Browsing by Author "Gahmberg, Benjamin"
Now showing items 1-1 of 1
-
Gahmberg, Benjamin (2024)Since around 2010, interest in Nordic design, culture, and lifestyle has increased in South Korea. As part of this trend, a considerable number of both Nordic and Korean companies in the Korean market have started to use Nordic branding to market their products. This means that they evoke association with the Nordic brand, i.e. the sets of associations that individuals have with the Nordic region, in an effort to imbue their products with added value. The utilization of foreign place brands in the marketing practices of private companies is understudied. In this thesis, I examine and compare the ways in which Korean and Nordic furniture and household product companies use language and images to evoke association with the Nordic brand, and the ideas about the Nordic brand that they communicate. The material of the study consists of texts and images collected from the Korean websites of eight Korean and eight Nordic companies that use Nordic branding. I use Serafini and Reid’s (2023) Multimodal Content Analysis research methodology to categorize and analyze the material. My analysis finds that the companies primarily evoke association with the Nordic brand by establishing linguistic, aesthetic, philosophic, historical, and geographical connections between their company and the Nordic brand. The Korean companies are found to associate the Nordic brand with simplicity and functionality, the concepts of hygge and “healing” (hilling), retro and nostalgia, and trendiness, whereas the Nordic companies associate the Nordic brand with simplicity and functionality, artistry and creativity, sustainability and progressive values, and timelessness.
Now showing items 1-1 of 1