NewJeans Is Gen Z Cool
Their album just overtook the Barbie soundtrack on Billboard charts. A lot of times K-pop can feel like it’s massive and relevant, yet hard to wrap your head around how to borrow the genre's best practices for non-music campaigns. A closer look at buzzy group NewJeans’ recent marketing definitely has a few areas of inspiration to consider across any category of pop culture marketing. Much of their unique approach ties back to branding expert, Min Hee-jin – who not surprisingly was just tapped to work with V from BTS. Though a veteran in the space, having launched some of the world’s biggest K-pop, ranging from Girls' Generation, to SHiNee, f(x), Exo and Red Velvet, Min Hee-jin recently told press that she now wants to do “things never seen in the K-pop scene before.”
At a time when campaigns (and a lot of OpEds about them!) are getting longer, such as Barbie’s 16 month pre-release roadmap, NewJeans is unique in that launching this property relies more on a unique mix of secrecy & surprise. Their album, for example, launched without mention of release date or any significant pre-premiere marketing. Some might argue, it took the “win the day” approach of Liquid Death, a marketing ethos built around striving to be “the best thing someone sees on their social feed one day at a time”, versus using a media mix to drive impressions over a period of weeks or months. Having just been casted by Apple as part of the iconic Shot on iPhone campaign, in the spirit of lifting perspective from their momentum, consider these related areas of entertainment marketing inspiration:
A Character Driven Story World
The continuity in storytelling that flows through NewJeans’ visual material is establishing a strong character driven story world – a longtime truth in Hip Hop, for example with Drake reportedly having just melted rival Pharrell’s old jewelry. This type of character driven story world is less common with Pop talent, whose “narrative” falls somewhere between the talent’s overly polished social content and what surfaces in gossip media. In a similar vein to Swifties’ love of lore and “easter eggs”, NewJeans fans are eager to uncover hidden messages between interconnected story worlds in their content. For the music videos of “Ditto” and “OMG”, fans rushed to create theories about how the playful schoolgirl characters actually tell a much darker story.
Blending Sub-Genres
NewJeans' sound integrates experimental subgenres. By paying homage to emerging music that may be beasting in the underground, NewJeans is not only expanding the appeal of their core genre, but also garnering indie credibility while maintaining commercial appeal. Their latest music, for example, incorporates clear Jersey Club inspiration. See GQ’s recent piece on How Jersey Club Music Became the Blueprint for Your Favorite Hip-Hop Songs Right Now.
Elevating Y2K Nostalgia
NewJeans’ aesthetic is a full embrace of Y2K girliness, tapping into a globally relevant nostalgia for the era’s visual and fashion styles. The Y2K aesthetic has felt redundant and overplayed in recent years however, but NewJeans has refreshed this look while pushing the trend forward. Each member is styled in the latest pieces from Gen Z fanatic brands, like Mowalola and Hyein Seo, reinterpreting the vintage revival trend through a fresh, contemporary lens. As writer Michelle Santiago Cortés aptly states in her dirt.fyi dispatch, “NewJeans shines in the afterglow of memory, moving through girlhood both backwards and sideways.”