K-Pop Marketing Mix

These market-oriented features in K-pop cast a doubt on the fans’ activities as exerting their agency. Interestingly, with consumptions of K-pop related products (e.g., listening to K-pop music and participating in the concerts, purchasing secondary commodities, such as K-pop stars’ photos, socks with their caricatures, posters, etc. – no matter how far the concert is held or the stores are ), a majority of interviewees claimed that K-pop stars are not (or less) related to commodification and consumerism. This needs to be contemplated in regard to the training system that the respondents articulated, which was mentioned in the previous section.
Whereas the respondents produce meanings in the trainings a person must go through to be a star

In this manner, the pseudo relationship is reinforced by a tacit approval between the consumers (fans) and the producers (agencies) that the products (stars) keep evoking the consumers’ emotions and satisfying their desire for intimacy via the sensuous images of the stars in media. However, with the help of the “fake” intimacy, the market-oriented logic that constructs the star cannot be recognized nor criticized. Thus, the respondent’s attempts to resist to the mass culture by enjoying subculture eventually

(Interviewee 7)

Indeed, proclaiming that “K-pop stars do not imitate the U.S. pop stars” demonstrates their two different standards judging the U.S. pop and K-pop. While the interviews read the U.S. pop star images only with the images, they interpret K-pop star images with diverse contexts, such as who is the most influential figure to a singer or what kind of different images a singer shows in other TV shows. Unintentionally they ignore amplification of voyeuristic sex appeal images in K-pop stars. In doing so, their attempt to challenge the dominant discourses of sexism goes to