The K-Effect: How Korean culture is moving from screens to carts, brands and travel

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A few years ago, watching a K-drama in India largely meant finding a screen, putting on subtitles and settling in for a few episodes. Today, the Korean wave is travelling considerably further. It is showing up in grocery carts, quick-commerce apps, beauty shelves, restaurant menus, travel plans and, increasingly, brand experiences.

The scale of the shift is visible in the latest data from Ormax Media.

According to the report, 107.8 million Indians now watch K-dramas at least once a month, compared with 72.9 million in 2025. That represents a 48% expansion in the audience base in a single year.

The audience is also not confined to premium subscription OTT households. Forty-five percent of K-drama viewers in India are CTV viewers, while 58% are AVOD viewers, meaning they do not have access to content available through paid subscriptions.

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That composition matters for marketers because it points to a K-drama audience that extends beyond the conventional premium <a href="https://comicvibe.com/roku-announces-new-battle-of-the-streaming-stars-series/” title=”Roku Announces New “Battle of the Streaming Stars” Series”>streaming consumer.

The gender profile is even more striking. While 23% of female OTT audiences in India watch K-dramas, the corresponding figure among male OTT audiences is 11%. Consequently, women make up 60% of the overall K-drama audience, giving the format the highest female share among the content formats tracked by Ormax.

K-dramas are also increasingly finding a place within the broader OTT viewing hierarchy. In 2026 so far, eight K-dramas across Netflix, Amazon MX Player, Amazon Prime Video and JioHotstar have appeared in Ormax StreamView’s weekly Top 50 most-watched properties on OTT in India.

Teach You A Lesson and If Wishes Could Kill are the two most-watched K-dramas in India so far this year

The biggest Korean title in India remains Squid Game. Ormax puts its cumulative Indian audience at more than 20 million unique viewers across its three seasons.

Globally, the show’s first season had already demonstrated the scale that Korean content could achieve. Released in September 2021, Squid Game was watched by more than 142 million Netflix member households in its first four weeks and accumulated 1.65 billion viewing hours during that period. It became Netflix’s most-watched programme at the time.

The numbers suggest that K-drama is no longer simply an international content niche. It is becoming a cultural gateway through which Indian consumers encounter a broader Korean ecosystem.

The K-drama effect is spilling beyond the screen

The more interesting development for brands, however, is what happens after the episode ends.

Ritika Taneja, Senior Vice President, E-commerce, WPP Media, points to Korean culture as an example of how commerce can shorten the distance between cultural discovery and consumption.

According to Taneja, quick commerce and e-commerce have made products associated with Korean culture easier to discover and buy. A consumer may encounter Korean food or products through entertainment and culture and then find products such as ramen available on a 10-minute delivery platform.

The significance of this shift goes beyond convenience. For international trends such as Korean culture, commerce platforms can become discovery and testing environments, allowing consumers to encounter products that may previously have had limited visibility or distribution in India. For brands, those transactions can also provide signals about demand before they commit to wider expansion.

That is where the K-drama phenomenon starts looking less like a content story and more like a commerce story.

From Korean noodles to Seoul Street

Brands are already responding to this cultural momentum.

Quick-commerce platform Zepto this week took the Korean theme offline with Seoul Street in Delhi, bringing together Korean-inspired food, brands and creators. The event was built in collaboration with Nongshim India, and several other brands as supporting or co-powered partners.

Chandan Mendiratta, Chief Brand Officer, Zepto, described the strategy as “culture hacking”, positioning Seoul Street as the latest in a series of experiences designed around moments and cultural phenomena that consumers are already engaging with.

“All our events in the past have had the intent of culture hacking. From Fake Shaadi to Valentines Prom Night we’ve been trying to live the culture,” Mendiratta said. “Korean skincare, Korean noodles, Korean Food, Korean Drama have been an important part of the culture lately.”

The activation illustrates how the Korean trend is being translated into an experience that brings together entertainment, food, creators and commerce rather than treating K-culture as a single-product opportunity.

K-culture is becoming a travel trigger too

The spillover is not limited to food and retail.

Airbnb’s 2026 report, Korea Calling: How K-Culture is Driving a New Generation of Travelers into Korea, found that 94% of visitors and prospective travellers surveyed said K-culture had influenced their interest in visiting South Korea. The study surveyed 4,500 travellers across nine countries who had either visited Korea or were planning to do so.

K-pop is particularly influential among younger travellers. Airbnb said 36% of Gen Z respondents cited K-pop as a primary motivator for travelling to Korea, compared with 26% of the general population.

Airbnb has consequently been building experiences around fandom and Korean entertainment. Its collaboration with K-pop group CORTIS included a Seoul Hideout, an immersive physical space inspired by the group’s creative universe and music, with the wider activation designed to bring fans closer to the artists and their culture.

The broader implication is significant: K-culture is increasingly functioning as a bridge from passive entertainment consumption to physical consumption and travel.

From passing fad to global business engine

A senior media analyst tracking the trend said the perception of Korean entertainment has also changed inside global marketing circles.

According to the analyst, global boardrooms once viewed the rise of Korean entertainment as a passing trend or a lucky viral moment. The continued momentum of K-pop, K-dramas and webtoons has changed that calculation, turning Korean popular culture into a sizeable business opportunity for brands.

The analyst said the implication for marketers is that the old model of simply putting a celebrity next to a product and placing the resulting image on a billboard is becoming less relevant. Consumers increasingly expect brands to understand the communities and fandoms they are trying to enter, rather than simply borrow their cultural relevance.

The opportunity, in this view, lies in authentic co-creation and in understanding how global fandoms actually behave.

That distinction is important. K-culture’s commercial value is not simply the visibility generated by Korean celebrities. It is the ecosystem of behaviours that surrounds them: watching shows, listening to music, buying Korean food and beauty products, following creators, discovering brands, attending experiences and eventually travelling to Korea.

This wave has been building for decades

The current K-drama boom may feel relatively recent in India, but the international expansion of Korean television has a much longer history.

Research published in Socio-Economic Review notes that Korean dramas achieved significant international success from the late 1990s, emerging as a distinct product category at a time when American productions dominated global television markets and Japanese productions were prominent across niche Asian markets.

The commercial trajectory was already visible by the 2010s. Korean drama exports generated US$167 million in 2013, four times the value recorded a decade earlier. By 2015, Korean drama broadcast licences were being sold across non-Asian markets, with the United States accounting for 4,291 titles, according to the research.

The same research traces the industry’s development to policy and institutional changes in South Korea in the late 1990s, when cultural industries increasingly came to be treated as strategic contributors to economic growth.

Squid Game then provided a global inflection point. Its 2021 release demonstrated that a Korean-language show could become a mainstream global streaming phenomenon at unprecedented scale, reaching No. 1 in 94 countries and crossing 142 million households in its first four weeks.

India is now moving from consumption to participation

The Indian data suggests the next stage of the Korean wave is not necessarily about getting more people to watch K-dramas. It is about what viewers do with the cultural cues they pick up from them.

A 107.8-million monthly audience creates a substantial base for that spillover. The fact that 60% of that audience is female, 45% also watches on CTV and 58% is AVOD further broadens the potential consumer universe.

The shift is already visible in how brands are behaving. Zepto is turning Seoul into an experiential property. Commerce platforms are making Korean food and products easier to access. Airbnb is linking Korean entertainment fandom with travel. And marketers are increasingly looking at Korean culture not as a single entertainment category but as a connected ecosystem.

The Korean wave, therefore, may have started with dramas and music, but its next chapter is being written in the places where culture meets commerce.

For Indian marketers, the question is no longer simply whether consumers are watching K-dramas. It is what they are doing next.

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First Published onOctober 2, 2026, 09:01:21 IST

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