Written by: Nancy, PANews
A cute and quirky little monster Labubu quietly stands in the display window, with a long queue of fans waiting outside the glass, all hoping for the surprise of a potential hidden edition. Similarly, a series of digitized images are minted as Non-Fungible Tokens on the chain, invisible in physical form, yet selling out within minutes.
One tangible and real, the other existing only on the screen, these two IP forms seem to be in two different worlds of reality and virtual, yet they grow, explode, and recreate myths with strikingly similar logic in an emotion-driven consumer era. Behind this is a medium of community interaction, a projection of individual identity, and more importantly, a cultural and emotional container born in the IP era.
Emotional Resonance: Connecting More Than Goods
Labubu's charm goes far beyond its furry appearance and unique design. It is an extension of users' inner world, or perhaps the secret monster figure from childhood doodle books, reflecting a lonely yet complex self deep within. This seemingly simple doll actually creates real emotional companionship for users, filling their desire for belonging and love - as psychologist Maslow pointed out about the "need for belonging and love".
At the same time, Labubu satisfies the psychological phenomenon of collecting. In psychology, collecting behavior is seen as an expression of control. When users accumulate and display Labubu dolls, gaining a sense of achievement, this ownership in turn enhances self-identity and inner satisfaction. Behind each doll lies a unique story: the excitement of queuing late at night or the emotional resonance when sharing a collection with friends, these moments solidify into precious emotional treasures.
Non-Fungible Tokens similarly inspire deep group belonging, satisfying people's social needs for acceptance and identification. What players collect is no longer just a cold string of code, a symbol of faith when first touching the crypto world, or a memory forged by like-minded individuals.
Based on the sense of ownership and belonging, this emotional resonance not only satisfies users' internal needs but also serves as an invisible bond connecting users and brands. Meanwhile, this emotional inspiration opens up new growth paths for brands and creators, by deeply cultivating users' emotional experiences and constructing multi-dimensional cultural identity and community belonging, ultimately achieving long-term user loyalty and continuous participation.
IP Narrative: More Than Assets, A Story Container
In the current cultural consumption wave, a character is never just an image. The core of a truly vibrant IP lies in its ability to construct a narrative universe that people are willing to immerse themselves in.
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Labubu is a typical example. As a core member of The Monsters series, Labubu might have initially been just a big-eyed monster with pointed ears, but after gradually developing personality, companions, and a growth trajectory, it evolved from a doll to a character, weaving a diverse and rich virtual network with other series characters like ZIMOMO and SkullPanda. The construction of this universe relies on continuous content output, scenario-based immersive experience layout, and a deep user emotional participation mechanism, allowing Labubu's image to extend to offline theme parks, limited edition plush toys, blind boxes, and assembly blocks.
This narrative IP construction approach is equally evident in the Non-Fungible Token realm. NFT projects have long realized that what truly touches users and maintains community is not mere scarcity, but the story behind the character. For instance, Bored Ape Yacht Club expands its "Ape Universe" through metaverse, fashion, games, and music; Azuki enriches user touchpoints with physical comics and trendy merchandise; Pudgy Penguins breaks through the Web3 circle by entering traditional retail with children's books and offline toys, emphasizing the cute and healing attributes of penguin characters and their emotional narrative of companionship and growth. The common point in these cases is that they have achieved a leap from visual symbols to cultural characters, making Non-Fungible Tokens a character-driven narrative medium, rather than just a chain asset.
From this perspective, IP universes with long-term narrative structures and continuous content production capabilities truly possess the cultural potential to transcend time and reach broader audiences.
Blind Box Mechanism: A Game of Scarcity and Surprise
The blind box mechanism is a psychological game built on probability, transforming goods beyond simple functional attributes by artificially creating uncertainty, thereby imbuing them with emotional value and trading potential. By creating scarcity through probability and stimulating emotions through scarcity, ultimately driving market value formation. The core of this mechanism is to make players obsessed with "the next time" - a psychological state psychologists call "intermittent reinforcement".
Labubu's innovative blind box mechanism gives consumers a sense of surprise and challenge. Hidden editions elevate ordinary goods to the realm of collectibles or even assets. Each unboxing is not just emotional consumption but a tangible probability game of emotions. The Non-Fungible Token field has similarly introduced such gameplay, writing randomness and scarcity into the chain through smart contracts. Each Mint process is essentially a digital card draw, with algorithms determining image, background, and feature combinations, almost replicating the hidden edition logic of physical blind boxes.
More critically, when a hidden Labubu is unveiled or a rare Non-Fungible Token is revealed, the social network's dissemination and emotion amplification mechanism is activated, from social media sharing to secondary market bidding, with rarity quickly priced by the market and converted into hard currency.
Premium: Market Pricing of FOMO Emotion
A hidden Labubu skyrocketing to tens of thousands of yuan, a rare Non-Fungible Token soaring to millions or even tens of millions of dollars - these astonishing numbers are not simple pricing behaviors, but the marketization of emotional value.
FOMO emotion is one of the core emotions driving premium. When buyers see others trading at high prices, it often triggers an impulse to quickly enter the market. At this point, many buyers no longer judge based on the work's inherent value, but instead act on psychological expectations of seizing opportunities or avoiding market abandonment, forming a positive feedback loop that further drives up premiums. This behavior is essentially a psychological bet on potential future value. Moreover, market consensus is reinforced by continuously rising transaction prices and social media discussions, further pushing prices higher.
Some speculators/resellers and even official parties are well-versed in FOMO psychology, deliberately creating market highlights through price manipulation, buybacks, limited releases, promotional hype, and artificial scarcity to stimulate purchase desire, forming short-term price bubble phenomena.
While emotion-driven dynamics bring substantial premiums and market activity, they also accompany extremely high volatility risks. Once emotions reverse, prices can rapidly collapse, leading to panic market sell-offs.
Celebrity Effect and Social Identity Symbols
In this era where emotional value is commodified, physical trendy toys like Labubu and Non-Fungible Tokens exist not just as collectibles, but as a new social language and identity projection carrier. Celebrity endorsements and mass emotional resonance together construct the symbolic status of trendy toys and Non-Fungible Tokens in contemporary culture, allowing them to transcend original aesthetic, functional, and collection attributes, and further evolve into cultural symbols that showcase personality, interest, and social capital.
Whether Labubu rises to become a global pop culture symbol after being frequently "recommended" by celebrities like Rihanna, Dua Lipa, and BLACKPINK's Lisa and Rosé, or Non-Fungible Token (NFT) gradually moves from crypto subculture to mainstream discourse after involvement from celebrities like Takashi Murakami, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Jay Chou, these phenomena demonstrate that celebrities, as super nodes in IP cultural communication, naturally guide aesthetics and demonstrate consumption, often rapidly enhancing the cultural value of a trendy toy or NFT project.
In the social media era, these collectibles have become cultural masks to be seen. Displaying a hidden or celebrity-style Labubu, or setting a rare NFT as a Twitter/X avatar, users are not just showcasing their collections, but also conveying their interests, aesthetics, values, and even economic strength. In a sense, this is a social behavior and identity declaration through images, assets, and symbols.
Community as Productivity: IP's Narrative Engine and Cultural Flywheel
Brands' growth paths are fundamentally transforming. Previously, advertising was the main battlefield, with high-frequency exposure and budget stacking almost equating to monopolizing user attention. Now, this formula is becoming ineffective, and the power to truly pierce through noise and touch hearts often comes from the community.
Labubu's breakthrough did not rely on overwhelming commercial placement, but on a group of ordinary users who love doll culture. Through daily activities like "showing off dolls", handmade modifications, creating memes, and photography check-ins, they continuously produce UGC content. These authentic and warm contents spread on social media, lowering transmission barriers and easily triggering emotional resonance, allowing the IP to grow naturally in social networks.
PANews secondary creation of Labubu
The NFT world is similar. NFT projects like CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins, and Azuki have moved towards mainstream more through spontaneous creation by holders. If the scarcity of NFT grants symbolic capital, community creation gives these IPs continuous vitality.
This is not just an innovation in communication logic, but a transfer of narrative rights. In such a system, ownership is not just physical asset attribution, but participation and shaping rights of brand narrative. Every piece of copy, every shared image is giving the brand new semantic layers. More profoundly, the community itself has become a productivity, a source of IP narrative, an incubator of creativity, and an amplifier of cultural resonance.
Aesthetic Driven: From Visual Style to Emotion Transmission
The popularity of trendy toys is inseparable from their "cute yet bizarre", "rebellious yet healing" visual language. This seemingly contradictory but highly integrated aesthetic quality injects strong personality into works and precisely captures the emotional context and inner world of contemporary young people.
Labubu, with its contrasting aesthetic of bizarre and cute, brings a strong visual impact and emotional freshness, becoming a cultural symbol of self-identity for Generation Z. This visual style is not just an aesthetic choice, but a narrative strategy. Labubu's image is both alienating and intimate, both marginal and warm, and this contradictory and complex aesthetic expression precisely reflects the real portrayal of Generation Z in identity anxiety, emotional exhaustion, and social alienation. Meanwhile, Labubu breaks the previously kawaii-dominated trendy toy aesthetic system, injecting a more angular expression dimension into pop culture.
This aesthetic logic is also interpreted in the NFT world. As a new visual species in crypto culture, NFT aesthetic language has transcended mere attractiveness or coolness, evolving into cultural resonance. For example, CryptoPunks pioneered a minimalist pixel style, representing geek spirit and digital fundamentalism; Azuki merged anime grammar with street fashion, constructing a new generation of identity recognition in Asian culture and global context; Bored Ape Yacht Club used a street visual style combining cartoonization and absurdity to satirize elite culture and traditional authority; Pudgy Penguins conveyed healing emotions through round, cute character images... These styles are not random stacking, but condensed expressions around identity recognition, emotional projection, and cultural belonging.
Images become entrances to spiritual spaces, and aesthetic styles are social languages. Ultimately, whether physical trendy toys like Labubu or on-chain NFT works, what truly touches hearts is not just shape and style, but the ability to plant emotional resonance in visuals through color, texture, and style, thus establishing a deep connection that transcends commodity attributes.
