Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia

Description

Offering a rare insight into the world of celebrity and media in China and beyond, Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia deconstructs the dynamics of “stardom” and celebrity endorsement in East Asia, and examines its impact on marketing communications and media. Through first-hand interviews with celebrities and entertainment industry practitioners, the book discusses the social, cultural and economic influences of celebrity through topics such as self-identity, celebrity-driven consumer behaviour, gender and race stereotypes, idol worship, etc. Interviews with celebrities such as Kai-Wah Kwok, Bob Lam, Denise Ho, Hilary Tsui and Francis Mak present the reader with insider accounts of celebrity formation, management and marketing in Hong Kong and Mainland China, as well as South Korea and Taiwan. These untold inside stories of celebrity endorsement and advocacy will stimulate both academic and general readers’ interest in rethinking the economic and cultural implications of the phenomenon of stardom.

Foreword

Kineta Hung

 

Foreword

P. David Marshall

 

Introduction

V. Leung, K. Cheng and T. Tse

 

Co-creation of celebrities

V. Leung, K. Cheng and T. Tse

 

Celebrities in marketing communication

V. Leung, K. Cheng and T. Tse

 

Celebrity in media

V. Leung, K. Cheng and T. Tse

 

Celebrity and identity

V. Leung, K. Cheng and T. Tse

 

Conclusion 

V. Leung, K. Cheng and T. Tse

Sujets

• Communication persuasive
• Marketing de contenu
• Media
• Industrie
• Communications
• Cultural Studies
• Business
• Economics
• Entertainment
• Media studies
• Popular culture
• Marketing et communication
• Industries
• Communication médiatique

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783208098
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Copy-editor: Michael Eckhardt
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-807-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-808-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-809-8
Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Foreword by Kineta Hung
Foreword by P. David Marshall
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Co-creation of celebrities
Chapter 3: Celebrities in marketing communications
Chapter 4: Celebrity in media
Chapter 5: Celebrity and identity
Chapter 6: Conclusion
References
Authors' biographies
Foreword by Kineta Hung
Celebrity fan culture in Asia is highly vibrant. Fuelled by the explosive growth in the popularity of Chinese and Korean superstars across the region and beyond, as well as the licensing of popular reality shows in markets around the world, celebrity fan culture is turning into a unique worldwide phenomenon. New players (such as cyber-personalities) and new economic values (such as fan economics) are being introduced into the media and entertainment industry, as well as into the world of branding and consumption. Through a negotiation between on- and offline culture and commerce, the relationships among celebrity, fans, media and entertainment are continually evolving and transforming one another.
This book traces the development of this cultural phenomenon as the lines between those who ‘make’ the celebrity and those who ‘use’ the celebrity – and how they do so – are blurred. To provide a better appreciation of the current cultural scene, the authors traced the transformation of media and entertainment industries over previous decades. Key industry players in China, Hong Kong and South Korea were interviewed to garner insights from different perspectives. The role of consumer fans and the impact of social media received special emphases due to the important roles they play in developing the celebrity–fans culture. In so doing, exciting issues are examined, including who determines a public figure’s celebrity status, how a celebrity’s profile is received and recreated, and the impact of these issues on the triangular relationship between society, culture and communication. This book would be of interest to readers excited about the celebrity and entertainment industry in particular and popular culture in general.
The authors are communication and cultural scholars who are well-versed in the areas of celebrity, fashion, luxury brands and the entertainment industry. Each gained substantial experience in the advertising and public relations industries before joining academia, teaching and publishing in their related subject areas.
Foreword by P. David Marshall
In some of my recent writing and research, I have called for the need to advance the study of our public personality systems – including our elaborate and complex celebrity culture – using various different approaches (Marshall, Moore, & Barbour, 2015). As I have developed persona studies over the last five years (in which celebrity can be understood as a subset of a larger and extensive public presentation of the self; cf. Marshall & Barbour, 2015), I have promoted the idea that we have to get much closer to our objects of study: we need to interview celebrities and work out what they imagine they are doing, and then reconstruct our thinking to better express their relationship to our cultures.
This is not an easy process. Researchers such as Kerry Ferris and Scott Harris (2011), who wanted to get close to the Hollywood system of celebrity, downgraded to studying celebrities in mid-sized American cities specifically because they wanted to interview them directly and could not do this successfully with any significant Hollywood stars. A recent study of the psychological implications of fame had to de-identify the famed individuals in their study (Rockwell & Giles 2009), and most of these interviews were conducted by phone or correspondence. Researchers have often been left with the exploration of these public personalities via what I would describe as ‘intrinsic’ interviews, conducted by the media itself, where the content is serving purposes and strategies other than the research. ‘Extrinsic’ interviews of celebrities are the goal, whereby the researcher and the celebrity work through the meaning of the celebrity’s public presentation of the self in a phenomenological explorative way.
The remarkable achievement of this book is that it accomplished this goal, and in many ways represents the first major work that has achieved this direct connection to celebrities and the industrial apparatus that surrounds them. Through a blend of interviews of industry professionals and self-reflective celebrities, this book makes major inroads into the meaning of celebrity culture via its chapters that include an in-depth study of the media and celebrity, identity and celebrity, and the form of marketing communication that celebrities express. This achievement is certainly dependent on the expertise and industrial connections of the authors of this work; yet it is also work that demonstrates an integration of the growing research on celebrity, both from a media and cultural studies perspective, as well as a marketing, communication and advertising point of view.
It is very possible that the predominant location of this study in Hong Kong presented a peculiarly rich resource for this exploration of the industrial and personal dimensions of celebrity culture. Hong Kong has been an entertainment capital in Asia and beyond for some time. And at its current juncture, it has also become a site where one can observe with intensity the transnational flows of pan-Asian media and entertainment. On one level, the entertainment industry and its associated celebrity culture is contained and visible within Hong Kong itself – a city of just over seven million, but with an interesting history of a very visible and active popular culture within its borders. This intense microcosm of interlocking entertainment industries and celebrities perhaps provided some of the visible and accessible pathways for the authors’ investigation of celebrity culture.
Equally significant is that the authors were able to uncover how media professionals and celebrities navigate the changing transnational movements of Asian popular culture. As some of the interviews and analyses in this book reveal, there has been a pragmatically inspired movement of the centre of the entertainment industry to Shanghai, and celebrities are similarly conscious of this shift. As this book reveals, simultaneous to this sensitivity is an understanding of the regional power and aesthetic sensibility of Korean popular culture across Asia. Both of these decades-old transformations are developed and discussed in valuable ways within the context of celebrity culture in the chapters of this book.
Beyond its methodological success and its capacity to directly interview the practitioners and managers of celebrity in the industry, Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia has also begun the significant work that I am hoping will expand with the publication of this work, namely comparative celebrity and persona research. With its nuanced understanding of the Hong Kong scene and its wider reading of East Asian popular culture, this book represents one of the pilots for the development of comparative persona and celebrity research. Each culture has a related but differentiated system of persona, one that is connected to the individuals that are visibly celebrated there. In addition, there is clearly a transnational sense of public and celebrity identity; for example, an idea of glamour that moves between cultures via all sorts of industrial, consumer and popular culture processes enacted by celebrities (Marshall, 2016). Along with a host of other writers and researchers – and an integration of numerous other sources from many national and transnational studies of celebrity – this work certainly is a stimulus to a new generation of research on the fascinating and interlocking world of public personality systems.
Chapter 1
Introduction
W hether living in modern western or Asian societies, we would not be surprised by the fact that we are surrounded by traces of celebrities in our everyday lives: in the news and commercials we watch; the television shows and films we enjoy; the products and images we consume; the role models and media personalities we mimic; the sociocultural issues we tirelessly gossip about; or even the benchmarks we uphold to judge ourselves and others. But what is celebrity? Do we all conceive it similarly across time and space, cultures and contexts? Who produces, propagates and twists its meaning and manifestation?
This book attempts to enrich the existing literature of celebrity studies – which has been predominantly developed from the western cultural context – through in-depth interviews with seasoned practitioners in various entertainment industries and members of media and brand communication teams in Hong Kong, mainland China and South Korea, specifically celebrities, media workers, artist managers and publicists. Through this, we aim to critically understand the divergent definitions of celebrity, analyse the differing manifestations of celebrity cultures, and comprehend the construction of their meanin