Panic on the streets of Shanghai

Hello everybody, I am CHEN Taoyu.

I am trying to build a website about the historical blocks and city-walk routines in Shanghai.(LINK is here)

At the beginning of my research, I targeted young, high-spending people. However, with the further research, I found that there are some problems with this. Through an interview with a female Weibo blogger who has tens of thousands of followers, I found that they rarely deliberately conduct a city walk. They pay more attention to boutique shops or photo-taking guides, focus on fashion lifestyle more, and have lower willingness to have cultural consumption. Through my interview with a blogger who focuses on “urban archaeology” and city walk, I found that the people who are most interested in city walk and urban culture are middle-aged people in their 20s and 30s and above, and a large proportion of them have children. Therefore, I decided to select local families over 25 years old in Shanghai as the main target group.

The persona type that I chose is the mid-class mid-aged people, with stable jobs and homes in Shanghai. They usually have a child or two, and aged between 30-50. Since their income and job are stable, they have some energy and money to spend on cultural consumption and children’s education. Even if they are not interested in cultural history themselves, they want to give their children the cultural capital that will make it easier for them to rise to the upper class in the future. As a result, they are more than willing to pay for city walk and culture. My interviews suggest they may be willing to spend hundreds of Yuan on a city walk event.

I interviewed five people: an average college student, a young state-owned enterprise executive who hasn’t married yet, a young female Weibo influencer in photography, a middle-class woman with a primary-school child, and a blogger who organizes city walk. They are all living in Shanghai or have been in Shanghai for a long time. By defining the persona, I can be more focus on one need of the people, to provide a clearer goal.