How AI-Generated Images Revolutionized City Coupon Design: A Real-World Case Study

With the rapid advancement of AI image‑generation technologies such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, AI tools have sparked widespread research and application, confirming the early AIGC notion that "every industry can be reinvented with AI." Anticipating this trend, the team began exploring AIGC in the e‑commerce sector at the end of 2022 to boost work efficiency, quality, and solve business challenges.

01 Business Background

In early 2023 the team received a request for city consumption coupons. The goal was to quickly shift payment coupons to city‑specific coupons, improve consumer experience through product and activity pages, and monitor redemption rates to increase coupon usage. Key challenges included:

High‑frequency promotional activities: an estimated 60 events per year, requiring large volumes of visual assets, with roughly one new activity each week, demanding coordination among multiple designers.

Weak consumer awareness: users struggled to quickly grasp city, discount, and other essential information.

Most design work focused on main visual (KV) creation. The AIGC approach aimed to solve the problems of "large task volume," "tight schedule," and "inconsistent style" for city consumption coupon KVs.

02 AI Technology Exploration

To validate the feasibility of AI technology in real projects, the team conducted extensive comparative tests, inviting designers with varying illustration skills. The results showed that incorporating AIGC assistance not only alleviated the pressure of "must look good" and "need it by tomorrow," but also ensured a consistent visual style across outputs.

We studied popular AI tools on the market and found significant differences among them, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. The following illustration (image) summarizes these distinctions.

03 Solution

Due to the special nature of city consumption coupons, conflicts often arise between city and province representative elements. For example, the Yellow Crane Tower is a landmark of Wuhan, but using it to represent Hubei could mislead users into thinking the coupon is only for Wuhan, causing loss of potential customers. Additionally, business units sometimes request specific product categories. To address overall visual consistency and regional differences, we established visual rules:

City: landmark building (primary) + representative plant/animal.

Province: cultural symbol (primary) + representative plant/animal.

Specific category (per business demand): product SKU collage (primary) + representative plant/animal.

AIGC Helped Us How?

In the city consumption coupon project, leveraging current AIGC capabilities helped the team solve the "rapid image generation" and "style unification" challenges. The experience yielded several insights that can be applied to other business lines to empower operations more efficiently.