Globalization of RED in South Korea

Nowadays, with the vigorous development of social network media, major Internet giants in

mainland China are very optimistic about the content marketing sector in overseas markets.

ByteDance took the lead in laying out the development of its subsidiaries in Southeast Asia

and launched Byte’s first overseas content marketing product. , Lemon8. RED, the largest

content marketing giant in China, is looking for suitable opportunities to expand its overseas

market. Based on such preliminary survey results, we try to help RED make its first step in its

overseas expansion plan.

 Content

Part I RED Background Information

 What is RED:

RED is a lifestyle-sharing platform for users to share positive energy and good life
through the sharing of text, pictures, and videos, which was founded in June 2013.

 RED's history:

RED started its business by helping overseas travelers to draft a shopping list before they
hit the roads. But with the aggregation of more user-generated content, the service is
transforming into a community for those who are passionate about fashion and shopping
and want to know more about these fields even though they do not have overseas
traveling plans on their schedules.

2013.10 2014.1 Now

Begin with a pdf called

outbound Shopping Guide which RED App Become a Chinese
holds 500,000+ downloads. is launched content community
giant

 RED's Business mode:

The commercial positioning of RED is a bridge between customers and brands. While
providing customers with richer product usage guidelines, it also provides brand owners
with channels for promotion and directions for product improvement. So, 80% of their
income comes from sales advertising, brand cooperation, and promotion.

RED’s user description

As the public data shows, 89.1% of the RED users are female and the majority of them are
aged 18 to 34 and located in tier 1 and 2 cities in China. And four major descriptive types of
them are Z generation, white collar, hedonistic, and exquisite baby mother. They are all
passionate about life which reflects their common lifestyle of sharing their rich and colorful
life and new things happening on the social media platform. Meanwhile, they hold a relatively
high spending power.

Part II South Korea’s cultural environment

Generally, South Korea is a strong economy in Asia (as one of the developed countries in
Asia) with a highly similar culture to China compared to other developed countries in Europe
and the US. Besides, South Korea is promoting a “building a nation through culture” strategy
and holding a well-organized internet infrastructure web which provides a solid basis for
developing social media platforms.

 South Korea’s geographical setting

a. Location

South Korea is a country in East Asia. It occupies the southern portion of the Korean
peninsula.

b. Climate

South Korea’s climate is characterized by a cold, relatively dry winter and a hot, humid
summer.
 South Korea’s social institutions

Small family sizes and high levels of urbanization make them desperate to connect with
others through the Internet.

a. Family

Household size:

As the following picture shows, in 2021, single-person households accounted for about 33.4
percent of total private households in South Korea, followed by two-person households at
about 28 percent. The average household size in South Korea that year was 2.3 persons.

Settlement pattern:

The pace of urbanization in South Korea since 1960 has caused considerable
depopulation of rural areas, and the traditional rural lifestyle has been slowly fading
away. In contrast to rural areas, urban populations have grown enormously. Seoul, the
political, economic, and cultural center of the country, is by far the largest city; satellite cities
around Seoul—notably Anyang, Sŏngnam, Suwŏn, and Puch’ŏn—also have grown rapidly,
forming an extensive conurbation (Greater Seoul) to the south of the city. In addition to
Seoul, other cities with populations of at least one million are Pusan, Inch’ŏn, Taegu, Taejŏn,
Kwangju, and Ulsan.
Demographic trends:

South Korea’s population more than doubled over the second half of the 20th century. From
1960, however, birth rates decreased rapidly, and the population growth rate was almost
negligible by the beginning of the 21st century. During the same period, mortality rates also
slowed, reflecting an overall increase in living standards.
More than four-fifths of the population is classified as urban; roughly half the
population lives in the country’s seven largest cities. Thus, although the country’s rate of
population growth is low, its overall population density is high—some two and a half times
that of North Korea—with huge concentrations of people in the major cities.
b. Education system

After World War II, South Korea began to popularize education, and now the
population is generally well-educated.

Six years of primary-school education and three years of middle school are compulsory, and
virtually all children of school age are enrolled. Nearly all middle-school graduates continue
to high-school or technical school. About four-fifths of high school graduates go on to higher
educational institutions. Graduation from a college or university grew considerably in
importance in South Korea after World War II, and the number of college-level institutions
increased enormously. Admission to a college or university requires applicants to pass a
fiercely competitive entrance examination; high school students must endure grueling
preparation work for these examinations, and less than half of high school graduates get the
opportunity to study at universities. Nearly all of the most prestigious schools are located in
Seoul; these include the state-run Seoul National University (founded 1946)—one of more
than a dozen national universities located throughout the country—and the private Korea
University (1905), Yonsei University (1885), Ewha Womans University (1886), and
Sookmyung Women’s University (1906). In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, overseas
study, particularly in the United States, grew in popularity.

c. Political system

South Korea has a multiparty system in which two parties have tended to dominate,
although their names and composition have often changed. In the early 21st century the
conservative Grand National Party and the centrist-liberal Democratic Party were dominant.

d. Legal system

The judicial branch consists of the Supreme Court, three appellate courts (High
Courts), district courts, a family court, a patent court, and administrative and local
courts. The Supreme Court is empowered to interpret the constitution and all other state laws
and to review the legality of government regulations and activities. The chief justice is
appointed by the president with the consent of the National Assembly.

e. Ethnicity Composition

The population of South Korea is highly homogeneous; almost the entire population is
ethnically Korean, and there is a small minority of ethnic Chinese permanent residents. The
number of foreigners is growing, especially in the major urban areas; people from Japan, the
United States (including members of the military), and China make up the largest foreign
populations, although they still constitute only small fractions. Many foreign nationals are
employed in business or the diplomatic corps, and tens of thousands of workers come from
China and Southeast Asia.

South Korea’s religion and language

Religion:

Freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed in South Korea, and there is no

national religion. Historically, several religions prevailed successively: shamanism (the
religious belief in gods, demons, and ancestral spirits responsive to a priest, or shaman),
Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. The principles and social outlook of Confucianism
are still much in evidence in Korean daily life and family relationships, and Buddhism
remains influential—even among people who may be nominally Christian, for example.
Approximately one-fourth of the population professes Christianity, with Protestants
(particularly Presbyterians and Methodists), independent Christians, and Roman Catholics the
largest groups. Less than one-sixth of the population is Buddhist.
Language:

All Koreans speak the Korean language, which is often classified as one of the Altaic languages,
has affinities to Japanese, and contains many Chinese loanwords. Korean often is written as a
combination of Chinese ideograms and Hangul in South Korea, although the trend is toward using
less Chinese. A large number of English words and phrases have crept into the language—
either intact or modified by local usage—as a result of the American presence in the country
since 1950.

Competitor Analysis
There are two major competitors of RED entering the South Korean market.
The first one is BAND. BAND is a social media app launched by local Internet giant

Naver in South Korea in 2012. In less than two years after its launch, BAND has surpassed
Facebook's number of active users in South Korea. It is somewhat different from regular

group chat apps, which is more like a Facebook club in type, but it does not collect as much

personal information as Facebook. The main themes of this social media are travel,

photography, mountaineering, painting, books and produce. Users can choose to enter specific

sections according to their interests, where they can find many friends, to communicate and

discuss together. However, it only focuses on private community sharing and the majority of

Koreans in their 50s use BAND.

The second one is Instagram. Instagram is a photo-sharing social media service owned

by Facebook. According to a recent survey, Instagram is the second most frequently used

social networking service by Koreans, with 5.8 billion minutes of usage per month, which

means 15.66 million Koreans spend an average of 6 hours and 11 minutes per month.

Instagram allows users to capture their life memories in any environment and choose the filter

style of pictures. However, Instagram has stuck to its focus on photos and videos and

discouraged users from using text too much. Images (and videos) have always been the most

important vehicle for Instagram content, which places a lot of limits on what users can share

and some barriers to brands spreading.

Segmentation and Targeting

There are 4 segments in this market. In the first segment, people tend to seek

information for fun or consumption through social media apps, they like to know some

specific information they want or what the daily news is. In the Second segment, people

desire to share things about them, the content is not limited to pictorial nor textual, it could be

both daily life and experience. Also, the audience of their sharing is not limited to private

community. People in the Third segment is slightly different from the segment 2 as they just

want to share the specific moment of their life, so the content may just be pictures. In the last

segment, people are more blocked, they just want to share things to the private community. In

conclusion, RED is targeting the first 2 segments people.

Positioning
Based on the previous analysis, RED’s position will be: “To South Korean Females
who wants to improve and share lifestyles through social media apps, RED is a social media

app that provides both pictorial and textual contents to help them improve their life quality

and share lifestyles more efficiently and comprehensively.”

Product strategy for RED.

Core component
The first is its platform. RED encourages sharing and interaction in product design, and

users can post far more than pictures and videos. In addition, users can also post notes of less

than 1000 words to share the content of food, skin care, clothing, travel, fitness, decoration,

reading and other aspects of life, which is highly integrated.

The second is the functions. As the main functional module of the home page of RED,

“Discover” has a collection of various fields of content. The clear classification tags would

enable users to find recipes, buy air tickets, apply for visas, find overseas travel guides, study,

and job experience, and even to sell second-hand or short-term rent. Like the general platform

audit mechanism is machine audit, human audit is mainly to filter out the platform of no

profit, mainly involving gambling and violence. The subjective operation of RED is relatively

strong as it is the reviewer to judge whether the content is beneficial to its distribution users,

that is to say, we often say that it is not "real stuff" because we don’t know whether there is

not the advertising information. This "subjective review" is often more representative of the

user on the other side of the screen than the cold machine. The credibility of information

shared by "real people" is greatly increased. Also, as RED is not a private social platform,

many people are willing to share their essays, moods, and daily lives with strangers here.
The third is the algorithm. In the searching UI, with its strong algorithm, users could

easily find the most relevant content, which make the searching process efficient. In addition

to liking comments, users can also create multiple favorites for their favorite notes on RED.

What is more, "Discover" is based on a powerful algorithm to generate a push of "thousands

of faces" according to the user's preferences in the form of feed stream, which also facilitates

users to find the content they are interested in.

Package component
 The trademark and shopping user interface will remain the same, and the brand name

will be RED and its Korean version.

Support Component
There will be coupons in the shopping part, deliveries and warranty will be guaranteed

as well. Also, there will be customer services for users to give feedbacks, instructions and

traffic awards for content creating.