What is happening in the life service industry after the concept of "heart value ratio" has reached a general consensus?

In this year's consumption discussions, "prudence" has almost become the default context.

With more transparent prices, more choices and longer decision-making cycles, the life service industry is no exception. However, if we shift our focus from macro indicators to specific scenarios, we will find that another kind of change is taking place. Consumers have not stopped going out, eating out or traveling, but have become more picky in every choice. They begin to repeatedly confirm what kind of experience they can get in exchange for this sum of money.

In restaurants, people no longer only care about the dishes themselves, but also whether the space is comfortable and whether the service is relaxing; in travel, the importance of destinations is giving way to the way of participation; in retail consumption, the appeal of low prices has declined, while trust, interaction and sense of identity have been continuously amplified.

These changes seem scattered, but point to the same direction. When functions and prices gradually converge, the core of consumption decision-making is quietly shifting to more subjective and more stable things, such as whether emotions are taken care of and whether the experience is worth remembering.

Against this background, Douyin Local Life, together with 36Kr and Houlang Research Institute, jointly released the 2025 Annual Trend Report for Life Service Merchants (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"). The Report summarizes this change as "emotional cost-effectiveness" entering the core of consumption decision-making — when price no longer constitutes an absolute advantage, consumers begin to pay for deterministic experiences and deliverable emotional value.

This is not a rebellion against rational consumption, but an adjustment of consumption order. Under a limited budget, people are more willing to spend money on scenarios that can definitely bring emotional returns, confirmed experiences and psychological stability. The life service industry is exactly the first field to undertake this trend of change.

The question arises accordingly. When "emotional cost-effectiveness" becomes a consensus, what changes will take place in the growth mode of the life service industry?

When consumption starts to make way for "heart-throbbing moments"

Emotional value is becoming a new rigid demand.

Among the multiple sets of data presented in the Report, a recurring common feature is that consumers do not simply "spend less money", but redistribute their consumption. Emotional value, experience memory and social significance, which were regarded as additional factors in the past, have begun to directly participate in payment decision-making.

Signals from external research are consistent with this. Accenture mentioned in relevant research that more than half of Gen Z regard consumption as a way to explore themselves and socialize; McKinsey's judgment in a report in May 2025 is more straightforward: consumers are more prudent on the whole, but will actively rearrange their budget for projects that "improve well-being". This change is not radical, but highly directional: consumption is shifting from "whether it is cost-effective" to "whether it is worth my emotional investment".

Emotional value is not an abstract concept. On the content side, it has formed three highly concentrated keywords: atmosphere, immersive experience and sense of ritual. The sense of atmosphere corresponds to the attractiveness of space and field; the sense of experience emphasizes the participation process and memorable fragments; the sense of ritual embeds ordinary consumption into life nodes, making a meal, a trip and a commodity a moment worth recording.

The "heart-throbbing triangle" composed of these three elements is becoming the most active search and creation direction in the Douyin ecosystem. Creators continuously produce content around scenarios, participation and nodes, while users look for specific emotional footholds in the content. They are not isolated hotspots, but jointly outline a demand trajectory: consumers are actively looking for real scenarios where they can place their emotions and confirm their experiences.

The actual presentation on the payment side makes the trend move from the macro to the specific. In various offline businesses, the phenomenon of paying higher premiums for experiences is expanding. In the catering sector, high-end group-buying packages priced above 200 yuan continue to grow; in the hotel and tourism track, experience-based products priced above 1,000 yuan remain active; in the retail and service industry, the transaction activity of commodities with cultural and identity labels has increased.

Consumers have proved with actual payment that: when the experience is clear enough and the emotional return is certain enough, price is no longer the first threshold.

"Centripetal evolution" in three tracks

When "emotional cost-effectiveness" becomes the underlying consensus, different industries show different evolution paths.

Catering, hotel & tourism and general retail, the three most typical life service tracks, are showing a common trend: Consumption no longer expands outward, but shrinks inward, moving closer to emotions, experiences and sense of participation. This is a kind of "centripetal evolution".

Catering: From "filling the stomach" to "enjoying the experience"

In the catering industry, the embodiment of "emotional cost-effectiveness" is not a simple environmental upgrade, nor a premium restructuring on the menu, but more of a redefinition of the overall experience. When consumers walk into a restaurant, they no longer just want to satiate themselves, or even just check in and take photos, but hope to get a state matching their current mood during the meal, such as relaxation, being taken care of, being understood, or just staying quietly alone.

The breakdown of catering in the report shows that unique atmosphere, unique emotion and unique taste are forming a joint force. On the one hand, the popularity of content such as "atmospheric restaurants" and "beautiful dining moments" on the platform continues to rise; on the other hand, seemingly scattered preferences such as solo dining, warm life atmosphere and nostalgic flavors all point to the same underlying demand: to find the foothold of emotion again in the high-frequency daily activity of eating.

Take "solo dining" as an example. Against the background of this growing emotional demand, Longge has provided a more methodologically significant sample. In 2025, it successfully created 4 blockbuster products with sales of over 100 million yuan, including pink mini burgers, mini yogurts and mini pizzas.

Its growth does not simply rely on cost performance, but more on forming a content-driven hit product mechanism around "listening to feedback — launching new products — verifying — scaling up". By continuously monitoring comments, interactions and imitation behaviors on the Douyin platform, it selects products with visual impact and topicality as traffic entrances, and then uses positive rating rates and repurchase data to reverse calibrate the product structure, forming an iteration rhythm of "launching new products monthly and creating hit products quarterly". In 2025, Longge used this mechanism to create multiple 100-million-yuan hit products, and realized the simultaneous expansion of traffic and sales through account matrix and influencer cooperation.

More importantly, it uses Douyin as both a C-end customer acquisition tool and a B-end store expansion tool. Hit product content solves the problem of passenger flow, and the founder's IP solves the problems of site selection and franchise resources, achieving about 300 new stores added in one year.

There is also Baiyu Korean Barbecue, which develops the traditional Yanbian brand into a national chain, emphasizing the differentiated expression brought by ethnic flavor and visual recognition, while Guoquan Shihui reconstructs the choice of home scenarios around the "sense of ritual at home". The paths are different, but the underlying logic is the same: through spatial expression, content operation and personalized expression, the restaurant is shaped into an emotional field. Users perceive the atmosphere in advance through short videos or live broadcasts, and then complete the experience closed loop through in-store consumption.

Under this structure, Douyin not only undertakes the function of seeding consumption, but also the functions of decision verification and transaction undertaking, and the distance between content and transaction is shortened. This change in model shifts the competition in the catering industry from a single product dimension to the comprehensive capability of "scenario + content + experience".

Hotel & Tourism: From "seeing the scenery" to "being part of the scenery"

The changes in the hotel and tourism industry are more intuitive. Standardized itineraries and traditional accommodation models are giving way to participatory experiences. Consumers are no longer satisfied with standardized itineraries and accommodation, but hope to truly immerse themselves in an experience through participation, interaction and immersion. Immersive performances, local culture, folk activities and sports events are becoming important factors driving travel decisions.

The center of the hotel and tourism industry has achieved a leap from "service delivery" to "emotional interaction".

The report mentions that the playback, search and interaction of content related to "sense of participation" have increased significantly. Users begin to pay for "what I can experience in this trip" rather than just "what I can see". This transformation also makes hotel and tourism consumption gradually extend from one-time services to emotional memories and repeated experiences.

Merchant cases such as Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park and Longemont also confirm this point.

The key transformation of Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park is to turn scarce resources into repurchasable content assets, and turn a single visit into emotional memories that can be repeatedly activated. Relying on rare animal resources such as killer whales and beluga whales, Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park personifies and starifies the animals, builds a content matrix of "official account + animal IP + keeper", and turns marine science popularization from static display to emotional interaction. The annual exposure of related topics reached 420 million, and the exposure of a single killer whale video exceeded 100 million, driving offline visits and annual card repurchases, with the annual payment GMV increasing by 15% year-on-year. More importantly, it focuses on rhythm management. Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park divides the whole year into multiple theme nodes, and uses "festival IP + customized live broadcast + influencer matrix"