With the rise of Hallyu, or the global export of Korean culture also commonly known as ‘The Korean Wave’, South Korea has become a big trendsetter in recent years: whether it be within fashion and K-Beauty skincare or Korean movies and drama series, to Korean popular music, also known under the umbrella term K-pop. What these categories have in common are their strong ties to visual aesthetics and K-pop is known for its very colourful and maximalist design, which is also a key characteristic to why K-pop as a phenomenon has been particularly attractive and has managed to captivate fans all over the world. In the marvelling K-pop universe, the goal is to engage all the senses for a complete and interactive sensory experience, making the visual just as important as the auditory, and this can also be applied to the physical album design. Physical K-pop albums sell better than ever despite the digital streaming services dominating our digital age. A visual analysis was conducted on selected contemporary K-pop albums together with a survey on Swedish K-pop fans, in order to discuss how packaging design of K-pop albums can influence consumer behavior. The study showed that interactive packaging design and extra album inclusions like photocards, photo books, postcards etc. makes the fans more likely to want to collect albums and merchandise, which on its own can be viewed as a collectible item. The packaging design both facilitates and encourages fans to interact with the design not only visually, but also in a tactile way, by engaging in participatory behavior such as filming unboxing videos and posting them on social media, and it can also be associated with identity making, i.e. how they identify themselves as fans in relation to their favorite artists or towards other fans. Lastly, it is interesting to discuss how K-pop design can be heavily influenced by American and Western concepts despite being marketed as a Korean phenomena and innovation; from the visual analysis it could also be concluded that contemporary design trends draw inspiration from Western concepts such as the y2k millennium bug, retro and technology.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-55279 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Adilnor, Sana |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Institutionen för konst, kultur och kommunikation (K3) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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