Search results

In this paper I bring together interaction, media, deviance, self, and identity to make sense of how young Singaporeans consume Korean popular (hereafter, K-pop) music and culture. My overarching goal is to highlight that being a music fan is not a straightforward or even easy experience. Rather, the self as music fan is continually developing within a complex variety of social processes, from the circulation of global, mass media representations to inter- and intra-personal interactions. I present data collected from a study on K-pop music consumption in Singapore, a small island-nation in Southeast Asia with an insatiable thirst for foreign culture. The data show how a group of Singaporean K-pop fans were regularly bombarded with largely negative messages about what it means to be K-pop music fans, and how these meanings affected their own negotiations as fans. K-pop fandom provided a sense of shared identity and status within popular youth culture, yet their experiences were often soured by negative media portrayals of deviant fans, whose behaviors risked stigmatizing the K-pop social identity. This paper thus deals with some of the problems for self that being a music fans entails.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a framework for marketing cultural goods (e.g. music) to global markets by examining modes of entry and positioning strategies used by media producers of the South Korean music industry.

An historic analysis was implemented to investigate the modalities and structures through which cultural products are produced and disseminated. Data for this study came from 314 articles collected from www.allkpop.com, a leading English-language, South Korean popular culture news site.

The cultural technology framework consists of the institutionalization of cultural technology, exportation of cultural content, collaborations with local talent, and joint ventures with local markets.

The findings emerge from an analysis of South Korean popular music industries, and further research is needed to generalize the results across cultural industries.

The cultural technology framework can be applied to cultural industries such as music, film, comics, and art, where culture and language could be barriers to adoption.

This study outlines a framework for the modes of entry and positioning strategies of cultural goods (e.g. music) in international markets. Extant literature has examined global marketing from the purview of durable consumer goods and brands, with limited insights into cultural products. More broadly, this paper addresses the call for more qualitative inquiry into international marketing topics.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the key success factors behind Bangtan Boys’ (BTS) popularity, and how they can contribute to sustaining it, along with detailed strategies for the success of global pop.

This study adopts a mixed-methods approach that uses text mining and interviews and uses the success of BTS to find the key factors accounting for its sustained popularity. For use in text mining, we collected data related to BTS from social network sites (SNS) and analyzed this data using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling, term frequency analysis and keyword extraction. In addition, we conducted interviews to explore the key factors accounting for the sustained popularity of BTS.

We found ten key success factors—active global fandom, SNS communication, fans' loyalty, empathy through music, storytelling and world view, performance quality, music video quality, overseas expansion at an early stage, efforts for self-development and teamwork among members— for a global pop group's success and sustained popularity.

This study contributes to the literature by finding key factors for success and sustained popularity of a global group through using a mixed-methods approach.

Our results suggest strategies to sustain the popularity of global groups and its potential to benefit across the entertainment industry.

This study is among the first to comprehensively examine the key factors for Korean pop’s (K-pop) sustained popularity by using a mixed-methods approach of text mining and interviews.

Although social media proficiency and use are key business and marketing practices in today’s digital environment, research has failed to offer sufficient insights into what drives small firms to use social media and how they vitalise co-creative social media environments with consumers. In response, the purpose of this paper is to examine how small firms utilise social media to interact and build bonds with consumers. These bonds become an important tool in the development of successful, profitable businesses and marketing practices in the digital age.

To examine how small firms use social media to engage with consumers and vice versa, the authors utilised a case-study approach and collected qualitative data by conducting semi-structured interviews.

The results showed that the small firms in this research seek to establish relationships and facilitate interactions with their core consumers in order to co-create value. In particular, the data demonstrate that producers engage in two distinctive practices: bonding (i.e. cultivating emotional ties with music fans) and spreading (i.e. encouraging expressive circulation by fans). Altogether, the findings indicate that the representative firms in this research use social media to develop synergistic relationships with consumers and to tap into the collective energy of consumers in their business environments.

The authors show that small companies use social media to establish relationships and interact with fans in order to co-create value and vitalise collective consumption, engagement, and participation. The case blurs the traditional distinction between production and consumption and suggests that the value of goods is a social creation, not merely a manufactured product.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interconnection between the corporatisation of K-beauty and Korea’s nation branding exercise and its links with soft power. Through the investigation of the transformation of Korea’s beauty industry, the authors seek to illustrate the inter-relationship of the market systems and national identification practices.

This study employed the qualitative case study approach to examine the latest development of Korea’s medical tourism. Through analysing a variety of secondary data that associated to the latest development of cosmetic tourism, this paper presents the impact of the transformation and reconfiguration of Korea’s beauty industry on the country’s nation branding strategy and the development of Korea’s soft power in the global marketplace.

The findings highlight how Korea’s new cosmetic tourism industry contributed to the renewal of Korea’s nation brand in the global market. The findings also illustrate the interconnection of the emerging Korean popular cultural products (K-pop and K-beauty) in the regional and global marketplace.

The findings demonstrate the role of market in re-defining a nation’s brand and identity. The findings also illustrate how market-driven strategy influences the development of a nation’s soft power in the regional and/or global marketplace.

The study shows that practitioners can be active agents in nation branding. Through highlighting strategies to develop soft power within and beyond the country boundary, this study shows how market agents, governments and other stakeholders can co-create a market system that transform and reconfigure the nation brand in the global marketplace.

In additional to explore the transformation of the beauty industry in Korea, this paper also presents the history and transformation of the beauty standards in Korea and other Asian cultures. Such dialogue invites marketing and consumer researchers to further explore the role of history and culture in guiding the production and consumption of new (consumption) standards.

This is the first paper that connects the theory of soft power in nation branding and country-of-origin literature. The case analysis of the socio-historical development of K-beauty also demonstrates how non-Western cultural goods enter the international marketplace. In summary, this paper provides new conceptual framework that illustrates a new collaborative mechanism that engages government and practitioners to co-create new cultural norms and standards to the local and international markets.

This study aims to highlight a series of accidents epitomized by the success of a music artist, bringing three streams of literature together – pop culture, entrepreneurship and place branding.

Using an illustrative case of a 2012 YouTube hit song, Oppan Gangnam Style, by Korean artist Park Jae-Sang, the artist’s attempt to lampoon the extravagant lifestyle of Gangnam District’s residents accidentally puts them on the global map. The narrative is built around the storytelling approach.

The study highlights the intersections of pop culture creativity and entrepreneurship (albeit accidental) with implications for place branding.

The study is overtly documentary analysis-based and could, therefore be subjected to quantitative analysis in future research. Furthermore, the conceptual model could be tested with additional cases in the future.

In a broad sense, this study is a pioneering effort in the field of entrepreneurship and its interconnections with other disciplines – marketing (place and entrepreneurship) and pop culture. The conceptual model could form a basis for future research in such intersections.

The purpose of this paper is to build on Steenkamp’s reflections, and introduce emerging and important developments that are shaping the global landscape and influencing global consumer culture (GCC) and global brands (GBs).

The paper is a thought piece.

The implications for GCC and GBs are discussed in the context of digital networked technologies, new brands from emerging markets and the digitally connected bottom of the pyramid consumers.

The paper suggests areas where research value can be added within the GCC and global branding literatures.

Although recent models of place branding have proposed culture as a crucial element in establishing a strong place or nation brand, the way in which cultural products influence the brand equity of other products from the same nation has not yet been studied. This study aims to argue that when a nation has strong legal institutions, as perceived by investors and managers, it offers fertile soil for cultivating cultural products that, when exported, can act as “cultural ambassadors,” promoting the country image in the minds of consumers and the value of the country's brands.

Exports of cultural products are provided by UNESCO. Valuable brands are those that brand finance included in its global top 500 most valuable brands list. The rule of law is provided by the World Bank. Panel regression models are used.

Supporting the hypotheses, exports of cultural products show positive effects on the value of brands from that country, and the rule of law shows positive effects on exports of cultural products.

Policymakers could improve the brand value of local firms by promoting exports of cultural products. To do so, policymakers should initiate judicial reforms that strengthen the rule of law to protect contracts and property rights.

This study examines the hitherto underexplored effects that a country's cultural product exports have on the brand value of firms from that country. Most prior research has focused on factors affecting imports of cultural products.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a recent effort by the South Korean Government to stimulate a domestic disaster risk reduction (DRR) technology industry for the export market. The project is a novel form of public-private partnership (PPP) that simultaneously fulfills the mandates of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction while promoting Korea’s economic development agenda.

The research is primarily a review study of the Global DRR Technology project as it is situated in the literature of PPP research from both the public administration and disaster management disciplines.

Korea’s approach to address DRR through a PPP targeting the needs of East Asian countries is unique. The overall effectiveness of the effort will take time to assess, but the model is an interesting and potentially fruitful mean of advancing DRR technology dissemination.

Korea may position itself as a global leader of DRR technology through this effort in terms of both market share and support of the Sendai Framework’s objectives. If successful, the PPP approach may be adopted as a viable means of improving DRR for other countries.

Using PPPs for various aspects of DRR can be win-win situation for economic development and disaster management outcomes.

This paper presents a distinct application of the PPP model for DRR that other countries may appreciate and/or adopt for their own DRR needs.