The children's indoor park has entered the Chinese market and has been developing for decades. Especially before and after 2010, domestic large, medium and small city parks have blossomed everywhere. The rapid development of the industry has benefited from the continuous expansion of the Chinese consumer market.

Authoritative data display

In 2017, the size of China's children's consumer market has reached 4.5 trillion yuan. It is expected that the annual growth rate of total children's consumption will exceed 20% in the next five years. Among them, the children's entertainment consumer market has exceeded 460 billion yuan and will increase in the next five years. Speed will also break through 30%.

However, with the gradual maturity of the market, the competition in the industry has become more and more fierce. The most intuitive manifestation is the operation of the indoor parent-child park. The time interval from the “preservation period” to the “bottleneck period” is shortened.

Under normal circumstances, after three to six months after the store opens, the park will experience a gradual decrease in passenger traffic, profits cannot be increased or gradually decline, and then face losses. Although a certain number of customers can be brought in a short period of time through corresponding advertising and promotion activities, the sustained effect in the later period is not obvious, and it will not be long before it is restored to its original state.

Reasons for bottlenecks in indoor parent-child parks

1. The homogenization is serious, which is the main reason for the bottleneck period in the indoor parent-child park. Due to the similarity of the amusement equipment, the amusement projects are mostly similar. From the hardware point of view, the advantages of paradise differentiation are insufficient.

2. The members of the park have poor cohesiveness and do not understand the member's operation, resulting in a low rate of repeated consumption.

How to break through the bottleneck problem in the park?

Improve the "soft power" of the park to break through

01 The homogenization of amusement equipment is inevitable

In the children's play equipment, almost all indoor parent-child parks face two dilemmas.

X-axis: For children's equipment, safety is definitely in the first place, but safe equipment may not be irritating enough, not special enough to be not enough, and irritating equipment is accompanied by certain dangers. Playability and security are a pair of indicators that deviate from each other.

Y-axis: Most of the indoor parent-child parks are located in large shopping malls. Although it is comparable to large outdoor theme parks like Disney in terms of annual passenger flow, the vast majority of the latter are only national and even global. Once a customer, such customers are more willing to pay a higher fee for the novel and unique amusement equipment.

The customers of the indoor parent-child park are mainly based on the surrounding residents who come to the store repeatedly. It is difficult for such customers to continue to pay higher fees for the novel and unique amusement equipment. Even if the equipment meets the above conditions, the freshness will follow the customers. Repeatedly and repeatedly to the store.

On the other hand, the novelty and peculiar meaning of higher development investment, it is easy to appear that the equipment is very attractive, and ultimately it is difficult to recover the cost.

Therefore, the “novelty” and “operability” of equipment have become another indicator that is difficult to balance.

In summary, the range of play equipment available in reality is very narrow, which is the root cause of the easy homogenization of children's play equipment.

02 Amusement equipment "changing often new" is a false proposition

Due to the serious homogenization of the equipment in the park, the problem of insufficient continuous appeal to customers has been proposed to be solved by the “changing often new” method within the range of equipment selection.

Seemingly logical, it is not realistic!

The first problem is the cost. The amusement equipment is as small as several thousand yuan and tens of thousands of yuan. In addition to the cost amortization, before the mass amusement equipment industry realizes large-scale iteration and breakthrough projects, the so-called replacement equipment can not solve the essential problem. .

Secondly, the adjustment of storefront equipment involves the coordination of many relationships, and the period is full of uncertainty. For example, the approval process for storefront construction is complicated and the cycle is long; the storefront decoration must be approved by fire protection, and the internal layout cannot be adjusted at will according to subjective wishes. In this process, the time process is extremely difficult.

What do you mean? For example, in order to reduce the risk of the store to go through various approvals, and then go to buy equipment, it is very likely that the equipment is out of stock or the peak season has passed; if the equipment is purchased in advance, the approval process before and after the construction is not smooth, the storefront is Take huge risks.

03 What should I do? Return to the essence of paradise!

Since it is impossible to solve the operational problems of indoor parks through the nature of hardware adjustment, it is necessary to break through the "soft power".

You can recall that when we were young, we liked to play with sand. Our parents also liked to play with sand when they were young. Now most children love to play with sand. You will find that children's demand for sand has not changed for decades. What does this mean? First of all, "playing" is the child's nature; secondly, the child needs an open space that can play independently.

In the concept of games, socialization is a very important extension, and children's demand for it is even higher than "playing" itself. This is not difficult to understand. When you were a child, you might have experienced this: we will lose interest in a toy for a long time, but playing with a good friend is always a matter of heart. This is because the child will interact with the game object during the game, whether it is a personal game or a group game. This is the bud of the child's interaction activities, and also the process of satisfying their "social needs".

In this process, children learn various skills such as language, emotional communication, organizational skills and rotation, negotiation, cooperation and so on. These skills enable children to achieve self-growth while also laying the foundation for their extensive interpersonal interactions in the future.

In the current urban environment, it is not easy to find a safe open space, but also a lot of playmate scenes, but these are exactly what the indoor parent-child park has, and it is the value of its scene.

What the park has to do is to stimulate and release the instinct of children to socialize through the game, and then constantly make them feel fresh. The nature of the park has a constant appeal to the children. Another problem that caused the bottleneck in the park mentioned in the previous article. - Members are not sticky enough to solve them, and all the key is whether the park can continuously provide high-quality "court games."

As a project that requires strong operations, the “land game” is not as simple as the outside world: it is just as simple as an adult playing a bunch of children.

Among them, how to choose a lot of games, how to set the activity process, the grasping skills of the game rhythm, the selection and use of teaching aids, the handling of unexpected situations, etc., require a lot of preparation work by the executives, and need to have rich experience on the spot. This is also the pain point that many indoor parent-child parks cannot continue to carry out “land games” – because it takes a lot of time and effort to train employees with these capabilities.

This is like a difficulty in front of you, you know the solution, but you can't solve it. And this is only a problem that hinders the healthy development of the store.

Improve the "soft power" of the park to break through

It is proposed that under the premise that the homogenization of amusement equipment is inevitable and the equipment is often changed to new ones, it is possible to carry out business breakthroughs through the upgrade of the “soft power” of the park.

01 to meet customer instinct needs, is the best marketing tool

The “key point” of breakout is to meet the most important needs of the indoor parent-child paradise – children, their most important needs.

According to the famous "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Theory", when people's survival and security needs are met, the next step is to meet "social needs."

In the days of our parents, even when we were young, the scene of meeting social needs was: playing games with other children in the courtyard, the hutong, and the grove.

After the development of the times, the unique scene advantages of the indoor parent-child park (high security, open space, etc.) can completely replace the former "big courtyard, hutong, grove". And the child will not be tired of playing repeatedly, because the child is not playing with a certain device, but wants to play with other children.

If the park can grasp the opportunity and meet the child's instinctual needs by continuously outputting high-quality games, why is the source lost?

Many successful cases in reality

A Park is located in a certain city, located in a large shopping mall in the popular shopping district. The area of more than 1,000 square meters and relatively new amusement facilities.

B Park is located in the southwest five-line small town. The area, equipment and A park are not the same. Because of the different consumption levels in the area, the price of the amusement park of the B Park is lower than that of the similar project of the A Park.

However, through continuous data tracking, the monthly sales of the two parks are almost the same. What are the reasons?

From the perspective of the product settings of AB Park, there is actually no obvious difference, only one is different:

A Park tends to promote the sale of ticket products through traditional means of promotion (such as: buy and offer).

Based on the traditional promotion method, B Park has joined the “field game”.

The latter insisted on holding three different game activities every day, and publicized the ability of children to grow up, and began to take the form of “light early education”. This move not only accelerated the customer's card sales behavior, but also played a significant role in promoting the sales of the park's multiple cards.

02 ideal is full, reality is very skinny

Having said that, the importance of the venue game to the indoor parent-child park is not to be described, but the ideal is full and the reality is very skinny, because many parks encounter various difficulties in their implementation:

Scene 1: I have tried my best to recruit, but there are only a handful of customers present, and the game activities cannot be carried out normally...

Scene 2: The game designed by meditation, the children's reaction is average, the parental participation is not high, the scene is embarrassing...

Scenario 3: Insufficient personnel, taking care of this, especially in the peak of the park, there is no need to send extra staff to bring the game. Recruit new people? Who will pay more for the cost? In case the newcomer is not suitable for the post, there will be a lot of follow-up troubles!

The above scene is just the tip of the iceberg where the paradise is exposed during the implementation of the “court game”, but these “pits” are enough to make the park “playing to love you is not easy”.

When there is a lack of persistence in one thing, the "breakout power" that needs to be accumulated over time will no longer exist, let alone the road to a benign development through the venue games.

03 indoor park "land game" three major pain points concentrated attack

In the face of the three major pain points that the park encountered in the promotion of the venue game, "the number of participants is difficult to carry out, the effect of the scene is not as expected, and the store staff is short of unmanned games", this paper designs a targeted solution.

First of all, "the number of participants is difficult to carry out." This is the biggest pain point for the park when organizing games, and it is also a fundamental constraint. Only by solving this problem, it is possible to form a synergy in subsequent efforts in other areas, otherwise it will be difficult to be effective.

Before delving into this issue, we must first understand the difference between "game" and "play".

What is "play"? For example: children in almost all ages in Shachi can play, can play with their own children or play with children, regardless of age and time. This is "play", which is related to people and amusement equipment.

What is "game"? The game is ultimately linked to "people and people." We say that if the game wants to have social attributes, it is bound to be limited by some conditions.

For example, if a child wants to play games with a familiar child, he or she must first agree on the time and place, and the age of the children participating in the game is about the same, because different games have different difficulty levels, and the age groups will be different. The game is only suitable for children under 3 years old, and some games are too difficult for children who are too young to play.

In addition, the number of people involved in the game should also be considered. For 10 people to play the game, the number of people is too small, the effect is not good; the game should be played by 4 groups of children, one more person and one less will affect the pairing, which is not conducive to the game development.

Because of these limitations, there is a phenomenon: sometimes there seem to be many children in the park, but in line with the "court game" restrictions, there are not many children who can participate in the event.

Once the number of participants is insufficient to support the activities, the social attributes of the venue games are difficult to cultivate between the children, and the membership stickiness cannot be discussed.

The main reason for this problem is that the activity information is not enough for the precise people. The people who need it do not know when and where the game is suitable for their children. How many people will participate? This is what we often do. Said "the wine is also afraid of the deep alley."

 To give a similar example, in the past, before the Internet car-driving tools such as “Drip-Drip” did not appear, a large part of the “difficult to take a taxi” was because the demand of the taxi driver could not reach the vehicle that can provide the corresponding service on a large scale. Demand and service can't form a precise match in the right time space, which is similar to the reason why the number of people participating in the store's "court games" is not enough.

The venue game seems to be simple, but why do some people bring the game to a lively atmosphere, the scene is hot; some people bring the game scenes, cold and clear? The main reason is nothing more than three points: the game itself is not suitable for indoor paradise scenes; the design of the activity process is unreasonable; the executor's activities lead to improper speech.

Therefore, how to refine and advance the specific activities of the supporting activities, as well as the supporting detailed speech and required materials are very important, which can eliminate the time for the clerk to plan and develop the game, and quickly improve the work efficiency.

Again, the pain point of “no more people to organize the game” seems to be that the store staff is not enough on the surface, but the actual situation is that most of the employees are responsible for the relatively simple work content, which is not competent for “one person with multiple posts and one post with multiple jobs”.

With the development of society, the children's playground has gradually become one of the basic configurations of shopping centers, and the problem of homogenization is inevitable. How to get rid of the problem of homogenization is a question that every operator needs to think about. I also welcome everyone to leave a message and talk about your method!