* Business Resources

This book on marketing continues to reflect our firm belief that the Wheel of Consumer Analysis is a powerful tool not only for organizing consumer behaviour knowledge but also for understanding consumers and for guiding the development of successful marketing strategies. In fact, it has been used by marketing consultants and practitioners to do so. The various chapters presented here follow several approaches, which researchers can explore in different contexts. This book intends to contribute to a better understanding of the application areas of marketing strategies and shows how these business practices in social sciences can stimulate various topics.

This research topic for Frontiers in Psychology highlights some of the more relevant changes that have conditioned consumer behavior in recent years—among these, the paradigm shift in marketing is worth emphasizing. Today, the market and the companies are implementing Marketing 4.0; This new marketing approach modifies both the business rules and the channels by changing the way to dialogue, interact and relation with consumers. The present Research Topic brings together 30 studies by 76 authors who analyzed the relevance of consumer behavior changes under this new paradigm, using different theoretical and methodological frameworks. These different papers, mainly constituting original research, examine a variety of sub-topics, including online and mobile environments, value co-creation, internal marketing strategies, and diverse industries and product markets.Given this broad selection of papers, we encourage readers to draw their own conclusions about the complex phenomena of consumer behavior. Our hope is that these different perspectives will cover various gaps in the field and prompt discussion among the audience of Frontiers in Psychology.

Pop City examines the use of Korean television dramas and K-pop music to promote urban and rural places in South Korea. Building on the phenomenon of Korean pop culture, Youjeong Oh argues that pop culture-featured place selling mediates two separate domains: political decentralization and the globalization of Korean popular culture. The local election system introduced in the mid 90s has stimulated strong desires among city mayors and county and district governors to develop and promote their areas. Riding on the Korean Wave--the overseas popularity of Korean entertainment, also called Hallyu--Korean cities have actively used K-dramas and K-pop idols in advertisements designed to attract foreign tourists to their regions. Hallyu, meanwhile, has turned the Korean entertainment industry into a speculative field into which numerous players venture by attracting cities as sponsors. By analyzing the process of culture-featured place marketing, Pop City shows that urban spaces are produced and sold just like TV dramas and pop idols by promoting spectacular images rather than substantial physical and cultural qualities. Popular culture-associated urban promotion also uses the emotional engagement of its users in advertising urban space, just as pop culture draws on fans' and audiences' affective commitments to sell its products. Oh demonstrates how the speculative, image-based, and consumer-exploitive nature of popular culture shapes the commodification of urban space and ultimately argues that pop culture-mediated place promotion entails the domination of urban space by capital in more sophisticated and fetishized ways.