Marketing to China's erciyuan generation: the guzi economy foreign brands overlook
Short version: the fastest-growing consumer tribe in China is not "Gen Z" as a demographic — it's the erciyuan (二次元) crowd, the anime-games-comics natives who turn fandom into spending. They buy guzi (谷子) — IP merch like pin badges, acrylic stands, and trading cards — and in 2024 that single category was worth about 168.9 billion yuan, up roughly 40% on the year. Most foreign brands either ignore this market or try to buy their way in with a logo slap. Both are mistakes. You earn a place here the way you earn a place in any fandom: by respecting the source material and giving fans something they actually want to own.
A quick translation, because the vocabulary trips people up. Erciyuan literally means "two-dimensional" — the flat world of anime, manga, and games — as opposed to sanciyuan, the three-dimensional real world. The people who live culturally in that flat world call themselves erciyuan, and what they consume is ACGN (anime, comics, games, novels). Guzi is a phonetic loan from the English word "goods": the physical merch tied to those IPs. Buying it is chigu (吃谷, "eating goods"). The most traded item is the baji (吧唧), a pin badge, which fans clip onto an ita bag — a transparent-front tote built to display a collection. None of this is niche anymore. iiMedia counts pan-erciyuan users in China north of 500 million.
Why this is a real market, not a teenage phase
The instinct in a boardroom is to file this under "kids' stuff" and move on. That's the expensive read. The guzi economy grew from around 120 billion yuan in 2023 to roughly 169 billion in 2024, and iiMedia projects it past 300 billion by 2029. The wider ACG market was about 598 billion yuan in 2024. These are not pocket-money numbers.
Two things make it durable. First, the buyers are not children — on Xianyu, China's big resale platform, more than 70% of guzi transactions come from people born after 1995. These are working adults with disposable income and a collector's completism. Second, the spending is emotional, not utilitarian. A badge has no function; its entire value is that it says "I love this thing" out loud. That makes it recession-resistant in a way a lot of discretionary categories aren't — when people trim big purchases, small affordable tokens of identity often hold up. One badge reportedly resold for over 70,000 yuan and hit Weibo's hot-search list, which tells you both how irrational and how real the demand can get.
What foreign brands keep getting wrong
The failure pattern is consistent. A brand decides erciyuan is "hot," licenses a popular anime for a quarter, prints the character on existing product, and expects fans to buy it out of enthusiasm. Fans smell it instantly. Here's the gap between how brands think and how this audience actually behaves:
| What brands assume | What's actually true |
|---|---|
| A famous IP guarantees sales | Fans buy specific characters and specific moments, not the franchise as a blanket. Pick the wrong character and the collab dies. |
| A logo on the product is "merch" | Guzi is designed for display and collection — badges, stands, cards. A branded tote with a character printed on it isn't guzi; it's a tote. |
| One campaign captures the trend | Fandom is a long relationship. One-off licensing reads as extraction. The brands that win show up repeatedly and credibly. |
| The merch is the ad | The merch is the product. Fans resell, trade, and queue for it. If it's not worth owning, no amount of media saves it. |
The tell is always the same: brands treat the IP as borrowed attention, and fans want proof you respect the world it comes from. Get that wrong and you don't just waste the budget — you earn a reputation for being the brand that "used" a beloved character, which travels fast in these communities.
How the smart players actually enter
The brands making real money here fall into a few models, and they're worth copying rather than inventing your own.
- Be the manufacturer of the merch itself. Pop Mart didn't license fandom — it built collectible IP and the blind-box mechanic around it, and turned that into billions in revenue including fast-growing overseas sales. If your product can become a collectible, that's a stronger position than renting someone else's.
- Be the trading-card platform. Kayou grew into China's dominant trading-card maker by licensing a broad portfolio of IPs and nailing the pack-opening ritual that fuels unboxing content on Douyin and Red. It's since taken licensed cards (My Little Pony, Naruto, tokidoki) into the U.S. The lesson: the format can matter more than any single IP.
- Go deep on one IP, not wide on many. The successful foreign collabs commit — dedicated product, dedicated design, often a dedicated store — rather than a logo cameo across a catalog.
- Own physical space. Shanghai's Bailian ZX Creative Centre, an ACGN-themed retail complex, became a pilgrimage site and drew world-first flagship stores. Japan's Aniplex opened its first offline China store there. Fandom wants somewhere to gather; a well-made space is both a channel and a marketing asset.
A playbook if you're starting from zero
If you don't own an IP and you're not a toy company, you can still participate — carefully. The order matters more than the budget.
- Pick the fandom before the IP. Don't start from "which anime is trending." Start from which communities overlap with your actual customer, then find the character or title they genuinely love. The fit has to be real to the fans, not just convenient to your media plan.
- Make something collectible, not promotional. If you do a collab, the output should be a desirable object — a well-designed badge set, an acrylic stand, a numbered card — that a fan would display even without your logo dominating it. Design for the ita bag, not the landfill.
- Respect the canon. Get character details, personalities, and relationships right. Fans will audit you. Work with licensors who enforce quality, and treat their guidelines as a floor, not a ceiling.
- Seed through the community, not over it. Let KOCs and fan accounts react first. Earned enthusiasm from inside the fandom is worth more than any paid placement shouting from outside it.
- Mind the rules. China's market regulator has tightened blind-box sales — odds disclosure and age limits for minors — so build compliance in, especially if your mechanic involves randomized packs.
Who should bother — and who shouldn't
Be honest about fit. Erciyuan skews younger and female — some counts put women at roughly 60% of guzi buyers — and leans toward categories where identity display is natural: beauty, fashion, F&B, stationery, tech accessories, lifestyle. If you sell industrial valves, this isn't your market. If you sell anything a young person wears, carries, or posts, the question isn't whether erciyuan fans are relevant — it's whether you're willing to do it properly. The brands that treat it as a cheap attention hack get the worst of both worlds: they spend money and they annoy the exact people they were trying to reach. For the broader context on why borrowed enthusiasm doesn't transfer, see my piece on guochao and national sentiment, and for the collectible mechanic specifically, blind boxes and the Pop Mart model.
Bottom line
The erciyuan generation isn't a trend to catch; it's a cohort that will shape Chinese consumption for the next decade, and guzi is how they vote with their wallets. You win here by making something worth collecting and by respecting the fandom you're borrowing from — not by renting a character for a quarter and hoping the logo does the work. Fandom rewards sincerity and punishes extraction, fast. Decide whether you're in it to belong or just to borrow, because the fans can tell the difference long before your finance team can.
If you're weighing whether an erciyuan or guzi play makes sense for your brand — and how to do it without torching credibility — that's the kind of call I help with. Reach out and we'll pressure-test it before you spend.