Branding Museums through UGC in China: Insights from the Cultural and Creative Industries in the Era of Digitalisation.

Over the past decade, China's cultural and creative industries have expanded rapidly, positioning museum led cultural and creative products (CCPs) as prominent interfaces between cultural heritage, creative design, and everyday consumption. While CCPs have become increasingly significant for museum revenue generation and visitor engagement, their role in shaping museum brand meaning, particularly through user generated content (UGC) on social media, remains insufficiently theorised. This thesis addresses this gap by examining how CCP-related UGC mediates museum branding within China's digitally participatory cultural environment. Conceptually, the study moves beyond institution-centred branding models and revisits classical critiques of the culture industry in light of contemporary digital participation. Rather than viewing cultural production as a top-down process of symbolic control, the research argues that museum branding in the Chinese context increasingly operates through co-creative dynamics, in which visitors actively participate in the circulation, interpretation, and reinforcement of brand meaning through CCP consumption and online sharing. In this process, audiences shift from passive recipients of institutional narratives to active contributors to cultural value and brand identity. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative design combining netnographic analysis of CCP-related content on social media platforms with semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 museum visitors. Thematic analysis reveals how CCPs function as low-threshold cultural mediators, how UGC facilitates informal learning and symbolic consumption, and how repeated digital exposure transforms cultural recognition into emotional attachment and behavioural intention. Comparative analysis further demonstrates that participatory branding outcomes vary significantly across institutions, depending on organisational capacity, platform integration, and responsiveness to UGC. By examining CCP-related UGC, this thesis demonstrates how museum brand meaning is co-produced through participatory digital practices rather than transmitted through institutional communication alone. It shows how CCPs function as cultural mediators that translate institutional narratives into everyday forms of symbolic consumption, and how social media interactions reinforce emotional attachment and visiting intention. Through the heuristic application of Social Cognitive Theory, the study further explains how observation, reinforcement, and action operate within digitally mediated museum branding in contemporary China.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

dba

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Dai, Junqian

• AM Amgueddfeydd (Cyffredinol). Casglwyr a chasglu (Cyffredinol)
• HM Cymdeithaseg

Dc Identifier Grantnumber

UWTSD

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repository.uwtsd.ac.uk:4291