K-POP 산업의 브랜드 정당성 유지 전략: 진정성과 수익성 간 이중 메시지 관리

초록

K-pop’s global success depends not only on music production but also on how entertainment companies manage legitimacy across multiple audiences. In recent years, the industry has repeatedly faced high-risk moments, including governance conflicts, contractual disputes, and policy controversies, intensifying tensions between market expectations and fan communities. Against this backdrop, this study examines how K-pop agencies structure and differentiate their communication strategies in such contexts through an exploratory, event-driven analysis. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, the analysis distinguishes between coordinative discourse and communicative discourse according to their functional roles. Coordinative discourse constructs strategic rationality and cognitive legitimacy, typically oriented toward markets but occasionally directed at fans when strategic logic requires justification. Communicative discourse seeks public acceptance and emotional legitimacy, primarily engaging fans but also addressing markets when conflict reframing becomes necessary. Using a qualitative case design, the study examines seven high-profile K-pop industry events between 2021 and 2024. A corpus of 488 organizational messages drawn from official statements, press releases, news-mediated corporate speech, and platform communications was coded according to discursive function and audience orientation. The findings show that K-pop companies rarely rely on a single messaging strategy. Instead, they layer coordinative and communicative discourses within the same crisis, emphasizing cognitive legitimacy in market-oriented communication and affective legitimacy in fan-oriented messaging. These findings indicate that dual messaging in K-pop can be understood as an institutional mechanism for managing legitimacy across structurally divergent audiences in affect-driven, platform-based cultural industries.

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