Assistant teaching professor Viviane Kim led a study abroad program that taught students about marketing and brand design within a specifically Korean cultural context.
On Netflix, it’s all about the K-drama. K-pop is dominating Spotify. K-beauty is all the rage on TikTok.
The “K,” for those that don’t know, is Korea, a marketing and branding powerhouse of a country that seems to be everywhere right now (heard of K-wellness, or K-horror films?).
Led by assistant teaching professor Viviane Kim, “Immerse in K-Culture” explored the origins of this K-phenomenon and introduced students to branding and design from within the cultural context of Korea.
Korean branding goes global
“Immerse in K-Culture” is a Northeastern University Dialogue of Civilizations, a global study program with courses all around the world.
“Korea, as a small country, wanted to rely more on export goods,” Kim says — a huge percentage of the Korean GDP comes from manufacturing, she says — and so there was a big push around K-food and K-beauty. The two biggest cosmetic manufacturing companies, she continues, are in Korea. Whether it’s “Estée Lauder or Chanel or any high-end product,” she says, it “is manufactured in Korea.”
Because so many cosmetics are made in the country, “it was easier for Korean companies to manufacture and develop new brands.”
But Korea’s biggest export turned out to be something intangible — its cultural products, like K-pop music. “So they started to invest a lot of money,” she continues, into marketing their music, television and film.
Design lessons from K-culture
Students on the Dialogue took part in two courses, Identity and Brand Design and Typography, exploring just how the Korean experiment — marketing their cultural products to a global audience — managed to work so well.
By living and studying in Korea for four-and-a-half weeks, students learned about the local business ecosystem, Kim says, like the “K-beauty industry, K-entertainment industry and K-food industry in Korea, while they’re staying here. And then I asked everyone to launch a new brand, or new product or new service.”
This new brand constituted the overarching project students pursued during their month in Korea.
Megan Alexander, a rising second-year student majoring in design, based her brand on a local animal found only in Korea and limited parts of China, the water deer. “In Korea they really like characters and little cute things,” Alexander says, pointing to how even the capital city of Seoul adopted branded characters in 2023.
“I made a character that was kind of based in the culture, so that I could do research through mythical folk tales in Korea,” Alexander continues.
Some of her classmates decided to focus on K-beauty and made fragrance or cosmetic brands, she says, but, “I wanted to focus more on the food, because I really like the packaging that all the Korean foods had. It was really interesting, and a lot of characters are also on the packaging.”
Alexander’s final design was for a juice brand she called “Mulde” — using “Mul,” the Korean word for water, and the first two letters of the word “deer” — with a stylized image of the water deer as its logo. Mulde’s tagline? “Sip the wild. Protect the wild.”
Socially responsible and irresistible
A crucial part of their time in Korea was performing market research. Kim says that her students identified social responsibility as a key ingredient when marketing to Generation Z and millennials.
Making that socially responsible product functional and attractive would make their products irresistible — hence Alexander’s cute water deer logo combined with the “protect the wild” tagline. Alexander envisioned that, in Mulde’s business model, a significant portion of profits would go toward conservation.
Kalene Peterson, a fourth-year student currently in an art direction co-op with Bose, attended the “Immerse in K-Culture” Dialogue in 2024. She chose the music industry for her project, “because I used to be a big fan of K-pop,” she says, and she wanted to “add my own personal touches into their music industry.”
She called her company Peterson Talents — there are “no Petersons in Korea,” she quips — and identified a growing musical genre that the hypothesized company would focus on: K-indie.
“I would take Korean indie music stars and promote [them] worldwide. So use the international platform to elevate their music, and show to the world,” Peterson says.
Career-ready through cultural immersion
Their brand designs started with typography, “learning how to use a specific font in order to communicate a specific end goal,” Kim says. But this had a powerful knock-on effect — when designing their own fonts and logos from scratch, students learned about all elements of branding.
Alexander says the experience she acquired with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign has already paid off, helping her secure a competitive position in a university club.
Students also got to hear from Korean entrepreneurs about their struggles and successes.
“One of the speakers,” Peterson says, a production company owner, “talked about the process of creating a boy band, and how their branding identity comes into place.”
Alexander recalls a CEO visiting the class, asking “us to come up with some designs for advertisements on Instagram,” translating that task to real-world experience.
The program came with a generous helping of cultural experiences, too, from museum visits to traditional calligraphy classes.
Peterson says that she appreciated Kim’s feedback, and “listening to her experiences as a designer, and her introductions to connections through the dialogue, as well. And I think she picked a good cohort. I’m still friends with some of them,” she says.