How do you make a good local product into a global product?
This question vexes global strategists and multinational managers. But there are success stories. One of the successes comes from K-pop.
Ever since Psy’s Gangnam Style broke the internet a decade ago, SM Entertainment and YG Entertainment have been trying to recreate its surprising triumph.
Six years back, YG cracked the code with Blackpink. Blackpink has become K-pop’s first truly global product. Blackpink’s success is unquestioned—their videos have been viewed over six billion times on YouTube.
So why is “Blackpink in your area”?
If you ask Blinks (the nickname for Blackpink fans) why the group is so successful, they are likely to give a series of one-word responses: Rap, Energy, Choreography, Dance, Voice and so on. But these are all pieces of the implementation. The folks at YG were more strategic in globalising K-pop.
What did YG do to take a local Korean product (K-pop) with limited global appeal to make it become a truly global product (Blackpink)?
The success rests in preserving the unique appeal of K-pop (Energy, Fun, Youth, Clever Dance, Insipid Lyrics, Flawless Voices), but as tuned by three small adaptations that made it more accessible and digestible to a global audience.
The three adaptations were:
1. Reduce (not eliminate) the Korean-ness of the product
2. Link the product to a broad set of aesthetic tastes
3. Connect the music to sounds familiar to a global audience
1. Reduce the Korean-ness of the product. This is achieved by having a group of four performers from three different countries, three of whom are fluent in English, and performing songs that increasingly have subsets of English lyrics.
2. Link the product to a broad set of aesthetic tastes. Traditional K-pop is meant to appeal singularly to Korean tastes, which also connect to preference structures in East and Southeast Asia. The hair, makeup, clothing and attitudes of traditional K-pop performers align with this aesthetic and with East Asian female stereotypes. But if you compare Blackpink with another K-pop female group Momoland, you can see how Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa are presented in a way considerably different from the members of Momoland. This difference tightly aligns Blackpink with global aesthetic preferences.
3. Connect the music to sounds familiar to a global audience. The first time you listen to Blackpink’s “Pink Venom”, you may wonder why it sounds so familiar. It is because the song deliberately pulls from several western singers: “one by one, two by two” from Rihanna’s “Pon de Replay”; as well as from Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent and Taylor Swift. This linkage reduces the foreignness while preserving the flavour of K-pop.
Overall, these tactics provide a useful lesson for how to go from local to global. Reduce the ethnocentricities in the product to increase its geocentricity, but do so in a way that does not remove the advantages and differentiation of the product.