Exploring the Dynamics of Consumer-Human Brand Relationship in Collectivist Southeast Asian Markets

Sammanfattning

K-pop has become one of the most influential forces in the music industry that create commercially significant human brands with a significant amount of fan base. Traditionally, consumer-brand relationship (CBR) literature has focused on how consumers interact with product brands grounded on a Western individualistic and dyadic perspective. However, this framework does not adequately explain how collectivistic cultural values shape the complexities of how fans build, maintain, and negotiate their relationship with human brands. The purpose of this research is to explore the consumer-brand relationships are constructed between K-pop idols as human brands and their fans, especially Generation Z K-pop fans, in Southeast Asian collectivistic markets. The research aims to obtain a deeper understanding of how Generation Z fans construct, sustain, and negotiate these relationships with their idols and their fellow fans, thereby creating meanings of their relationships. This thesis uses the Consumer-Brand Relationship (CBR) as the main theoretical lens, Human Brand Theory (HBT) as supporting theoretical lens, and Consumer Culture Theory as the contextual lens, and Relational Labor as the supporting mechanism. This study adopted an abductive qualitative research approach in combining the use of interviews and netnography. The researchers conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Generation Z fans in Vietnam and Indonesia and supported by netnographic data collected from six months of idols’ post on the Weverse App where K-pop idols interact with their fans. The findings challenge the traditional dyadic framework of CBR in three ways. The first theme surrounding the formation and maintenance of consumer-human brand relationships through transparent bidirectional relational labor involved mutual emotional and financial investments between both parties. Second, the fandom community functions not as an additional enhancement but as an important prerequisite for fan-idol relationship formation and maintenance. Third, this study challenges the idea of unconditional fan loyalty that has been widely held in parasocial relationships, by demonstrating that three-tiered collective moral accountability plays a large part in how fans maintain and negotiate their relationships. Southeast Asian fans serve as gatekeepers for their idols, showing both rational and emotional response based on the three-tiered moral boundaries, including rational tolerance toward idols’ personal lifestyle choices, conditional forgiveness toward sociopolitical violations, and collective boycott for serious legal violations. Given these dynamics, fans participation spectrum further emerge to set individual boundary, including silent participation, selective engagement, and life-stage-driven recalibration. This research contributes to the literature by extending Fournier's (1998) CBR framework to human brand and collectivist market contexts. It has demonstrated that social communities are an integral part of human brand relationships in Southeast Asian collectivist markets. It also provides novel contribution that has extended the relational structure of the consumer-human brand relationship from a dyadic model to a community-mediated triadic relationship between individual fans, idols, and fandom community. The practical implications for brand managers and agencies are to adopt a community-building focus and to recognize and respect the moral and community structures of Southeast Asian fandoms.