MCM of Sung Joo Group: An MCM Licensee Wrote a Creation Myth in the Luxury Industry

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (02) ◽  
pp. 277-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eun Jung Choi

In 1994, Sung Joo International was an international distributor of premium and luxury fashion brands in Korea. During that time, Sung Joo International successfully built partnerships with designers such as Gucci, Sonia Rykiel, Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) and Mode Creations Munich (MCM) until 1999. Due to the premillennial global financial crisis, Sung Joo International strategically terminated all their international distribution agreements in 1999 — except their agreement with MCM. The brand gained notoriety among Korean, female college students within the masstige handbag market. Therefore, Sung Joo International acted as the official MCM licensee in Korea, from 2000 to 2004. Based upon a $4 million increase in sales volume, the Sung Joo Group purchased MCM in 2005 with the intent of transforming it into a full-fledged, global luxury brand. Since 2005, the Sung Joo Group has successfully molded MCM into an emerging, semi-luxury brand of iconic leather goods in China, the United States, Korea and Europe. Several innovative steps, such as new product designs, competitive pricing strategies, remerchandising, retail store expansions and collaborative marketing, preceded their entry into the international market. Such steps have been important for the elevation of MCM's brand prestige. The public image of Sung Joo Kim, founder and chairperson of Sung Joo International, has been vital to the rebuilding of MCM's brand image. Under her leadership, Sung Joo International was officially dubbed the “Sung Joo Group.” Her presence in news media and MCM advertisements has since broadened MCM's aspirational appeal. MCM is currently valued at $320 to $400 million, exceeding the $250 million in sales during MCM's 1993 preacquisition height. Within 5 years, Sung Joo Kim expects MCM to become a luxury brand that will be competitive with more established brands such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci.

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam William Chalmers ◽  
Onna Malou van den Broek

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between the global financial crisis and Corporate Social Responsibility reporting of financial services firms. We challenge the view in existing studies that firms, when faced with economic hardship, tend to jettison CSR commitments. Instead, and building on insights regarding the institutional determinants of CSR, we argue that firms are constrained in their ability to abandon CSR by the extent to which they are subject to intense public scrutiny by regulators and the news media. We test this argument in the context of the European sovereign debt crisis drawing on a unique dataset of 170 firms in 15 different countries over a six-year period. Controlling for a battery of alternative explanations and comparing financial service providers to firms operating in other economic sectors, we find considerable evidence supporting our argument. Rather than abandoning CSR during times of economic hardship, financial industry firms ramp up their CSR commitments in order to manage their public image and foster public trust in light of intense public scrutiny.


2016 ◽  
pp. 26-46
Author(s):  
Marcin Jan Flotyński

The global financial crisis in 2007–2009 began a period of high volatility on the financial markets. Specifically, it caused an increased amplitude of fluctuations of the level of gross domestic products, the level of investment and consumption and exchange rates in particular countries. To address the adverse market circumstances, governments and central banks took actions in order to bolster the weakening global economy. The aim of this article is to present the anti-crisis actions in the United States and selected member states of the European Union, including Poland, and an assessment of their efficiency. The analysis conducted indicates that generally the actions taken in the United States in response to the crisis were faster and more adequate to the existing circumstances than in the European Union.


Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro

Starting in the late 1970s, a moral panic concerning child kidnapping and exploitation gripped the United States. For many Americans, a series of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children, publicized through an emergent twenty-four-hour news cycle, signaled a “national epidemic” of child abductions perpetrated by strangers. Some observers insisted that fifty thousand or more children fell victim to stranger kidnappings in any given year. (The actual figure was and remains about one hundred.) Stranger Danger demonstrates how racialized and sexualized fears of stranger abduction—stoked by the news media, politicians from across the partisan divide, bereaved parents, and the business sector—helped to underwrite broader transformations in US political culture and political economy. Specifically, the child kidnapping scare further legitimated a bipartisan investment in “family values” and “law and order,” thereby enabling the development and expansion of sex offender registries, AMBER Alerts, and other mechanisms designed to safeguard young Americans and their families from “stranger danger”—and to punish the strangers who supposedly threatened them.


Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.


Author(s):  
Steven L Schwarcz

Securitisation represents a significant worldwide source of capital market financing. European investors commonly invest in asset-backed securities issued in U.S. securitisation transactions, and vice versa One of the key goals of the European Commission's proposed Capital Markets Union (CMU) is to further facilitate securitisation as a source of capital market financing as a viable alternative to bank-based finance for companies operating in the EU. To that end, this chapter explains securitisation and attempts to put its rise, its decline after the global financial crisis, and its recent CMU-inspired revival into a global perspective. It examines not only securitisation's relationship to the financial crisis but also post-crisis comparative regulatory approaches in the EU and the United States.


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110326
Author(s):  
Lin Liu

This paper presents new empirical evidence concerning the time-varying responses of China’s macroeconomy to U.S. economic uncertainty shocks through a novel TVP-VAR model. The results robustly reveal that a rise in U.S. economic uncertainty would exert sizable, persistent, and significant detrimental effects on China’s gross domestic product (GDP), price level, and short-term interest rate during the period when common shocks take place, such as the global financial crisis around 2008, whereas small and transient effects in the tranquil times. Therefore, China should diversify its international linkages and gradually reduce the dependence on the United States into a certain range to shield the domestic economy, as well as improve the independence of monetary policy. Furthermore, to withstand unfavorable external shocks, China should be prudent on greater opening-up and carry out more intensive intervention when common shocks hit the world economy. Finally, investors should be alert to the potential detrimental impact of U.S. economic uncertainty on Chinese assets’ fundamentals.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-402
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Macpherson

At the end of the 2015 Academy Award-winning film The Big Short, which explores the origins of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, a caption notes that the Wall Street investor protagonist of the film who predicted the collapse of the United States (US) housing market would now be ‘focused on one commodity: water’. Water is sometimes described in popular culture as ‘the new oil’ or ‘more valuable than gold’. It is predicted to be the subject of increasing uncertainty, competition, conflict, and even war, as increasing demand from a growing human population and development meets reduced supply as a result of poor management, overuse, and climate change.


2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Iliadis ◽  
Imogen Richards ◽  
Mark A Wood

‘Newsmaking criminology’, as described by Barak, is the process by which criminologists contribute to the generation of ‘newsworthy’ media content about crime and justice, often through their engagement with broadcast and other news media. While newsmaking criminological practices have been the subject of detailed practitioner testimonials and theoretical treatise, there has been scarce empirical research on newsmaking criminology, particularly in relation to countries outside of the United States and United Kingdom. To illuminate the state of play of newsmaking criminology in Australia and New Zealand, in this paper we analyse findings from 116 survey responses and nine interviews with criminologists working in universities in these two countries, which provide insight into the extent and nature of their news media engagement, and their related perceptions. Our findings indicate that most criminologists working in Australia or New Zealand have made at least one news media appearance in the past two years, and the majority of respondents view news media engagement as a professional ‘duty’. Participants also identified key political, ethical, and logistical issues relevant to their news media engagement, with several expressing a view that radio and television interviewers can influence criminologists to say things that they deem ‘newsworthy’.


1999 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-565 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vally Koubi

Because of the nature of modern weapons, significant innovations in arms technology have the potential to induce dramatic changes in the international distribution of power. Consider, for example, the “strategic defense initiative” (SDI), a program initiated by the United States in the early 1980s. Had the program been successfully completed, it might have led to a substantial devaluation of Soviet nuclear capabilities and put the United States in a very dominant position. It should not then come as a surprise that interstate rivalry, especially among super powers, often takes the form of a race for technological superiority. Mary Acland-Hood claims that although the United States and the Soviet Union together accounted for roughly half of the world's military expenditures in the early 1980s, their share of world military research and development (R&D) expenditures was about 80 percent. As further proof of the perceived importance of R&D, note that whereas the overall U.S. defense budget increased by 38 percent (from $225.1 billion to $311.6 billion in real terms) from 1981 to 1987, military R&D spending increased by 100 percent (from $20.97 billion to $41.96 billion). Moreover, before World War II military R&D absorbed on average less than 1 percent of the military expenditure of major powers, but since then it has grown to 11–13 percent. The emphasis on military technology is bound to become more pronounced in the future as R&D becomes the main arena for interstate competition.


Author(s):  
Christoph Nitschke ◽  
Mark Rose

U.S. history is full of frequent and often devastating financial crises. They have coincided with business cycle downturns, but they have been rooted in the political design of markets. Financial crises have also drawn from changes in the underpinning cultures, knowledge systems, and ideologies of marketplace transactions. The United States’ political and economic development spawned, guided, and modified general factors in crisis causation. Broadly viewed, the reasons for financial crises have been recurrent in their form but historically specific in their configuration: causation has always revolved around relatively sudden reversals of investor perceptions of commercial growth, stock market gains, monetary availability, currency stability, and political predictability. The United States’ 19th-century financial crises, which happened in rapid succession, are best described as disturbances tied to market making, nation building, and empire creation. Ongoing changes in America’s financial system aided rapid national growth through the efficient distribution of credit to a spatially and organizationally changing economy. But complex political processes—whether Western expansion, the development of incorporation laws, or the nation’s foreign relations—also underlay the easy availability of credit. The relationship between systemic instability and ideas and ideals of economic growth, politically enacted, was then mirrored in the 19th century. Following the “Golden Age” of crash-free capitalism in the two decades after the Second World War, the recurrence of financial crises in American history coincided with the dominance of the market in statecraft. Banking and other crises were a product of political economy. The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2008 not only once again changed the regulatory environment in an attempt to correct past mistakes, but also considerably broadened the discursive situation of financial crises as academic topics.


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