This is a continuous three-year study. In the first year, it was attempted to derive the core values of the regional food culture through a French food culture branding study, and in the second year, regional food culture branding research was conduct ...
This is a continuous three-year study. In the first year, it was attempted to derive the core values of the regional food culture through a French food culture branding study, and in the second year, regional food culture branding research was conducted in Mexico and the Mediterranean and the core components of the cultural brand were deduced. In the third year, the process of developing a Korean food culture branding paradigm was conducted in which the results of two years of overseas research were integrated and applied to Korean cases.
The first-year study on French food culture branding was conducted by analyzing the case of “French food culture branding,” which is renowned as an exemplary case of food culture branding, as well as the characteristics and differences of French food culture branding through research results derived from this process. In particular, in the first year, the chef's brand was regarded as a core sub-brand of the French food culture brand and was attempted to be used as a basis for a synchronic analysis to grasp the identity and core values of the French food culture brand. Therefore, this study attempted to understand the overall French food culture with the semiotic analysis of discourses related to French food culture, and to find the identity and core values of the French chef brand from a synchronic perspective. Through the analysis of the isotopes of the discourse on the French culinary recipe itself from French chefs and from Haute cuisine to Nouvelle cuisine, an attempt was made to derive the identity of the French food culture brand and explain it in a semiotic square structure. In addition, through the identity analysis of French chef branding, we tried to analyze the core values of French food culture brands. In other words, this study positions and also synchronically interprets the identities of representative French chef brands such as Marie-Antoine Carême, Georges-Auguste Escoffier, Mère Fillioux and Mère Brazier, and Paul Bocuse into the areas of Project value, Information value, Euphory value, and Vision value. This study will understand that the results are in line with the temporal journey of chef branding, starting from the project value of Carême to the information value of Escoffier, the euphory value of Mère Brazier, and the vision value of Bocuse. Through the results of this first year's study, we understand the core values of Korean food culture brands in a synchronic way, and include not only the receiver-oriented perspective but also the sender-oriented perspective as in the case of French food culture branding. It was possible to obtain implications that the development direction of Korean food culture branding should be explored.
In the second year's study, it was debated whether it was necessary to review the food culture branding method from the perspective of the core subject of regional food culture branding. In other words, this study is about food culture branding as a process of making food from the perspective of chefs and restaurants, food culture branding in the process of managing food culture from the perspective of regional governments, and food culture from the perspective of regional residents and tourists. It has come to a conclusion that food culture branding is necessary as a process of experiencing. Therefore, in the second year, we attempted to understand the identity of food culture in Mexico and the Mediterranean region through data collected from visits and media research in three cities in Mexico and five cities in the Mediterranean and the analysis of the official websites of each city. We drew the core components of the food culture brand as a part of regional culture branding through the analysis of the structure and contents of the discourse related to food culture in each region. By categorizing this, it can be broadly divided into food experience elements and food culture communication elements. The food experience elements could be further subdivided into four elements: food ingredients, food, recipes and special products, and the food culture communication elements could be further subdivided into four elements: events, food space, cultural facilities and public relations. In addition, the extensive cultural-oriented value and structure of semiosis, which is included in the derived regional food culture brand elements and oriented values, are re-analyzed and positioned using the structure and concept of “consumption value mapping” of Semprini as a measure. A “regional food culture brand octagon” that will be the basis of the “regional food culture branding model” could be derived.
In the third year, the food culture branding research paradigm derived in the first and second years was again applied to the discourse analysis for the study of food culture branding in Korea, and the core values of original food culture and universal food culture were derived. With this process, the food culture branding paradigm was revised and supplemented, and the completion of this paradigm was improved. Therefore, we established the concept of food culture in Korea, analyzed the structure and contents of food culture-related discourses on the official websites of Jeonju and Gwangju, reflecting the results of the first- and second-year research, and analyzed eight kinds of food culture brands. This study also tried to understand the identity and orientation value of the food culture brand in Korea that the components revealed. This study was able to categorize the representative values and universal values based on the identity of each component derived from the analysis process of the eight food culture brand components and consumption values through the study of the Korean region, and the core values derived based on them. In this process, we will develop a regional “food culture branding model” by dividing and arranging the 111 oriented values derived into core values, representative values, and general values, and linking them back into one frame and reconstructing them in terms of relevance. The food culture branding model developed in this way provides a semiotic framework to explore and can also be expected to contribute to construction of the communication nature of food culture branding in depth, as well as expressing the core values of regional food culture.