BTS Success Formula and Its Lessons for Korea

Last weekend, BTS held their comeback concert at Gwanghwamun in Seoul. The group's members, who had suspended activities for military service, reunited as a full seven-member ensemble on stage after completing their duties. Major global media outlets covered the event extensively, and the concert was livestreamed to some 190 countries through Netflix, making it undeniably an event that captured worldwide attention. BTS fans — known as ARMY — flocked from around the world to see the performance, and shops near Gwanghwamun reportedly enjoyed an unexpected boom in business. It was a moment that reaffirmed the ever-expanding global influence of Hallyu, the Korean Wave.

While BTS now commands such global influence, the group did not have a smooth path from the start. BTS debuted in 2013, when the typical route for new K-pop acts to succeed was gaining visibility through terrestrial television broadcasts. However, Big Hit Entertainment, the agency BTS belonged to, was merely a small-to-midsize firm that lacked the funding and personnel for large-scale promotion through terrestrial TV. To overcome this disadvantage, BTS adopted a strategy of leveraging social media platforms such as YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). They consistently supplied a vast range of content through social media — not just new songs but also behind-the-scenes production footage and glimpses of their daily lives. This strategy, bolstered by the rapid expansion of internet infrastructure and the explosive growth of social media users at the time, contributed enormously to building a global fan base. In other words, rather than employing the traditional approach of building domestic popularity first and then venturing overseas, they targeted the international stage directly — a new strategy that secured fans worldwide.

Of course, for such a strategy to succeed, the content must be compelling. The lyrics, music, and personal stories shared needed to resonate universally. Through their song lyrics and social media posts, BTS candidly expressed the anxieties about the future, dreams, and love commonly felt by young people around the world, successfully earning widespread empathy. They won over not only young people but also parents who yearned for wholesome content for their children instead of decadent pop culture. What is particularly noteworthy is that most of this content was produced in Korean — at least in the early debut period. Common sense might dictate that content should be made in English to achieve global reach, but BTS judged that authenticity mattered more than language. Remarkably, fans around the world voluntarily translated, shared, and embraced content made in Korean, and on the strength of their support, BTS achieved global success.

In this way, BTS employed strategies that defied conventional wisdom from the group's early days, and those strategies succeeded in making them global stars. They bypassed terrestrial TV and used social media. Instead of securing domestic fans first, they targeted young people across the entire globe. They insisted on Korean rather than risk undermining authenticity with awkward English, and they sought to win the empathy of the world's youth with constructive content rather than decadent material. In truth, these strategies were disadvantageous for achieving short-term popularity or results. But they ultimately succeeded and became the driving force behind Hallyu's explosive growth as it gained acceptance worldwide.

Korea is now making arduous efforts across every sector to leap from a middle-income country to an advanced nation. What we need most at this juncture is not to follow the paths others have paved before us but to create our own new paths — just as BTS chose strategies different from everyone else's to overcome their difficult early circumstances. Yet we still too often force people onto well-trodden roads in the name of objective evaluation. The government is particularly guilty of this. Even in scientific and technological research — the very domain where creativity should be most respected — government assessments remain centered on objective metrics such as paper counts. Under such conditions, producing truly world-leading achievements is difficult. It is time to carefully ponder why people joke that Korea could become the world's best in women's golf and baduk (Go) precisely because no government ministry was in charge of them.