How Demand Capacity Is Formed

. Against the policy background in which expanding consumption has moved from short-term demand management toward the construction of a long-term household-consumption mechanism, existing studies have extensively examined income, wealth, social security, expectations, supply quality, and the consumption environment. Less attention has been paid to a more antecedent question: how consumers acquire the capacity to recognize, understand, participate in, and repeatedly derive utility from differentiated goods and services. This paper introduces demand-side taste capital, a durable stock of category-specific knowledge, appreciation, participation skills, emotional memories, and identity linkages accumulated through family, school, peers, media, and repeated participation. It develops a mechanism linking interest exposure in the formative years to taste-capital accumulation, preferences and willingness to pay after consumers gain greater income and decision autonomy, realized demand, market thickness, and industrial differentiation. The paper further proposes a life-cycle antecedence effect: late childhood through early youth is an important period of concentrated accumulation, while the economic effects of that stock are more fully released after independent income and consumption decision-making emerge, and are reconfigured rather than eliminated in later life. The framework distinguishes demand capacity from purchasing power, intertemporal constraints, supply conditions, and time–space accessibility, and discusses demand-side spillovers of education, intergenerational transmission, and demand-side absorption of new supply. Descriptive evidence from European football, Chinese service consumption, and digital cultural consumption provides real-world support for different links in the proposed mechanism. The paper concludes that a long-run consumption strategy should address not only current purchasing conditions but also the antecedent formation of demand capacity among future consumer cohorts.