London Korean Links

Covering things Korean in London and beyond since 2006

Korean marketing skills

Korea may be the most wired nation on earth (or is it the second-most?), but Koreans in London have yet to embrace new technology.

Centrepoint
Somewhere around here you might come across a solitary poster for the Lee Soo Young concert

As noted in previous rants, there has been absolutely nothing official on the web which gives any decent information on the Korean concert in Croydon on 1 May. Well, yesterday I found some publicity and a few programme details. And the delivery mechanism was resolutely twentieth-century. Well actually a few centuries earlier than that. I saw a poster. Taped to the door of an oriental foodstore in the concrete wasteland underneath Centrepoint. You had to squat down to read it, and jump out of the way every time a customer wanted to get in or out, to avoid getting your face bashed in. The print was very small, so small you needed to press your face against the glass in order to read anything, thus increasing the risk of injury. I’m not very good at squatting. I think westerners aren’t, in general. Anyway, in the brief moments in between dodging the customers and before my knees gave way, I gained the impression from the pictures that the concert will have three themes. Firstly Lee Soo Young’s latest album; secondly (as I originally guessed from the title of the concert) Ahn Eaktae’s Korea Fantasy for choir & orchestra; thirdly some traditional Korean songs, though what genre I didn’t stay to find out — it was too dangerous. A curious mixture.

And who’s going to go to it? Koreans I guess, given that no-one else (apart from the one or two people who are good enough to visit to this site) is going to know about it. I suppose there will be charabancs going from New Malden to Croydon on the MayDay holiday, because the event is being organised by the New Malden Korean Residents Society. But wasn’t this an opportunity to have a bit of cultural exchange? Maybe try to get some Brits going along, in the spirit of ‘Think Korea 2006’? And how do you do this? Try publicising it on the web for a start.

3 thoughts on “Korean marketing skills

  1. i agree. This has been the most frustarting part of ‘think Korea 2006’. every govt initiative bar this one gets a website in seconds.

    i shop at centerpoint too – they have flyers at the till but they are just as mysterious 😛

  2. That was my first visit to Centrepoint – I didn’t know about it until someone told me about it a week or so ago (I’ve been going to Hana for my Kimchi). I thought I’d try to find it seeing I was in the area (I was meeting up with Jase and Meeyeon from http://www.koreanfilm.org.uk for a Korean meal in Poland Street). By the time I’d found the store and tried to decipher the poster I was running late, otherwise I’d have investigated for handbills and soju inside.
    I’ll now have to update my food & restaurants page.
    By the way, I need to work out how to set up WordPress so that I don’t have to approve comments before they get posted (I’m a bit of a newbie at this). I don’t mean to police the comments.

  3. Couldn’t agree more! I first got wind of the concert via soompi.com, and was equally frustrated that there was no official Think Korea site and no more details of the concert anywhere. (I can’t even go, but I was still frustrated! 🙂

    However, through searching around for more info I did end up here – great site, thanks for all the work you’ve put in collating Korean info.

Leave a Reply to Kay Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.