Product, Product, Product: Portfolio Strategy and the Sustainability of Museum Cultural Products — A Hybrid Category Management Approach for Small-Scale Museums

In recent years, museum cultural products have expanded rapidly as museums increasingly seek financial sustainability and enhanced visitor engagement. However, widespread product homogenization, fragmented development practices, and declining profit margins have emerged as systemic challenges across the sector. Existing studies have largely focused on design innovation and cultural symbolism, while insufficient attention has been paid to portfolio-level strategic management.This study introduces a hybrid strategic framework for museum cultural product systems by selectively extracting and simplifying core principles from industrial product portfolio management and retail category management. Rather than directly replicating commercial management procedures, the research distills strategic essences including systemic portfolio architecture, consumer decision-centered value logic, and iterative lifecycle optimization.Through a case study of the China Pewter Museum, the study demonstrates how material coherence, localized cultural narratives, functional flagship products, and event-driven innovation can be integrated into a self-reinforcing cultural product ecosystem. The findings suggest that product homogenization is fundamentally a structural management failure rather than a creative deficiency, and that strategic portfolio thinking offers a viable pathway toward sustainable museum cultural product development.This research contributes to museum studies by introducing cross-domain strategic management theory and providing a practical hybrid model adaptable to small and medium-sized cultural institutions.