Estimating the Price of Fanatism: A Case of Indonesian K-Pop Merchandising Market

Abstract

There had been few prior research in Indonesia that has given insight and overview into the K-pop merchandising market landscape. However, none of them took pricing on K-pop merchandise into perspective. Thus, this article attempts to answer research inquiries about the overall K-pop product market through the role of pricing. To limit the study, only two different types of K-po signature merchandising were examined in this research namely album bundles and lightsticks. Using the Van Westendorp’s model, this study tried to find out the fans’ acceptable price range. Using self-completion online surveys, this study managed to explore both items’ acceptable price ranges. Among 200 respondents, both merchandises’ acceptable price range were clustered closely to the local e-commerce’s price range rather than its official distributor/seller website. The album bundling price range were scattered between IDR 245,000 (≈USD 15.83) to IDR 375,000 (≈USD 24.23) per bundle. Meanwhile, the lightstick was around IDR 465,000 (≈USD 30.04) – IDR 700,000 (≈USD 45.23) per item.