BTS As Global Ambassadors For Sustainable Development: Does A Strong Fan-Artist Relationship Secure Engagement With Sustainability-Oriented Activities?

Abstract

In addition to BTS’ cultural and economic impacts, the group has increasingly become linked to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), participating in a series of UN-initiated activities, and sustainability-oriented brand collaborations. Strongly communicated values have been a key feature of BTS’ brand positioning and has allowed BTS to incorporate aspects of sustainability as a facet of their public image. Considering the existing demonstrated level of engagement and impact for social causes by their loyal fanbase, ARMY, our study aimed to identify whether a strong fan-artist relationship would influence engagement with the group’s increasingly sustainability-oriented activities and fans’ motivation to learn more about sustainable development following engagement, and controlling for existing familiarity with the SDGs. Building on Hon and Gruning’s (1999) framework for Organization-Public Relationships (OPR) and elements from Joo et al.’s (2019) perceived corporate social responsibility(CSR) authenticity, we developed an online survey that was distributed in closed ARMY Facebook groups across four English-speaking countries. We asked questions related to fan identification, fans’ relationship with BTS, knowledge of the SDGs, and engagement with eight of BTS’ sustainability-oriented campaigns. Running multiple linear regressions across four hypotheses, our findings returned only two statistically significant relationships among the independent variables: trust showed a positive relationship with motivation to learn more, and congruence showed a negative relationship with engagement with the campaign BTS x Samsung’s Galaxy for the Planet. Control variables for prior familiarity with SDGs and fan identification showed both significant positive and negative relationships with engagement with all but one of the activities. Our study suggests that while the respondents perceived BTS as authentic, trustworthy, and value-driven ambassadors, ARMY’s existing familiarity with the SDGs may be a better predictor of engagement with sustainability activities, rather than ARMY’s strong relationship with, and positive perceptions of BTS.