For a very long time now, harem anime have been extremely popular and "successful." I'm sure that everyone has heard at least once that they are generic and repetitive and there's a reason for that. Harem anime use the same winning formula over and over again to gain its viewers and fans, so it's no mystery why they all feel so generic. Before I get into the formula let me talk about the reasons behind people basically copy pasting the same thing over again. Easy money. This has become more and more apparent to me after each season of anime. When I found out from my friend that the most popular anime of last season was Shinmai Maou no Testament, I was in shock. Why the heck was that receiving more views than the good shows of the season like Shigatsu was Kimi no Uso or Kiseijuu? Simple. Sex sells and the formula used is still working. "If it ain't broke don't fix it."
So on to the formula. It's pretty basic. All you need is a protagonist who is charismatic and then sprinkle in girls with a mixture of the following characteristics: tsundere, big breasted, childhood friend, top of the class, idiot, clumsy, pettanko, loli, imouto, onee-san, kuudere, and maybe even a yandere and then you're set. Take those characteristics and just mix them together with the amount of characters you want and voila, you got your star studded cast.
With these characters all you have to do next is decide your next setting. Do you want a high school comedy? An action anime? Maybe a science fiction? Well either way make all the girls fall in love with the main guy as a result of him saving them or being nice to them (it can just be literally 5 seconds of interaction) and then after that, just make them fall into the most ecchi situations. To-Love-Ru would be a very extreme but appropriate example where the protagonist, Yuuki Rito, seems to fall into a girl's crotch without fail every other page. So where does the setting come in? Well the setting is honestly not very important, it's just overall flavor and gives the series a bit more of a purpose. For action anime, you can have clothes get ripped during battles or have action shots of panties or boobs bouncing. For school settings it's even easier. Nurse's office, girl's locker room, gym storage shed, etc. There are so many situations and if you add in the actions scenes, you have "successful" anime such as Highschool DxD and Shinmai Maou no Testament.
The next thing you need, is to make sure that each character gets their own episode with the protagonist because you have to make sure that every fan is satisfied and thinks that their girl has a chance. After that, you need to make sure that the main girl gets some screen time with the protagonist too. She can either be jealous, falling into some scandalous situation with the protagonist, or both.
The last thing you need to make sure happens, is that the ecchi is as strong as possible. The more boobs that are shown and the more erotic the situations that happen are, the more popular the series will be. If you really want to make sure, you make a profit, censor everything. If you do that, there will be an outcry from fans until the Blu-ray Disc release, but they'll still keep watching anyway, so don't worry about it.
If this all sounds good to you, and you understand all these points, then you're on your way to becoming a hit harem-ecchi producer. Harem anime will never go away because they are extremely easy to make and are easy to make money off of since people just eat sex up. The fact that it' borderline hentai but still more socially acceptable of a product than actual hentai makes it a very valuable asset to people who just want to make a generic product that sells rather than a quality product that sells.
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