Cross-country Specifics of Marketing Strategies Development when Entering the American Entertainment Industry: the Case of Big Hit Entertainment on the American and Korean Markets

Globalization processes have been set in motion, some would say, long time ago and have accelerated since the early 21st century. This has caused businesses seeing bigger opportunities outside of the domestic markets. American companies started going international, which led to other businesses following their example. However, entering foreign markets has shown to not be as easy as it seemed: different cultures, patterns of behavior and other factors turned out to be an obstacle in the international trade and marketing, especially. K-pop and K-dramas gained huge popularity around the globe in the past few years and became one of the leading entertainment industries in the world making South Korea an export-driven country depended on the entertainment market. As of today, these segments have a big impact on South Korea’s economy with Korean Wave that appeared in the late 2000’s becoming a soft power luring many tourists and consumers to the market. Korean Wave or Hallyu Wave has been declared by Korean government as one of the main forces in driving the Korean economy. On the other hand, American entertainment industry has established its dominance internationally a long time ago taking up the first place in top ten entertainment markets. Consequently, entering this market would mean a huge effort that has to go into marketing. However, since the early 2010’s Korean entertainment started conquering the West, where the main player in the entertainment arena was the United States, not only due to Korean dramas, K-pop and Korean e-sports being loved by many just for the content but thanks to the successful marketing strategies being implemented by Korean entertainment agencies while entering the American entertainment market. In the following paper we analyze American entertainment market and the marketing strategies used by the United States based companies. We look into whether the process of marketing strategies development in the entertainment industry in the U.S. has some distinct specifics, and whether those specifics affect the companies entering the American market from outside. We analyze how the marketing strategies used for entering the American market are special, and what factors affect their choice and development on the example of the successful entering case of Big Hit Entertainment. The topic researched in this paper is highly relevant in this day and age as the media and entertainment industry is forecasted to continue growing in the following years. Moreover, the entertainment plays a huge role in our lives as it is the content that we consume on the daily. And since the American market is the biggest one in terms of revenue generation, it is a luring geographical segment for the foreign companies to expand their businesses to.