Just Right: Gaining and Maintaining Brand Loyalty Through the Lens of K-Pop

Abstract

Understanding how to build, maintain, and utilize brand loyalty is essential in today’s business world. Given increasing competition for a customer’s limited attention span, learning how to foster brand loyalty among customers gives a business considerable competitive advantage. This research will examine the impact of firm-level marketing techniques employed by the Korean music industry on consumer brand loyalty. In-depth interviews of K-Pop consumers were conducted in tandem with an online survey amongst a pool of randomly selected, consistent K-Pop consumers to gauge the effects of 1) gamification marketing techniques and 2) exclusive ecosystem marketing techniques on building consumer brand loyalty. The effects will be analyzed using: 1) a thematic analysis of the interview transcripts, and 2) a mediated correlational analysis with firm-level tactics of gamification and exclusive ecosystem as the independent variables, brand loyalty as the dependent variable, and brand community as the mediator variable. Findings from this research will determine whether marketing tactics employed by players in the Korean music industry are effective on customers, and if so, provide incentive for other businesses to pursue similar tactics to build loyalty for their own brands.