic value’), Factor 9 (‘brand’) and Factor 12 (‘cross-branding collaborations’) have sub strong influence on it. Meanwhile, Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’) has a strong impact on Factor 9 (‘brand’), and has a sub strong influence on Factor 1 (‘artistry’), Factor 2 (‘connotation’), Factor 7 (‘local characteristics’), Factor 8 (‘historic value’) and Factor 12 (‘cross-branding collaborations’). Therefore, we can combine other factors to find design methods which can make products more worthy of collection and commemoration, so as to better promote consumption. The improvement of products’ collection and commemoration can also assist the development of other factors. In addition, it can also improve the exterior of products, create more artistic products and adhere to the existing style to maintain a young brand image.

  • Factor 11 (‘multimedia communication’), Factor 8 (‘historic value’) and Factor 3 (‘manufacturability’) are the last three values in Prominence Value (D+R), indicating that these three factors have little impact on other factors.

  • The top three positive Relation Value, Factor 1 (‘artistry’), Factor 2 (‘connotation’) and Factor 3 (‘manufacturability’) which have more influence on other factors are the casual elements. While the last three negative Relation Value, Factor 11 (‘multimedia communication’), Factor 9 (‘brand’) and Factor 7 (‘local characteristics’) which are more likely to be affected by other factors are the result factors. Factor 1 (‘artistry’), Factor 2 (‘connotation’), Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’) and Factor 12 (‘cross-branding collaborations’) all have a strong impact on Factor 9 (‘brand’), in addition, the factor’s centrality ranking is also very high, so it can be seen that the promotion of brand is very important for the development of cultural and creative products.

    Fig. 2.
    figure 2

    The secondary relationship in strong influence

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  • It can be seen from Fig. 1 that in addition to the influence of Factor 12 (‘cross-branding collaborations’) on Factor 9 (‘brand’), the rest of the association lines can form a secondary association diagram shown in Fig. 2. Factor 1 (‘artistry’) and Factor 2 (‘connotation’) can directly and strongly affect the Factor 9 (‘brand’), or first have a strong impact on Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’), and then strongly affect the development of Factor 5. This phenomenon shows that the design of cultural and creative products can start from the exterior and connotation of the products. This way can not only give the products more cultural significance, but also enhance its commemorative value and brand image. It can be seen that these four factors are closely related.

4 Conclusion and Suggestion

4.1 Conclusion

  • Conclusion 1. Research shows that Factor 5 (‘commemorative collection’) is the most critical factor in all consumers’ purchase decisions. Consumers think that cultural creation with the value of collection and commemoration can enhance the historic value, local characteristics and brand image of the Beijing Palace in their mind. Therefore, how to better enhance the value of commemorative collection through innovative technical means has become an important way to lift the purchasing decision-making ability.

  • Conclusion 2. According to the Fig. 1, the attributes of cultural and creative products will affect consumers’ cognition of the characteristics of the Palace Museum. We can publicize the cultural characteristics of the Beijing Palace and build the brand more effectively by enriching the exterior and connotation of cultural and creative products, refining its technology and assisting with the sales mode under the new media.

  • Conclusion 3. As a new marketing model in the context of new media, Factor 12 (‘cross-branding collaborations’) is very important, which has a direct impact on the products, On the other hand, Factor 11 (‘multimedia communication’) is the resulting factor, which is more influenced by other factors. Enhancing the effects of these two factors by using multimedia technology to increase the interaction between products and consumers can promote consumers’ awareness of cultural and creative products in the Palace Museum and lift their purchasing decision-making ability. With the help of innovative forms, the value of the cultural and creative products itself will be enlarged to get better benefits.

4.2 Discussion and Suggestion

  • The results show that multichannel selling and multimedia communication, which were originally predicted to have a great impact on consumers’ decision-making, do not have a strong impact on other factors. However, as an effective marketing model, they do play important roles in building image of the Palace Museum and improving consumption. The reason is mainly as follows: DEMATEL is a method to study the relationships among various factors. While multichannel selling and multimedia communication are both promotion models based on the overall products, so it will lack the relationships among the details of cultural and creative products. Based on DEMATEL, it is suggested to strengthen the relationship among Factor 10 (‘multichannel selling’), Factor 11 (‘multimedia communication’) and other factors, such as promoting the limited products by multichannel selling in order to improve the purchasing power of consumers, or using multimedia technology together with brand effect to strengthen the interaction between products and consumers.

  • It can still expand the sample size in order to get more accurate conclusions during the questionnaire collection. Meanwhile, the division of factors is overly detail and the questionnaire is too long, which is easy to make the subjects lose patience. It is suggested that the follow-up research should be simplified.