Methodology

ART + ACADEMIA.

THE RIGHT TOOLS
South Korea’s pop culture ascendancy was enabled by its mastery of visuality and digitality. In order to truly understand how things work on the ground here, from the question of why Koreans lead the world in high rates of plastic surgery, why Seoul street fashion has suddenly garnered the world’s attention, or why drag and gender-crossing is trending around the country, one has to understand how visuality plays a role in each subculture and unique set of social practices using Ethnomethodology and Technomethodology. And then one must understand how digitality has allowed each of these phenomena to explode, as made visible by the lens of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis/CTDA). Grounded by the experience of a Korea-based ethnographer, researcher, and industry professional with two decades of fire-baptized experience in Korea, Dr. Hurt leads a team that produces:

• quality, qualitative market research using real ethnographic data

• stunning and sticky artistic output made by our actual Creators so we rarely outsource

• content-marketing channels for your store, product, or service into

• customized guerrilla marketing that is only possible by executing with our ethnographic/street-based familiarity with the Korean market

RICH SOCIAL DATA.

GROUND-BASED DATA
Iconology Korea's big idea is to take the capabilities of our founders and the people they will recruit to create a singular, reputable agency that will produce and manage INBOUND and OUTBOUND knowledge about Korea, while also providing domestic INTERNAL cultural consulting services to the many members of the culture producers market with unmet needs or whose needs are currently being haphazardly and amateurishly met. Our people are essentially ethnographers who study and know the culture before recording and re-presenting it in a package for easy consumption.

GLOCAL POSITIONING.

Iconology Korea is positioned at the nexus of the global and the local, where global forms and practices get parsed through local interpretation and practices. Understood simply, it's the Bulgogi Burger at McDonald's Korea suddenly becoming a global hit. The same power of glocality holds true for Korean street fashion, cinema, and food, in our analysis. We see data through this kind of theoretical lens to reach truly useful conclusions. In short, we know Korea, its streets, its realities, its sensibilities. Other operators in this space of "cultural consulting" often put up a front that they know the ins and outs, all the angles and exigencies, but this is usually all outsourced. Our knowledge is generated (and billed) in-house, from the theory down to the ground.