Week 8 Blog Post for Media in Japan

How does commercialization effectively promote the concept of ‘friendly competition'?

Japan’s “Election” and Korea’s “Idol Brand Reputation Rankings” systems

What is the first thing that comes up to you when seeing this site?

        For me, it reminds me of the political election where the candidates have their posters hung up and each of them would have a short self-introduction to appeal themselves. Similarly, AKB48’s ‘election’ system is said to be a “friendly competition” among the group members, allowing the fans to vote for their favorite idol during the regular election seasons. Members with the most votes are acknowledged for their popularity and are qualified to become the core, representative members to be active on media.

        I was reminded of a famous program called “Produce 48” which gained a great amount of popularity both in Japan and Korea. To briefly introduce the program, it is a South Korean reality competition series, a large-scale joint project that the public votes and ‘produces’ a girl group with 12 members out of the 96 contestants from both South Korea and Japan. I, myself had also enjoyed watching but had never thought of why I had waited so much for the new episodes to be updated every week, but I do remember that the intense nature of ‘competition’ among the participants was responsible for the dramatic unfold and therefore have created tensions to draw in the audiences.

        This aspect of entertainment is effectively commercialized by the entertainment agencies to promote longevity marketing, creating the concept of idol brands, and franchising them. But what do they mean by ‘idol brand’ and ‘reputation ranking’? For example, what does it mean by saying that the Japanese girl group AKB48 is a successful example of an idol brand?

        Like luxury brands, the idol members, or groups themselves hold social values and reputation to be evaluated and credited for their influences that they have on the society. It is the public who hold power to determine the degrees and ranks according to certain criterion.

Q: So, how does the evaluation system work? And what are the standards to be highly ranked? Is it different from simply being popular and having a large-sized fandom?

        In Korea’s case, the Korean Business Research Institute is in charge of presenting the brand reputation rankings for k-pop groups based on various factors/criteria/standards such as social participation, social communication, media, and online community index. (“Do k-pop idol group”, 2017, para.1) According to the most recent analysis of the reputation ranking which was presented in this year’s October, Black Pink was listed in the 1^st place with the index value of 6,092,040.

        But the term “brand” is said to have originated from Japan, another hub for idol culture and entertainment. So I became curious to see how brand is defined within the Japanese media and how the standards differ from those of Korea and therefore, we move on to see how AKB48, the most popular girl group of Japan builds their portfolio and have managed to be successful.

        In Japan’s case, as mentioned at the beginning, they strengthen the concept of idol brand by holding elections. Once described as the world’s oddest election by CNN, AKB48, Japan’s most popular and highest-earning girl pop group tour around with the fans to hold sessions for speeches, handshakes, and even official statements to refute voting fraud. Through this process, each of the members are in competitions to make strategic appeals to the audience in order to promote their brand and improve their individual reputation. It almost reminds us of the typical political election site. (Liu & Wakatsuki, 2017, para.1-2)

        If we look at the enforcement of competition and the concept of ‘brand’ for both Korea and Japan’s idol culture, we see that the commercialism is a gigantic force behind both. Japanese girl groups are often referred to as the “commercial darlings” to merchandise goods such as chocolate, cell phones, and are also became the motives for manga series, video games themselves.

        As for the friendly competition, their fandom is majorly consisted of male fans to make votes in their annual election and statistics proved for the accumulative number of more than 3 million votes in only last couple of years. The AKB48 General Election committee is in charge of holding the regular elections where they hold election campaign activisms/sessions where the fans get to actually meet their stars one-on-one. This “friendly competition” among the members and fans is said to be a smart tactic/strategic marketing to generate high sales. In order to support their favorite member and ensure that they will win, fans purchase numerous same copies of their single album.