MAM
The birth of Korean cool: how Seoul hacked the world’s taste buds
MUMBAI: This is a book the Indian prime minister’s office ought to read between policy briefs—and then read again with a highlighter. Ditto Ashwini Vaishnaw and the mandarins at the ministry of information and broadcasting. Narendra Modi has spoken often about exporting India’s soft power; he has even launched Waves to push Indian content abroad. Euny Hong’s The Birth of Korean Cool shows, briskly and unsentimentally, how another Asian countries actually did it.
First published in 2014 and expanded for 2025, the book is part reportage, part cultural history and part field manual. Hong, a Paris-based journalist, dissects how a war-battered, culturally insecure South Korea retooled itself into a global style factory. The lesson is bracing: Korean cool did not “go viral”. It was planned.
Hong’s central argument is gloriously unfashionable. Hallyu—the Korean wave—was not an accident of youthful exuberance but a state project, designed with bureaucratic zeal. Around 2000, president Kim Dae-jung looked at America’s film revenues and Britain’s stage musicals and drew a blunt conclusion: culture pays. He set up a Cultural Content Office with a $50 million annual budget. That pot swelled to $500 million. Today it is closer to $5 billion, still fuelling Korea’s pop exports.
A financial crisis provided the shove. When heavy industry sputtered, policymakers pivoted to pop. Culture, they decided, was not fluff but infrastructure. Long before K-pop hijacked playlists and K-dramas colonised Netflix queues, Seoul chose to subsidise desire—with spreadsheets, grants and a steely long game.
The book is at its sharpest when Hong punctures the myth of effortless cool. She tours idol boot camps that would make investment bankers blanch, a society obsessed with polish, and an ecosystem where failure is not romanticised but fixed. Cool, she argues, can be trained—sometimes brutally.
She is no evangelist. With dry wit, Hong exposes the darker underside: pressure-cooker perfectionism, the commodification of youth, the relentless optimisation of faces, bodies and emotions. Korean cool, she reminds readers, is as much factory as fantasy.Stylistically, the book moves at K-pop tempo—snappy, self-aware, lightly irreverent. Hongwrites like an insider with a sceptic’s eyebrow permanently raised. The prose is sharp without being academic. This is economics in eyeliner.
If there is a flaw, it is deliberate. Readers seeking obsessive deep dives into specific bands or shows may find Hong more interested in systems than stars. But that, too, is the point. This is not fandom. It is a study of how nations brand themselves—and win.
The Birth of Korean Cool is ultimately a warning to every country chasing relevance. Soft power is not vibes; it is policy. Cool is not magic; it is management. Seoul did not wait to be discovered. It engineered desire—and exported it. The rest of the world is still humming along, trying to catch the tune.
(Thanks to Sameer Nair for the gift. Paperback available on Amazon at Rs 1,612. Publisher: Picador; pp 331.)
MAM
WPP appoints Estée Lauder’s Anne-Isabelle Choueiri as chief transformation officer
Former Estée Lauder executive to lead operations, technology and culture overhaul under WPP’s three-year growth plan
LONDON: WPP has appointed Anne-Isabelle Choueiri as chief transformation officer in a newly created role tasked with delivering the group’s Elevate28 strategy.
Choueiri joins from The Estée Lauder Companies, where she led enterprise-wide strategic initiatives, including the “One ELC” operating model and major upgrades to enterprise marketing, data and analytics capabilities. She also led the redesign of enterprise technology teams and served on the company’s AI taskforce, driving AI strategy, adoption and value realisation across the business.
At WPP, she will be responsible for designing, implementing and embedding the operating model behind Elevate28, the company’s three-year growth plan unveiled in February 2026. She will lead efforts to improve innovation, efficiency and integration across WPP’s client offerings, with a focus on delivering agile, outcome-driven solutions and measurable growth.
Choueiri will oversee organisational transformation across the group, working closely with product and enterprise technology teams to deploy AI, data and technology to build new capabilities and improve operational performance. She will also work with the people function to embed cultural change, strengthen an agile performance mindset and support talent development across the organisation.
Before joining Estée Lauder, she held senior roles across consulting and digital agencies, including at Accenture, Masaï (a Bain & Company spin-off), and Kearney, with experience spanning strategy, data and digital marketing transformation.
Cindy Rose, chief executive officer of WPP, said Choueiri brings a strong track record of leading large-scale transformation across operations, technology and culture, adding that her appointment will help accelerate the group’s next phase of growth under Elevate28.
Choueiri said WPP’s strategy represents an ambitious opportunity to reshape how the company operates and delivers for clients, adding that she looks forward to building integrated solutions and fostering a culture of innovation and change.
She will be based in New York and will join WPP’s executive committee.
