The Three Tiers of Emotional Consumption: From Small Change to Zero
Since May, users around the world have placed roughly 700,000 orders on a food delivery platform that has no restaurants, no riders and no food. FoodNeverComes lets you browse menus, load a cart, check out with a fake card and watch a courier cross a map toward your door. Then nothing arrives. That is the whole product. Its slogan says it plainly: the food never comes, but the dopamine does. The platform is South Korean, but the same mechanism has a homegrown version in China.
It would be easy to file this under internet jokes. We think it is closer to a controlled experiment, one that isolates a question most consumer brands never test: how much of what you sell is the product, and how much is the feeling of buying it?
China’s consumer market in 2026 happens to hold all three versions of the mechanism. Put three stories side by side (snacks still growing, guzi stores opening and closing at once, and more and more people tapping digital wooden fish) and you get a three-tier ladder of emotional consumption: small money for real goods, middle money for emotional symbols, and no money at all for pure anticipation. The tiers are not ranked by price. They are ranked by how much of the purchase is feeling rather than product: the higher the rung, the lighter the product and the heavier the feeling of the moment. Each tier is behaving very differently right now, and the differences are instructive.
Tier One: Small Money, Real Goods
Start at the bottom of the ladder, where the spending is small and the goods are real. Chinese consumers have become cautious about big purchases, but snacks are one of the few categories still adding volume. iiMedia Research sized China’s snack industry at RMB 1.18 trillion in 2025. A survey of 565 young consumers published by 36Kr’s youth research unit in August found that 74.2 percent of respondents had replaced at least one proper meal with snacks in the past month. The sample is small, so read it as a sharp cut into behaviour rather than a market read. The top trigger scenarios were mid-afternoon hunger, evenings when cooking felt like too much, and breakfasts skipped for lack of time. Snacking is filling the cracks left by a disordered eating schedule.
This is not only a Chinese story. Mondelez’s latest State of Snacking research found that 41 percent of US snack consumers now eat snacks in place of a regular meal, roughly double the share in 2019. The shift from snack-as-supplement to snack-as-meal is a structural change in how younger consumers eat, on both sides of the Pacific.
The most revealing number in the Chinese survey is about health claims. 56.3 percent of respondents said a high-protein, sugar-free or low-calorie label makes them more willing to buy an indulgent snack, yet only 16.1 percent said such products actually taste good. The label is not selling health. It is selling permission: a way to indulge with a smaller sense of guilt. Any brand that has watched clean beauty claims work the same way in skincare will recognize the mechanism.
The channel side tells the same value story. Discount snack chains have become the default offline entry point for young buyers, and the biggest of them, Mingming Hen Mang, operator of the Snacks Busy and Zhao Yiming brands, signed its 30,000th store in July 2026, the first snack retail network in China to reach that scale. Its model runs on factory-direct sourcing and prices meaningfully below supermarkets, with the fastest penetration in lower-tier cities.
Why does tier one hold up while pricier emotional categories wobble? Because snacks combine four properties: a low price point, high purchase frequency, instant feedback, and a functional floor. Hunger is real even when the mood purchase is not. When budgets tighten, spending does not leave the emotional register; it slides down to the cheapest tier that still delivers a real product.
Tier Two: Middle Money, Emotional Symbols
One rung up sits the guzi economy: badges, trading cards, acrylic stands and other merchandise derived from anime, comics and game IP. The category is genuinely large. iiMedia Research put China’s ACG market at RMB 597.7 billion in 2024, with a forecast of RMB 834.4 billion by 2029, and Pop Mart has already shown how far a Chinese IP company can ride the same emotional demand globally. We have written before about how emotional merch became a mainstream category in China; guzi is its most concentrated form.
And yet the retail layer of this market is paying for its own overheating. According to a widely shared report by research outlet Biaowai Biaoli, guzi stores closed and opened in 2025 at a ratio of 1:2, two new stores for every one that shut, and 14 percent of new stores still did not survive their first year. Store owners describe daily takings of around RMB 600 against rent and payroll, and inventory pile-ups worth hundreds of thousands of yuan.
What went wrong is a compact lesson in how emotional value decays. First, IP owners diluted their own scarcity. A rare badge that once traded at RMB 72,000 fell to roughly a tenth of its issue price as reissue followed reissue; by the twentieth re-release, the premium was gone. Second, individual store owners never had pricing power: distributors set tight margins and forced bundles of unpopular IP onto every order. Third, once the category was proven, the players with real capabilities moved in. Miniso, Jiumu and TOP TOY opened dedicated guzi sections, using supply chains and far broader audiences to take a large slice of the market; IP distributor Sanyueshou stepped out from behind the scenes to open its own stores, and domestic IP giant Yuewen now runs the whole chain from licensing through to sales. The profit pool did not disappear, it was reallocated to whoever controlled supply chains and channels.
The tier-two lesson generalizes well beyond toys: when a category’s moat is scarcity plus emotion rather than operating capability, the first players eliminated are the ones with neither. Beauty founders who build on emotional storytelling alone should read the guzi shakeout as a preview.
Tier Three: No Money, Pure Anticipation
Now the top rung, or rather, the rung where the price finally reaches zero. In China, this tier is the digital wooden fish. The wooden fish is a Buddhist ritual object monks strike while chanting; the app turns it into a single tap on a phone screen, and each tap pops up “merit +1,” as if a worry has just been shaved off. The scale is real: reported daily active users top 5 million, 72 percent of them post-95s, and Huawei’s app store alone lists 16 digital wooden fish apps with nearly 13 million combined installs. It is the same mechanism as South Korea’s FoodNeverComes, with product and delivery stripped away, leaving only the ritual and the emotional feedback of that one tap.
The neuroscience behind the joke is standard: dopamine is released mostly in anticipation of a reward, not on receipt of it. Slot machines and infinite scroll feeds are built on the same asymmetry. What is new is seeing the mechanism stripped so cleanly of commerce (one tap, “merit +1,” no product, no delivery) and still keeping tens of millions of people coming back. The transaction has been removed and a large audience stayed for the ritual alone.
For anyone selling physical products, that is a slightly uncomfortable data point. It suggests a meaningful share of the value in any consumer purchase lives in the moment before the product exists for the buyer: for a delivery order, the scroll, the selection, the confirmation screen; for the digital wooden fish, the sound of the single tap.
What the Emotional Consumption Ladder Means for Brands
Reading the three tiers together, a few practical conclusions stand out for consumer and beauty brands, in China and beyond.
Anticipation is part of the product, not an accessory to it. Most brands spend the bulk of their budget on the product and hand expectation management to a logistics text message. These zero-cost experiments argue for treating the pre-arrival window as designed real estate: pre-order countdowns, shipping notifications written by a human, unboxing that rewards the wait. This costs little and sits exactly where the dopamine is.
In a downturn, the ladder runs downhill. Consumers do not abandon emotional consumption when budgets tighten; they descend a tier, with emotional symbols giving way to real snacks. At the extreme, some spending leaves money altogether and steps off the ladder to find the same feeling in free simulation. The strategic question for a brand is whether your product has a functional floor to land on. Snacks have hunger. Skincare has skin. A collectible has only the current temperature of its IP.
Permission labels outperform virtue labels. The finding that 56.3 percent of snack buyers respond to health claims while only 16.1 percent believe the products taste good is a precise description of how such labels actually work: they lower the psychological cost of an indulgent purchase. Brands should design claims as permission, and should also expect regulators and consumers to eventually notice the gap between the label and the substance.
Check which side of the transaction your value sits on. If a brand’s repurchase rate depends on the thrill of ordering rather than the value of using, a free substitute for the thrill can intercept it, exactly as a fake delivery app intercepts an impulse takeaway order. The uncomfortable audit question: would your customer miss the product, or just the buying of it?
None of this says emotional consumption is a bubble. Tier one is growing, tier two is consolidating rather than vanishing, and tier three is monetizing attention if nothing else. What the ladder shows is a market repricing feelings with unusual honesty: consumers will pay for emotion, but the price they will pay tracks frequency, certainty and the presence of a real product underneath. Brands that engineer anticipation deliberately, and anchor it to a capability moat, get to collect on both.
Double V is a cross-border operating partner and intelligence house for emerging consumer brands, based in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. We help brands connect China and the world through three businesses: Brand Operation (marketing and distribution for brands on retainer), Brand Incubation (sister company Glam Infinite and our own-built brands), and Industry Intelligence (cross-border research and reports). Talk to our team.
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