— Overview
As living standards rose, performing arts stopped looking like a pastime only for a high social rank and began to interest a much wider public. The audience is not a late decoration. It is how a production keeps its finances steady and how a work reaches a finish that can be shared. Marketing, in that light, is part of making the work, not an afterthought. Motives discussed here include relief from stress, a better quality of life, a break from the everyday, play, and a cultural hunger.
No current ticket-sale figure is added.
— Contents and key concepts
A wider public, and an audience that keeps the work standing
Korea's cultural life, in this telling, rose with high growth, industrialization, science, and a broader social development. As the quality of life improved and a measure of economic ease arrived, leisure time grew, and people began to think of spending that time well. Interest in culture widened, and so did spending on it. Performing arts, once widely seen as a mark of social rank, started to draw a much larger public.
In that widened field, the audience is not an ornament added at the end. Jeong (2003) argues that spectators matter for the financial stability of a production and for its artistic finish. Marketing, understood this way, is the work of recognizing how people come to want a performance and of building a path they can actually take. A five-step picture of a consumer decision — need, search, comparison, attendance, later judgment — is borrowed from everyday buying and applied to the wish to watch.
What a motive does, and why a performance is a particular kind of good
A motive, as Namgung (1998) sets it out, is what prepares a person to pursue a goal and what keeps the action going. It has the character of a need or an impulse; once it forms, a person is placed in a tension often called emotion; it livens consumption; and it helps a person set a goal, weigh how useful a product is for that goal, and steer behavior toward what will meet it. For a marketer, a motive is a need strong enough to produce action.
A performance offers benefits at the level of feeling: pleasure, a sense of worth in living. It is also made and given by people with a particular artistic talent, and that is how it differs from many other cultural goods. Nam and colleagues (2015) saw attendance as a way to ease stress and to improve the quality of life. Kwon and colleagues (2015) found motives clustered around escape from the everyday, cultural interest, and play. Those readings stay in their years. No later box-office total is laid on top of them.
Sources
- an account of why performing arts need audiences and what motivates attendance, citing Jeong Ok-jo (2003), Namgung Young (1998), Nam Jeong-mi and colleagues (2015), and Kwon Hyeok-in and colleagues (2015).
Last updated: 14 November 2026
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