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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 study is to present a theoretical framework to demythologize Asian consumers' cultural and ideological narratives in relation to the newly emerging popular culture developed in Korea, widely known as “Korean wave.” In addition, methodological considerations for the understudied consumption phenomenon are also discussed.

From the extant literature on popular culture and globalization, a theoretical overview of Korean popular culture (KPC) is provided. Subsequently, a condensed presentation of netnography employing critical discourse analysis (CDA) is provided.

A netnography fused with CDA suggests a reflexive process in which a range of sociocultural tensions in the globalization process of KPC dynamically hybridize and transform into new cultural tastes in respective cultures.

Cultural branding can be revisited, as the new discourse generated in Asia envisions new entries into the global brandscape. Moreover, this endeavor helps explicate how a globalized trend is replaced with another through a paradoxical discursive process.

As this article discusses popular culture as a product to be consumed just as are other tangible products, it assists researchers in visualizing and theorizing about the globalization process of incorporeal, cultural products. The application of discursively enriched netnography facilitates pertinent analysis and ultimately theory‐building.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to unpack an Asian-born celebrity culture in which celebrities become everyday necessities for global consumers’ identity struggle, prototypes for global branding strategy, contents for the media industry, and agents for sociocultural transformation.

In order to better elucidate such a significant phenomenon, the authors also introduce two mostly palpable and more relevant domains of celebrity culture to global consumer culture literature − politics of aesthetics and memetics − as analytical tools. Observations and publicly available narratives are also incorporated to enhance the review and critique of the global celebrification process. Psy’s Gangnam Style (GS) is chosen as an archetype, due to its exceptionally vulgar but highly replicable nature.

The specific case of GS exposes three unique qualities of kitsch − exaggeration, disconcertment, and subversive sensibility − that are substantially commensurate with prototypical characteristics of globalized online memes − ordinariness, flawed masculinity, theatricality, and ludic agency. Polysemy and optimism also facilitate the celebrification process in global participatory culture.

The “radical intertextuality” of online memes sustains the participatory culture in which kitsch becomes a global icon through a reproductive process. Korean popular culture cultivates reverse cosmopolitanism through a nationalistic self-orientalization strategy that paradoxically indigenizes western pop-culture and transforms power relations in global pop culture.

This paper presents further elaboration of current discourses on global-celebrity culture by incorporating popular concepts and practices, such as kitsch, meme, parody, and sharing, which synergistically advance aesthetic liberation on a global scale.

The purpose of this study is to explore the acculturation caused by the Korean wave among Indonesian Muslim consumers, especially in the food and cosmetic sectors, based on religious grounds.

Data were collected through focus group interviews with 20 Muslim respondents in Indonesia.

The findings specifically highlighted that Muslim consumers’ acceptance of Korean products varied. Muslim consumers’ acceptance was influenced by similarities and differences in values between Islamic and Korean cultures. Consumers categorised into each acculturation mode (assimilation, separation, integration and marginalisation) showed different behavioural patterns in Korean product acceptance. This study proposes that global products can be optimised through specific and targeted marketing campaigns for different types of Muslim consumers with products that comply with their religious values.

Few studies have explored the importance of religious values (e.g. righteousness, compassion and respect for others) with respect to the acceptance of foreign products in the acculturation context. Additionally, how values from other cultures reconcile with the Indonesian Muslims’ affinity for Korean culture has been limitedly studied. This study aims to fill these gaps by identifying the role of religious factors in the acceptance of global products by taking the example of Indonesian Muslim consumers and Korean products.

The author launched an online survey at a private English-speaking university in Kuwait to evaluate the status, value and importance of Japanese and Korean popular cultures in Kuwait. East-Asian culture is a subculture that is very widespread in the region because of Internet use and the influence of English-speaking education. The survey shows that this subculture can be understood as an alternative culture because it tends to contain a dissimulated critique of traditional Kuwaiti culture. Many students approach Japanese and Korean cultural products because they are in search of a coherent lifestyle founded on certain ethics. The Japanese–Kuwaiti cultural transfer implies a double resistance towards the local culture and towards American culture. The resulting marginalization is therefore two-fold. Resistance towards Western culture is here not based, as is often assumed in Arab contexts, on cultural closure and conservatism, but rather on the willingness to engage with an alien culture. This creates a paradoxical pattern of resistance to both the East and the West through adherence to another Eastern culture. The phenomenon can be understood in terms of globalisation as well as of anti-globalisation.

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.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are converging world cultures by creating common consumer lifestyles across countries through standardized products. However, little is known about how consumers’ exposure to foreign cultures affects their purchase experience from the country. This study explores this gap in the literature by investigating how consumers’ exposure to foreign cultural source (e.g., entertainment) shapes their attitude toward its country. This attitude is conceptualized to influence the perceived product quality and corporate ability of the country’s MNCs, which are further hypothesized to influence consumers’ purchase experience with products offered by the MNCs. Furthermore, the impact of product quality and corporate ability on consumer purchase experience is expected to be moderated by consumer ethnocentrism. The study framework is tested in the context of the Korean Wave (or “Hallyu”) using data consisting of 533 Indonesian consumers. The results support most of the study hypotheses. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.

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 paper aims to reveal how the Chinese government has tried to regulate transnational cultural flows by applying cultural policies.

The paper compares the dissemination of different foreign television programmes in China since the 1980s. The documents of cultural policy released since 1990s, news reports and the statistics of imported dramas since 2000s will be analyzed.

The research finds that the Chinese government has treated cultural products from different countries in unequal ways. Political-diplomatic relationships and the need for ideological control, influence the making of cultural policy. Restricting the quota of imported dramas, censorship and propaganda are measures taken by the Chinese government to regulate transnational cultural flows.

The paper mainly focuses on platforms such as state-owned television stations and internet. The role of pay-cable channel in disseminating imported dramas should be taken into consideration in the future research.

The paper provides a systematic understanding on the development of Chinese cultural policy.

The paper offers an alternative approach to explore the policy-oriented dissemination of transnational cultural flows other than market-oriented dissemination.