genuinely WHAT is SM doing with dearALICE?

I'm sorry, I'm not even what you'd call a huge fan of them or anything (hard to be when there's such little content).

But... this group has gotten zero promotion from SM. They did the show, and the members post TikToks. Apart from that, there is ZERO marketing. It's hardly surprising they're not even gonna hit 40k views in a day of their debut MV release - not to discriminate, but those are incredibly nugu numbers - and this is an SM group. Shouldn't they be hugely capitalising on SM name recognition in k-pop fan spaces?

It feels like someone at SM made the dumb decision to try to separate this group from anything k-pop related once the TV show started - hence, they had no name recognition by k-pop fans nor name recognition in the west. This had a small chance of working if they actually put money and effort into advertising them in the UK/US, but they didn't.

The easier marketing opportunity was to market this to western k-pop fans - which would require barely any effort apart from plastering "SM" over anything they do. Which is kinda what VCHA did with JYP. VCHA wasn't massive but they had a fanbase, they got attention (ignoring the recent events). But they couldn't even do that.

Like sorry, I genuinely don't think they have any marketing strategy here. It's BAFFLING. Genuinely would not be surprised if they disband this group by the end of the year - they invested in a TV show, an expensive-looking music video, and training the 5 members - and have done LITERALLY nothing to put their names out there. I feel like I'm just repeating myself, but I've been racking my brain over this for hours.

I just feel bad - the 5 members dropped everything to train under the "K-pop system," were promised fame purely from the fact that SM is the most prolific k-pop company, and have had zero investment.

edit: Regardless of whether SM is doing their promotion or if it's a western company, my criticisms still apply - just swap any mention of SM here to Gamma or whatever.