TITLE:
Exploring the Drivers of Labubu’s Viral Success: Insights from Behavioral Economics and Social Media Analytics
AUTHORS:
Mengxuan Wang
KEYWORDS:
Labubu: Collectible Toy Consumption, Behavioral Economics, Baidu Index, Text Analysis, Emotional Consumption
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Business and Management,
Vol.14 No.5,
September
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: In recent years, with the rapid development of the collectible toy industry and the growing demand for emotional consumption, Labubu has gradually emerged as a significant cultural phenomenon among young consumers. This research analyzes Labubu’s breaking out of its niche and entering a massive market. By combining behavioral economics with social media big data, the study shows that the viral hit was not the result of chance or clever design, but of three forces converging: emotional value, scarcity marketing, and social-media-driven resonance. First, using Baidu Index Data from 2023 to 2025, this study analyzed the search popularity, regional distribution, and demand graphs of Labubu. The results display that its public attention underwent a developmental process of diffusion from niche groups to the mass market. Viral events, celebrity effects, and social media communication serve as critical driving forces for its growing popularity. Second, using comments from Labubu-related videos on Bilibili as the sample, we conducted high-frequency word analysis, visual keyword mapping analysis, and co-word network analysis. The findings indicate that consumer discussions mainly revolve around two major themes, “emotional value” and “market value”. Words such as “cute”, “like” and “good-looking” reflect consumers’ recognition of the product’s emotional attributes, while terms like “capital”, “price” and “hope” reveal public concern over commercial operations and market phenomena. Building on these findings and drawing on behavioral economics theory, the analysis further reveals that scarcity effects, loss aversion, herd effects, sunk cost effects and social identity effects collectively contributed to the formation and dissemination of Labubu’s popularity. The case of Labubu demonstrates that in the generation of “emotional consumption”, a successful IP must simultaneously serve as an “emotional comfort object”, a “social currency”, and an “investment vehicle”, driven by deep-seated psychological mechanisms such as loss aversion and herd effects. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of collectible toy consumer behavior and provides practical implications for the brand operation of collectible toys and the dissemination of cultural IPs.