• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.209-237
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• 2012

1. Research Purpose Consumers rely on various clues to evaluate their decision to patronize a retail store, and store brand is one of them (Dodds 1991; Grewal et al. 1998). As consumers find ever increasing variety of contact points connecting them to specific store, the value of experiential shopping as a means of increasing store's brand equity warrants greater attention from scholars of retail management. Retail shopping values are credited for creating not only cognitive experiences like brand knowledge but also emotional experiences such as shopping pleasure and pride (Schmitt 1999). This may be because today's consumers place emphasis on emotional values associated with shopping pleasure, lifestyle brought to life, brand relationship, and store atmosphere more than utilitarian values such as product quality and price. Many previous literature found this to be true (Ahn and Lee 2011; Mathwick et al. 2001). This brings forth important research issues and questions regarding the roles of shopping experiential values and brand equity with regard to consumer's retail patronage choice. However, despite this importance, research on this area remains quite inadequate (Hwang 2010). For this reason, this study aims to verify the relationships among experiential shopping values, retail store brand equity and tries to link that with customer loyalty by surveying large-scale discount store shoppers in Korea and China. 2. Research Contents In order to carry out the research objective, this study conducted comprehensive literature survey on previous literature by discussing major findings and implications with regard to shopping values and retail brand equity and store loyalty. For data collection, researcher employed survey-based research method where data were collected in two major cities of Korea (Seoul) and China (Bejing) and sampling frame was based on patrons of large discount stores in both countries. Specific research questions raised in this study are as follows; RQ1: How do Korean and Chinese consumers differently perceive of shopping values regarding shopping at large-sclae discount stores? RQ2: Are there differences in consumers' emotional consumption propensities? RQ3: Do Korean and Chinese consumers display different perceptions of brand equity towards large-scale discount stores? RQ4: Are there differences in relationships between shopping values and brand equity for Korean and Chinese consumers? For statistical analysis, SPSS17.0, AMOS17.0 and SmartPLS were employed. 3. Research Results The data collected through face-to-face survey conducted in Seoul and Bejing revealed appropriate data validity and reliability as a result of exploratory/confirmatory factor analysis and reliability tests, andh SEM model yielding satisfactory model fitness. The result of the study may be summarized by three main points. First, as a result of testing differences in consumption dispositions, Chinese consumers showed higher scores in aesthetic and symbolic dispositions, whereas Korean consumers scored higher in hedonic disposition. Second, testing on perceptions toward brand equity of large discount stores showed that Korean consumers exhibited more positive perceptions of brand awareness and brand image than Chinese counterparts. Third, the result of exploratory factor analysis on the experiential shopping values revealed different factors for each country. On Korean side, consumer interest value, aesthetic value, and hedonic value were prominent, whereas on Chinese side, hedonic value, aesthetic value, consumer interest value, and service excellence value were found salient. 4. Research Implications While many previous studies on inter-country differences in retailing area mainly focused on cultural dispositions or orientations to explain the differences, this study sets itself apart by specifically targeting individual consumer's shopping values from an experiential viewpoint. The study result provides important theoretical as well as practical implications for large-scale discount store, especially the impotance of fully exploring the linkage between shopping values and brand equity, which has significant influence on loyalty. Therefore, the specific implications deriving from the result shed some important insights upon the consumption values based on shopping experiences and brand equity. The differences found in store shoppers between the two countries may also provide useful insights for Korean and Chinese retailers who plan to expand their operations globally. Related strategic implications derived from this study is the importance of localizing retail strategy which is based on the differences found in experiential shopping values between the two country groups. Especially the finding that Chinese consumers value consumer interest and service excellence, whereas Koreans place importance on hedonic or aesthetic values indicates the need to differentiate the consumer's psychographical profiles when it comes to expanding retail operations globally. Particularly important will be to pursue price-orienated strategy in China in consideration of the high emphasis on consumer interests and service excellence, but to emphasize the symbolic aspects of brand equity in Korea by maximizing the brand equity associated with aesthetic values and hedonic orientations. 5. Recommendations This study focused on generic retail branded discount stores in both countries, thus making it difficult to tease out store-specific strategies based on specific retail brands. Future studies may benefit fro employing actual brand names in survey questionnaire to verify relationship between shopping values and brand-based store strategy. As with other studies of this nature, this study needs to strengthen the result's generalizability by selecting respondents from a wider spectrum of respondents.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.44 no.3
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• pp.146-164
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• 2021

This study examines the effects of the public's perception of emergency medical service (EMS) on the public health system's brand equity and the moderating effect of governance on this relationship using Keller's customer-based brand equity model. It uses four EMS functions: rescue/first-aid and transfer activities; disaster prevention, preparation, and response activities; educational activities in urgent situations; and medical treatment in emergency rooms to examine the effects of them on brand meaning of the public health system. Our findings are important for understanding the public as customers of the public health system and devising and/ or adapting healthcare policies and marketing strategies to develop brand equity and increase customers' loyalty to the public health system.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.151-162
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• 2014

One of the largest changes in retail business in Korea since the distribution market was opened in the mid 1990s is the appearance of foreign discount stores and the rapid growth of department stores. Discount stores and department stores have changed the structure of distribution business which has been primarily made up of traditional markets and supermarkets that have been the main retail markets in Korea. The retail business is changing from just a product purchasing place to a space where various values such as pleasure, happiness, etc. are provided. Therefore the purpose of this research is to grasp the effects that the shopping experience values at department stores have on the department brands, images, and awareness by means of theoretical and empirical research. Especially I classified the shopping experience values, an independent variable, into aesthetics, pleasures, consumers' interests, and services' excellence, and I verified whether they have a meaningful effects on the brand recognition and image, an endogenous variable, and the store royalty, a final various. A total of 235 questionnaires were used for analysis to test the research hypotheses. The positive analysis was done with SPSS 17.0K and AMOS 17.0 covariance structure analysis was performed. As a result, variables of the shopping experience values except consumers' interests seemed to have not only right influences on recognition and image, but also right influences on store royalty. Therefore this research shows that department store customers not only make use of department stores to buy products, but also visit department stores to get the values of pleasure and happiness, and that these aspects have a greater influence on the department store's image, recognition, or royalty in a sense.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.33-60
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• 2020

Along with the rapid advance in internet technologies, ubiquitous mobile device usage has enabled consumers to access real-time information and increased interaction with others through various social media. Consumers can now get information more easily when making purchase decisions, and these changes are affecting the brand landscape. In a digitally connected world, brand image is not communicated to the consumers one-sidedly. Rather, with consumers' growing influence, it is a result of co-creation where consumers have an active role in building brand image. This explains a reality where people no longer purchase products just because they know the brand or because it is a famous brand. However, there has been little discussion on the matter, and many practitioners still rely on the traditional measures of brand indicators. The goal of this research is to present the limitations of traditional definition and measurement of brand and brand image, and propose a more direct and adequate measure that reflects the nature of a connected world. Inspired by the proverb, "A man is known by the company he keeps," the proposed measurement offers insight to the position of brand (or brand image) through co-purchased product networks. This paper suggests a framework of network analysis that clusters brands of cosmetics by the frequency of other products purchased together. This is done by analyzing product networks of a brand extracted from actual purchase data on Amazon.com. This is a more direct approach, compared to past measures where consumers' intention or cognitive aspects are examined through survey. The practical implication is that our research attempts to close the gap between brand indicators and actual purchase behavior. From a theoretical standpoint, this paper extends the traditional conceptualization of brand image to a network perspective that reflects the nature of a digitally connected society.

• CRM연구
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.43-68
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• 2010

One of the recent research trends that universities are increasingly adopting the concept of 'customer' and the customer-oriented strategy has urged us to research enterprise-wide CRM strategy adaptable to university administration. As the first step of CRM strategy for university management, we try to validate the difference of CRM strategic factors among university types. Drawing upon both CRM process and customer equity drivers, which have been recognized as core frameworks for CRM strategy, we developed those survey instruments adoptable into university industry, and validated statistically-significant difference among 12 types of university group constructed by the levels of university evaluation and the location of the universities. We collected 261 responses from 177 universities from all over the country and analyzed the data to see the levels of CRM processes consisting of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion, and customer equity drivers consisting of value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity by using multivariate ANOVA(MANOVA). The result confirms the explicit differences of the levels of CRM processes and customer equity drivers between the groups by university evaluation levels(high/middle/low). However, the analysis failed to show the significant differences of those between the group by university locations(the capital/the suburbs/the six megalopolises/other countries). More specifically, the level of activities for customer acquisition and retention of the universities in the higher-graded group are significantly different from those in the lower-graded group from the perspective of CRM process. In terms of customer equity drivers, the levels of both brand equity and relationship equity of the higher-graded group are significantly higher than those of both middle and lower-graded group. In addition, we found that the value equity between the higher and lower-graded groups, and the brand equity between the middle and lower-graded groups are different each other. This study provides an important meaning in that we tried to consider CRM strategy which has been mainly addressed in profit-making industries in terms of non-profit organization context. Our endeavors to develop and validate empirical measurements adoptable to university context could be an academic contribution. In terms of practical meaning, the processes and results of this study might be a guideline to many universities to build their own CRM strategies. According to the research results, those insights could be expressed in several messages. First, we propose to universities that they should plan their own differentiated CRM strategies according to their positions in terms of university evaluation. For example, although it is acceptable that a university in lower-level group might follow the CRM process strategy of the middle-level group universities, it is not a good idea to imitate the customer acquisition and retention activities of the higher-level group universities. Moreover, since this study reported that the level of universities' brand equity is just correlated with the level of university evaluation, it might be pointless for the middle or lower-leveled universities if they just copy their brand equity strategies from those of higher-leveled ones even though such activities are seemingly attractive. Meanwhile, the difference of CRM strategy by university position might provide universities with the direction where they should go for their CRM strategies. For instance, our study implies that the lower-positioned universities should improve all of the customer equity drivers with concerted efforts because their value, brand, and relationship equities are inferior compared with the higher and middle-positioned universities' ones. This also means that they should focus on customer acquisition and expansion initiatives rather than those for customer retention because all of the customer equity drivers could be influenced by the two kinds of CRM processes (KIm and Lee, 2010). Surely specific and detailed action plans for enhancing customer equity drivers should be developed after grasping their customer migration patterns illustrated by the rates of acquisition, retention, upgrade, downgrade, and defection for each customer segment.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aviation and Aeronautics
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.65-77
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• 2013

A high brand reputation of a airline means the airline is preferred by passengers because of its unique services being even better than others. This is why airline's specialized services are important in that those services would create a new brand value and build up the airline's brand image, being enable to have competitive advantage over other airlines, to provide satisfied services, to have a mutual trust between passengers and the airline and to create customer's loyalty. A-Airline have been trying to give passengers a joy of flight by providing its customized and specialized cabin services out of airlnes' stereo-typed services.Therefore this paper will find out how their satisfaction of the cabin services have a positive impact on customer loyalty through brand image, brand reputation, brand identity and brand attraction. Those services would not only contribute to upgrade A-airline's corporate image but show the way to which the cabin service is heading also.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.11 no.5
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• pp.385-394
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• 2013

Recently, as the healthcare market is globalized, the importance of the information on the Internet has been recognized. In this study, the analysis by research model with hypothesis that benefit sought factors of health tourism have a positive effect on behavioral intention of destination selection through tourism brand equity by internet information was carried out. As a result of analysis, benefit sought factors like as health and beauty did not have a positive effect on brand cognition and perceived quality but benefit sought factors like as service and nature had a positive effect on brand cognition and perceived quality. However, benefit sought like as experience did not have a positive effect on brand cognition and perceived quality. And brand equity like as brand cognition and perceived quality had a positive effect on behavioral intention. Thus, according to the results of these hypotheses, policies that foster health tourism in Jeju region will be followed based on product development that considering the importance of the existing service and cognition.

• Smart Media Journal
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.106-113
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• 2018

Brand identity (BI) is a key asset that affects consumers' psychological cognition of products and services. In the initial planning stage of the BI design development for a company, a unique approach strategy is required. In the final evaluation stage, a reasonable design evaluation method involving potential consumers needs to be prepared. However, conventional brand identity design evaluation processes tend to depend on the results of surveys, and in many cases it is impossible to be free from the distorting phenomenon of survey respondents' psychological manifestation which is often revealed in the process of the surveys. In this context, this research has explored whether the method of utilizing EEG data of the subjects along with the conventional survey method of preference could be helpful in the process of evaluating the brand identity design. To achieve that, we correlated the subject's preference survey results with the subject's EEG data. 'Attractiveness' and 'concentration' were used as variables. As a result, it was found that there was a high correlation between the results of preference survey on 'attractiveness' and the results of 'EEG' on 'concentration'. Therefore, in addition to the existing conventional qualitative evaluation methods, we confirmed that design evaluation methods using EEG are useful for evaluating tacit knowledge objects such as the BI design.

• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.24
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• pp.223-246
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• 2011

Today, cultural content industry could be defined to service business rather than manufacturing business because of its own trait. Also, it has the realistic restriction that it can't hold the dominant position in the market competition when it can't provide consumers satisfaction regardless of its quality or degree of completion. In other word, it can only expect great success when the business plan and the activities get the perfect balance with its best quality and perfect of completion. As the result, it emphasizes the importance of business competition in the global market. In briefly, there is no doubt that the creativeness of content is very important in the cultural content industry but in the future, making system to maintain the distribution process and share the profits fairly will be taken more important role. Especially, animation genre has the feature, which compares to other genres, such as film or TV drama, would be free from cultural barriers, and it is a great advantage. So to speak, animation can get little influence from cultural discount. However, Korean animation can't use the advantage properly for the foreign distribution because of its poor infrastructure and short of professional human resources. For those reasons, it has been needed to set up the realistic and specific action plan to overcome the situation. Therefore, considering those needs and the situations of Korean animation facing, making B2B online marketplace could be a great solution. The online marketplace stands for taking more efficient and broad distribution channel instead of the passive way, which we have now. If we have the B2B online marketplace, we can share all the information about the Korean animation with the potential customers whom live outside of Korea at real time. It also could be use to the windows of multiple distribution, which can make additional profits and activate the optional markets for the Korean animation. Through the method, Korean animation would be expected to get the higher international competitiveness, and it would be developed in quality and quantity of the business. Finally, it would be a great chance to Korean animation, which can get the unique brand power by improving the backward distribution circumstances.