What began as a two-company marketing stunt between fashion platforms Musinsa and Zigzag in Seongsu-dong quickly outgrew the fashion industry entirely, offering a striking case study in how a well-timed piece of brand banter can spread across completely unrelated sectors in a matter of days. Within a short window of Zigzag’s pop-up banner needling Musinsa, brands with no direct stake in either company’s business — SPAO, Miso, Primera, CJ CheilJedang, Paldo, Pepsi, and KitKat — had all posted their own jokes riffing on the feud.
The cross-industry pile-on illustrates a specific pattern in Korean social-media marketing: brands increasingly treat other companies’ viral moments as shared cultural material to riff on rather than territory to stay out of, provided the original content is light-hearted enough to avoid reputational risk. A snack brand joking about a fashion-platform rivalry costs little and, if timed well, can ride an existing wave of social attention rather than needing to generate its own from scratch.
Marketing professionals point to the wordplay-heavy nature of the original Musinsa-Zigzag jabs — nonsense variations on each company’s name rather than substantive criticism — as the key ingredient that made the moment safe for so many unrelated brands to join without appearing to take a side in an actual business dispute. Because neither original combatant treated the feud as adversarial, follow-on brands could participate in the joke without risking association with a genuine corporate conflict.
The episode has become a frequently cited example in Korean marketing circles of “band-wagon marketing” (편승 마케팅) — the practice of low-cost, high-visibility participation in someone else’s viral moment — and is expected to influence how brands approach similar opportunities going forward, particularly in the fast-moving, meme-literate space of Korean social media.
Neither Musinsa nor Zigzag has commented on whether the scale of third-party brand participation exceeded their expectations, but the sheer diversity of industries that joined in — apparel, snacks, instant noodles, and beverages — suggests the format resonated well beyond its original fashion-retail context.
Source: Korean marketing and retail press coverage of cross-brand participation in the Musinsa-Zigzag campaign, 2026.
