• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.1-13
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• 2018

Idol goods refer to products such as cups and towels, or mementos or souvenirs that are manufactured to gratify the desires of fandom and may include the facial images of a star. The objective of this research was to explore the purchase behaviors of K-pop idol goods. Two hundred and sixty female idol goods purchasers in their twenties participated in an online survey. Cheering tools were the most often purchased idol goods, followed by idol slogans and dolls. To investigate the difference in idol goods' attributes they considered when shopping, respondents were divided into three purchase groups based on their annual total expense for purchasing idol goods. There were significant differences among light, medium and heavy purchasers in terms of goods' price, practical features, and scarcity. The light shopper group was majorly guided by price and practical features as compared to the other two groups, and heavy shopper group was majorly guided by scarcity attribute than in the other two shopper groups. The more they identified their favorite idols, the more they worked hard, the higher their income, the higher the expenses of investing in idol products, the more likely they were to repurchase idol goods. In term of post-purchase behavior of idol goods, most idol goods purchase by fans were stored rather than used, and few indicated that they purchase two identical idol goods for use and storage.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.559-575
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• 2021

The popularity of K-pop, the development of diverse media and communications, and rapid globalization are increasing consumers' attachment to celebrities. These celebrities, called "Human brand", have a growing impact on consumers. However, research on idol celebrities has been conducted mainly on teenagers. Furthermore, there are limits to the studies on consumers' attachment to idol celebrities who do not advertise specific products and intention to purchase products which are not advertised but related to the idol human brand. Therefore, this study has been conducted on 301 out of 400 adult women in their twenties to forties in Korea to examine the relationship between the characteristics of the idol human brand, attachment to the idol human brand, desire to imitate the idol human brand, desire to identify with the idol human brand and its fandom community, and the effect on purchase intention. For the statistical analysis, SPSS and AMOS were used. The study found that the characteristics of the idol human brand which are trust, professionality, social attractiveness, and physical attractiveness positively influenced attachment to the idol human brand. The attachment to the idol human brand positively affected the imitation desire toward the idol human brand, and the identification desire with the idol human brand, and to identify with its fandom community. Additionally, the desire to imitate and to identify with the idol human brand and its fandom community positively affected the intention. Furthermore, the relationships between all variables were found to have a significant mediating effect.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.80
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• pp.115-142
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• 2016

This study aims to reveal the content of and logic behind a recent negative public sentiment toward female idols with the example of a debate over songstress IU's fourth album that was released late last year. While previous studies on fandom have focused on the identification process towards entertainers and making community, a recent phenomenon of "anti-fandom" or "malicious comments" implies that more research is needed on negative emotions such as hostility or schadenfreude (feelings of pleasure from others' misfortunes). Schadenfreude is a social sentiment that originated in modern liberalism, which features contradictions between public equality and private ownership, and that has been intensified in neoliberalism, which features a maximization of this contradiction centering on a meritocracy. Celebrities in Korea often become the targets of schadenfreude, which is associated with the suspicion that they gain popularity not from their abilities but from "just being popular." It should also be noted that this kind of schadenfreude operates differently between male and female entertainers. Specifically, the acquisition of money and fame by modern women whose presence used to be located in the private possessions of males is considered to be due to their unjustified use of sexuality. This is also the background of the recent online misogyny culture in Korea. In this context, IU, who had been successful at building a differentiated image of "sister-like idol artist," became a valid target. Although accusing IU of utilizing pedophilia reflects a stalemate that a current politics of sexual violence faces, it rather damages the name of an individual than attracts public attention to the structural causes of childsexualabuse. This is why I see the way that pedophilia was used in the debate over IU as a schadenfreude. Consequently, the term pedophilia here contributes to an expansion of the entertainment economy that is sustained by rises and falls of the celebrities' stock prices.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.401-411
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• 2000

The objectives of the thesis were to investigate the general trends of clothing conformity and clothing attitudes and to figure out the relationships between clothing conformity and clothing attitudes, and differences of clothing conformity and clothing attitudes between different genders and ages. The conformity includes clothing conformity by informational influence, by identificational influence, and by normative influence. And the clothing attitudes are fashion interests, pursuit of individuality, clothing importance. It was turned out that three types clothing conformity were closely related with variables of clothing attitudes(fashion interests, pursuit of individuality, clothing importance). Particularly, the clothing conformity by normative influence was negatively correlated with pursuit of individuality. And other clothing conformities were positively correlated with the variables of clothing attitudes. It was also turned out that school girls marked high points on the clothing conformity by informational influence and by identificational influence. Middle school students were influenced by identification idol. Most of middle and high school students were believed to recognize the importance of clothing, and they were pursueing both fashion and individuality simultaneously.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.405-428
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• 1990

Language has a social function to communicate information. Linguists have gradually paid their attention to the function of language since the nineteen sixties, especially to the relationship of form, meaning and the function. The relationship could be more clearly grasped through disciyrse-based analysis than through sentence-based analysis. Many researches were centered on the discourse functional notion of topic. In the early 1970's the subject was defined as the grammatiocalized topic the topic as a discrete single constituent of the clause. In the late 1970's several lingusts including Givon suggerted that the topic was not an atomic, disctete entity, and that the clause could have more than one topic. The purpose of the present study is, following Givon, to study grammatical coding devices of topic and to measure the relative topic continuity/discontinuity of participant argu, ents in Korean narratives. By so doing, I would like to shed some light on effective ways of communicating information. The grammatical coding devices analyzed are the following eight structures: zero-anaphora, personal pronous, demonstrative pronouns, names, noun phrases following demonstratives, noun phrases following possessives, definite noun phrases and indefinite referentials. The narrative studied for the count was taken from the KoreanCIA chief's Testiomny:Revolution and Idol by Hyung Wook Kim. It was chosen because it was assumed that Kim's purpose in the novel was to tell a true story, which would not distort the natural use of language for literary effect. The measures taken in the analysis wre those of 'lookback', 'persistence', ambiguity'. The first of these, 'lookback', is a measure of the size of gap between the previous occurrence of a referent and its current occurence in the clause. The meausure of persistence, which is a measure of the speaker's topocal intent, reflects the topic's importance in the discourse. The third measure is a measure of ambiguity. This is necessary for assessing the disruptive effects that other topics within five previous clauses may have on topic identification. The more other topics are present within five previous clauses, the more difficult is the task of correct identification of a topic. The results of the present study show that the humanness of entities is the most powerful factior in topic continutiy in narrative discourse. The semantic roles of human arguments in narrative discourse tend to be agents or experiences. Since agents and experiences have high topicality in discourse, human entities clearly become clausal or discoursal topics. The results also show that the grammatical devices signal varying degrees of topic continuity discontinuity in continuous discourse. The more continuous a topic argument is, the less it is coded. For example, personal pronouns have the most continutiy and indefinite referentials have the least continutiy. The study strongly shows that topic continuity discontinutiy is controlled not only by grammatical devices available in the language but by socio-cultural factors and writer's intentions.