Driving Forces Behind KCON
In chapter 5, Kim Suk-young illustrates different parties involved in KCON as a grand market place: corporations, nation-state, and individual self-promoters. Discuss what each of these agents aim to achieve in such an event overseas and what their strategies are. Further, do you think these strategies are effective in enhancing the nation’s soft power? If so, then how? If not, then why?
Hi, my name is Francis and I will be leading this week’s discussion regarding the role of various parties that work together to make KCON a success. With the increasing spread of Korean music and culture, KCON has grown to be an integral part of this Hallyu wave. KCON events happen annually in various cities across the globe and the event’s magnitude in terms of attendees, merchants, number of artists performing and convention size increases each year. The 2017 convention in Los Angeles, for example, was a record-breaking year as the convention attracted eighty-five thousand attendees and sold out two nights of concerts at the 21,000-seat Staples Center. (Kim 2018: 183) As much as it is important to focus on the artists and music being the driving force behind the convention, other major driving forces are often behind the scene of our daily lives.
Corporations are a major supporter in the funding for the convention and their goals are pretty straightforward. Just like how many individual merchants use KCON as a platform to push their goods, it’s no different for the corporations as they desire to have a greater presence around the attendees of the event from not just the time of the convention but into their daily lives after. An excellent example of this would be the CJ group. The CJ group itself have two subdivisions in areas of different sectors: entertainment (CJ E&M) and food services (CJ Foodville). Both these corporate groups have a strategic and significant presence at KCON as CJ E&M operates TV channels including Mnet and various music shows. CJ Foodville’s branding is heavily dependent on the celebrities and with this association, emotional investment that accompanies the process is an even more significant aspect of food consumption. (Kim 2018: 185) Combined with the media, the CJ group’s products and services are essentially food for the body, mind, and heart, the liveness of KCON is now embedded into everyday life consumption.
The self-promoters, just like corporations, focus mainly on their presence. The KCON convention also invites various online influencers as apart of their promotion and convention curriculum. The rhetoric of “we promote you and you promote KCON while promoting yourself” (Kim 2018: 191) well summarizes the strategy these influencers use. They use their own online presence to attract more people to the convention and the convention attracts others by having the influencer promoted as a panelist with other known figures and celebrities. Influencers may sometime use a hashtag or post content relating to their experience at the convention. KCON itself heavily utilizes hashtags during the convention but even with the convention over, these hashtags are still circulating the web. These hashtags is no longer a phantom of a live event from the past but a durational embodiment of that event (Kim 2018: 188) sustaining KCON’s liveness in our daily digital consumption.
Lastly, the nation-state of Korea also plays a crucial role in KCON’s success. As the convention is centric around all aspects of Korean culture and life, the continuous embodiment and consumption of this culture can be seen from the government’s eyes like a dream scenario for enhancing the nation’s soft power (Kim 2018. 182). The convention is a perfect place to promote commercial nationalism with individual booths for areas such as tourism, education, agriculture, etc. All this effort also ties in well with their cosmopolitan motives as they are showing the world that their culture and lifestyle extends far beyond the borders of Korea. With cosmopolitan movement involving not just the Kpop artists themselves, cosmopolitanism isn’t just personal to the artists anymore but rather an entryway to bigger international success (Saeji 2016: 262) that can be attributed to the increasing list foreign cities now hosting KCON.
Bibliography:
– Cedarbough, T. Saeji. Cosmopolitan Strivings and Racialization. Peter Lang AG, 2016.
– Kim, Sukyoung. K-pop Live: Fans, Idols, and Multimedia Performance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
COMMENTS
Shannon: Thank you, Francis. I agree about your points regarding corporations and their goals with sponsoring conventions. Selling food is essential for conventions to make profit and is a major aspect sponsors can take advantage of for their benefit. Most people who watch Korean variety shows (such as Running Man and older episodes of Weekly Idol) know the extent of how much producers like to incorporate food into their shows. Food is considered a reward earned by completing different challenges (like mini games for Running Man and random play dance in Weekly Idol). As international viewers become aware of the value of food in Korean culture, corporations move forward with pushing their consumable goods to consumers looking to attend conventions like KCON.
I find the points about using the convention as a place to promote commercial nationalism really interesting. While I agree the aspects (like tourism and education) used for promotion increases recognition from other countries, I would add that the convention’s success and hype is owed to marketing and advertising efforts. Whenever KCON is announced for a city, the idols making an appearance there are kept hidden until fans buy tickets for the event. Just the mystery of the identities attracts fans to these conventions. When it is finally known which idols are performing there, the hype is usually increased, and even attendees who did not know about them prior to KCON would get to learn more of the talent that Korea has to offer. Groups like Wanna One and Fromis_9 were able to promote their group by performing and helped promote their country through their celebrity status. Every bit of promotion allows Korea to be more known and liked internationally. Since consumers are the ultimate deciders of what service and goods careers becomes and stays sustainable, much effort must be put into marketing and advertising of all aspects of Korea.
Zoe: Thank you for the essay Francis. It is getting more and more obvious that KCON is becoming a huge platform for the Global fandom to both feel included in the K-pop world and also a way for the K-pop idols to promote themselves on a bigger stage. I definitely agree that Korea as a whole is playing a main role in the KCON platform. In my personal opinion, Korea is getting a lot more ambitious to push the Korean culture onto the global platform, and they have found the most effective and fastest way to achieve that is through K-pop. With people more involved in k-pop and KCON, eventually there will be more people having interest Korean culture and other tourist aspects. Also something that I want to bring up about oversea strategies in K-pop is that we are getting more and more foreign members in groups. In that way, when the groups go on the global stages like KCON, the foreign members who speak the foreign language fluently can advertise the group and engage with the fans so much easier which can expand their popularity. (As much as I want to admit that music has no language, but when it comes to K-pop, language can be a barrier.)
Amy: Thank you for your essay, Francis. Regarding self-promoters, this reminds me of the Youtuber Go Toe Kyung who owns the Youtube channel “퇴경아 약먹자”. He is famous for making many fun Kpop dance videos and now has 1.6 million followers on Youtube. As his popularity rises, he was invited to KCON18LA and play the role as an individual self-promoter like what you mentioned. His “KPOP Random Play Dance at KCON18LA” has got over 8.1 million views on Youtube, a very impressive view for an non-celebrity Youtuber. This video is not simply for entertaining but it carries many other meanings. The gathering of hundreds US girls and boys dancing along recent Kpop hit songs showing how KPOP has become globally popular that it is not restrained within Asia anymore. Also the exciting vibe in this video would make people who don’t know about KCON or who haven’t been to KCON become curious and want to be there to see their idols, meet other Kpop fans to share their interests and experience the Korean food and culture presented in the convention. I think working with the online influencers like Go Toe Kyung is a very great strategy of KCON to spread their influence and attraction. Things about the convention would not only be circulated by the hashtags on social media, but would also be maintain and shared through the videos on Youtube. At the same time, this is also a great opportunity for Go Toe Kyung to enhance his channel’s popularity and consequently help hime gain more profit from creating contents on Youtube. I would say the collaboraion between KCON and the self-influencers is a win-win strategy that would be promoted more in the future.
Here is the link of the video that I mention in the comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5e-fqu-XvU&index=6&list=PLkmOLyYgIcWGTayNEep21b_wMLH4E2Mmb
Diego: I’d like to expand on Francis’ rhetoric he quoted, “we promote you and you promote KCON while promoting yourself.” I went and participated to the first Vancouver Kpop Con in 2018 and I’d say that this rhetoric is very accurate. The biggest attraction to Vancouver KCON is the Kpop groups that make an appearance as well as the local and international guest artists who will perform on the Canada Dream Stage. The Canada Dream Stage is a big performance opportunity for those who want to put their name out there, and the surprise Kpop groups (Astro for Vancouver KCON 2018) make it more of a reason to come out and support the convention.
As a grand market, the Vancouver KCON wasn’t taking advantage of to its fullest due to its infancy, but there were corporations who would promote their products (Subway for example) as well as many independent artist vendors who would sell various products and items related to Kpop or Korean culture.
As Francis mentioned, Korea receives soft-power influences from KCONs due to the nature of the convention – to promote and celebrate Korean culture. The evidence is in the pudding, as the majority of Vancouver KCON was surrounded by Korean cultural technologies – traditional Korean goods, Kpop cover performances (song and or dance), Korean artists performing, travel agencies promoting overseas opportunities, and much more. All of these elements celebrate and highlight only a fraction of Korean culture, and promote Korea’s soft-power political influence. The more KCON becomes popular, the more economic opportunities become available to Korea.
Collaborations between KCON and other companies will become possible as these conventions gain global traction, which in turn will open doors for companies to collaborate with Korea and Korean companies. As long as Korean cultural technologies remain relevant and continue to grow, KCONs everywhere will continue to bring up Korea’s soft-power through the bidirectional benefits mentioned in the rhetoric.
Zoe: The youtuber that Amy brought up seemed really interesting, I came across this video and that youtuber a long time never thought it could come up again here. Things such as cover dance or like random play dance challenge definitely can be counted as a convention at KCON whereas it give fans opportunities to be a part of this huge popular culture. And for those who doesn’t know K-pop that well, these kind of convention can a way for them to get curious about this kind of culture, which eventually have a big chance to attract them into this kind of popular culture that they didn’t really know much about before.
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