• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.101-116
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• 2014

In the year 2013, Warren Buffett was named one of the most influential people of the year by TIME magazine. When people are exposed to such news, they show strong interest in who the influential people are and how those people became so successful. Likewise, people show strong attachment to other prominent figures as well. This social phenomenon indicates that people perceive well-known persona like business leaders, TV stars or sports stars etc. as human brands of intangible assets. As the role of these human brands is becoming more important, people tend to develop stronger attachment toward them. Another notable modern social phenomenon is people's pursuit of life-satisfaction and social well-being. People desire to increase their quality of life by having quality time with family and friends, and also by building attachment towards celebrities, sports stars, and so on. The main objective of this study is to examine how attachment toward human brands affects quality of life. While existing studies on human brands examined antecedents of attachment, e.g., some needs fulfillment such as A-R-C needs (autonomy, relatedness and competence needs) fulfillment, this study focuses on the outcome variables of attachment, e.g., how attachment toward human brands affects stress relief and life satisfaction through self-efficacy. Based on previous research, we divided human brands into two types: heroes and celebrities. Heroes are defined as people who have considerable and lasting importance on both societal and individual levels, and celebrities are defined as people who are well-known but have little or no short-term impact on society and individual levels. This study focuses on how attachment toward each type of human brands, celebrities and heroes, affects the quality of life or well-being. This study focuses on three important outcome variables; stress relief, life satisfaction, and self-efficacy, (three variables) which have been recently gaining importance, especially in the domain of positive psychology. Major findings from the present study show that although celebrities draw attachment from people by providing fun and entertainment or providing stress relief, they have weak influences on the wellbeing or efficacy of individuals at a deeper level. In contrast, attachment toward heroes helps people live better by providing meaning and positively influencing life satisfaction through self-efficacy (Frankl 1997). These results are consistent with the main tenet of 'positive psychology' which seeks "to find and nurture genius and talent and to make normal life more fulfilling" (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Considering the fact that certain celebrities are perceived as heroes to some, we can conclude that celebrities can become heroes if they provide meaning and value to the lives of people. This study contributes to the research stream of human brands since the most current leading research (e.g., Thomson 2006) indicated the need to look at the resulting effect of attachment on life satisfaction through self-efficacy. Another important contribution is that we empirically documented the different effects of celebrities and heroes. As expected, this study shows that heroes more deeply influence the lives of individuals in the long term while celebrities do so rather shallowly in the short term. The issues of the influence of heroes on the individuals' lives need to be further investigated in relation with the perspective of positive psychology.

• Review of Culture and Economy
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.141-173
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• 2018

In this article, we explore how artistic fame is formed by analyzing antecedents of fame the extent to which the name of an actor or his/her work is positively known by his/her audiences among Korean handicraft artists. Drawing on prior literature on reputation and fame, we clarify the differences between the concept of reputation and the concept of fame and further distinguish three types of reputation among individual artists, depending on its sources expert reputation, market reputation, and peer reputation. We employ the mixed method in this study, in which we first conducted open-end interviews with three kinds of constituents (i.e., critics, market intermediaries, and artists) and then developed and tested the hypotheses derived from the insights we had obtained from the interviews. We further considered the impact of reputational work, defined as the level of effort devoted and activities performed by an artist him(her)self geared toward promoting his(her) work, on artistic fame. We find that there are large differences in factors associated with artistic fame between non elite and elite Korean handicraft artist groups, where elite status is captured by artists' educational background (i.e., Seoul National University and Hongik University, which are considered elite schools in accordance with prior research). Specifically, findings suggest that among non elite status artists, recognition by experts, or what we call expert reputation, acquired through national awards and invitations from prominent exhibitions as well as artists' own reputational work that incurs high cost, such as self-financed exhibition openings, were shown to be highly significant factors associated with artistic fame, which was measured as the number of media exposures related to her/his art work. By contrast, among elite status artists, peer reputation acquired through an artist's institutional affiliations and relatively low cost artists' own reputational work, such as self listing on a highly publicized magazine, were shown to be significant factors associated with fame. Taken together, this paper contributes to research on cultural industries and markets by highlighting the importance of understanding artistic fame not just as the outcome of her/his talent but as the social product that arises at the intersection of actors (artists) and her/his audiences in the social evaluation process.