Month: January 2011

Compared to fifty years ago, when songs and dramas were treated as expensive forms of art only affordable to the rich of high status and reputation, today’s music is cheaper, involves a lot of entertaining and fashionable elements, has a larger service market, and can be found almost everywhere around us.

Korean entertainment may be one of the fastest developing industries in recent years. It successfully combines business and arts and creates a great amount of profit by training idols to cater to their customers’ taste in fashion and preferred styles of music. Korean entertainment companies prefer music bands and groups to individual singers for several reasons. A band is more versatile as it can showcase a variety of singing voices, instrument mastery, and dancing. Usually, the members of a band are selected to fulfill various expectations: they have to be attractive, and each member has to have a special skill such as dancing, playing an instrument, or having an outstanding voice. The goal is to offer as many positive qualities in the group members as possible. The band members receive careful singing and dancing lessons and each gets his or her own and unique personality. The band’s overall image is important too; the entertainment companies make sure that there are enough bands to speak to a plethora of music styles and a wide range of customers.

As we look at the following pictures of popular Korean music groups, we can easily tell each group’s music style and target market.

• “Girls generation”
• One of the most popular girls’ music group in Korea
• Target market: boys and girls around 10 – 28
• From the picture: very styled, hair/ make-up ( many current fashion trends, various hair lengths, straight/ curly, reddish, blond)
• Unifies: black, a little bit punk
• Mix of sophistication and hot urban grunge
• Cute upbeat music with hip-hop elements

• “Kara”
• Target market: middle school/ Early high school customers
• From the picture: clean-cut, cute, stylish, innocent, pretty girls
• Wholesome image/ clean
• Music: quirky, fresh songs about schools, boys, problems with friends, homework, fashion

• “2 P.M.”
• Appealing to young girls
• Sexy, muscular, strong, tall, powerful, ambitious, stylish
• Korean rap, up beating music

• “SHINee”
• Target market: young girls, office lady, mothers, old sisters, older people too
• From the picture: young, classy, classic, clean guys/ School boys with class and money
• Bright pop music

( Posted on Jan 22 )

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kB7XTdpUFg[/youtube]

A Successful Commercial – ETUDE

A successful marketing strategy includes great commercials. Referring to the textbook, a good marketing strategy clearly identifies a target market and marketing mix; moreover, a good commercial is designed to communicate the most valuable information about the product to the targeted consumers. After people get to hear about the superiority of the product, they will purchase it once or twice to give it a try, and hopefully will be so satisfied that attach their loyalty to this product. Thus, I think Commercials are extremely important in the first-hand delivery of information to the prospective consumers.

Of course, not every commercial is a success story. There are poorly designed commercials that do not appear to consumers. However, good commercials can really have an impact on sales. One such successful commercial is produced by a Korean cosmetic company called ETUDE. Their commercial is really creative, interesting, cute, and cleverly manipulative.

I don’t understand Korean at all; however, without knowing any Korean words, I got to know the theme and the plot of the channel. What I find important here is that this commercial achieves to be easily understood by people around the world without creating many language barriers or literacy problems. It is very clever that the company used Cinderella’s story which is well-known by all girls around the world. Then, Etude altered the plot by creating a different ending: instead of the girl who lost her shoe, the modern prince picks her sister because of her beautiful innocent fresh looking appearance due to her use of ETUDE product. ETUDE make-up, which has a target market among young girls between 15-28, promotes its products by saying that every girl can be Cinderella, as long as she is using ETUDE makeup.

(Posted on Jan 15th, 2011.)