한류의 물결을 넘어서:자국적,글로벌,그리고 초국적 문화 콘텐츠를 위한 한국영화의 해외진출 전략

Cultural industries, such as the movie industry, have recently attracted growing attention as the most important emerging sector that is expected to create enormous economic values as well as cultural pride in the 21st century. The current study aims at establishing a systematic theoretical framework that may also provide practical and policy implications, based on the realization of the needs for systematic resource and policy supports for the further expansion of ‘Hanryu(韓流)’, i.e. Korean wave, in the global community. In this regard, existing studies in the cultural industry literature have laid an important foundation in that they pioneered the academic inquiry of cultural sectors as industries. The current study examines the performance implications of global market strategies that divide the cultural market into three segments based on the idiosyncratic characteristics of cultural preferences. The current study categorizes the following three market segments: 1) localized market niche that reflects each country’s unique cultural preferences, 2) globalized market niche that deals with general cultural preferences shared broadly by global citizens, 3) transnationalized market niche that targets unique global cultural preferences that transcend any particular local cultural contexts. Based on this segmentation of global movie markets, the current study suggests the following two strategic implications for globalization: First, it is disadvantageous for film distributors to distribute the same cultural contents to multiple global markets, each of which has a distinctive cultural preferences. Second, the government needs to provide different types of supports according to different niche characteristics of each market segment. Based on these observations, the current study suggests two generic strategies that may enhance export performances of the Korean movie industry, the validity and relevance of which are tested by an empirical analysis that used a data-set containing information on all Korean movies released 1997~2005. While the one is ‘PR strategy’ geared to overcoming reputation limits in global markets, the other is ‘contents composition strategy’ aiming to resolve the problem of contents availability. The current study emphasizes the importance of the government’s policy to enhance diversity in contents production by examining disadvantages of employing mixed strategies. According to the results of our empirical analyses, all four hypotheses were strongly supported. That is, while both PR strategy utilizing international film festivals and content composition strategy conforming to global trends turned out to have positive effects on export performances, the employment of mixed strategies and PR strategies during Hanryu period turned out to have negative effects. Academic implications for subsequent studies and policy implications for the government and practitioners are discussed.