• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.157-194
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• 2008

The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers. The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability. In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it. In this study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels; characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things. And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to-consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of products such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and make some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher than at other community sites. It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities. Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences: consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users. As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that shows close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consumers do not want to spend money to buy content and etc. In this sense, marketers of community websites must know consumers' affect toward online community site is not a last goal and important factor to influnece consumers' purchase. Third, building good content environment can be a really important marketing tool to create a competitive advantage in cyberspace. For example, Cyworld, Korea's number one community site shows distinctive superiority in the consumer evaluations of content characteristics such as content superiority, site vividness, and customerization. Particularly, comsumer evaluation about customerization was remarkably higher than the other sites. In this point, we can conclude that providing comsumers with good, unique and highly customized content will be urgent and important task directly and indirectly impacting to self congruency, consumer experience, c-to-c interactivity, and various loyalty factors of online community. By creating enjoyable, useful, and unique online community environments, online community portals such as Daum, Naver, and Cyworld are able to build customer loyalty to a degree that many of today's online marketer can only dream of these loyalty, in turn, generates strong economic returns. Another way to build good online community site is to provide consumers with an interactive, fun, experience-oriented or experiential Web site. Elements that can make a dot.com's Web site experiential include graphics, 3-D images, animation, video and audio capabilities. In addition, chat rooms and real-time customer service applications (which link site visitors directly to other visitors, or with company support personnel, respectively) are also being used to make web sites more interactive. Researchers note that online communities are increasingly incorporating such applications in their Web sites, in order to make consumers' online shopping experience more similar to that of an offline store. That is, if consumers are able to experience sensory stimulation (e.g. via 3-D images and audio sound), interact with other consumers (e.g., via chat rooms), and interact with sales or support people (e.g. via a real-time chat interface or e-mail), then they are likely to have a more positive dot.com experience, and develop a more positive image toward the online company itself). Analysts caution, however, that, while high quality graphics, animation and the like may create a fun experience for consumers, when heavily used, they can slow site navigation, resulting in frustrated consumers, who may never return to a site. Consequently, some analysts suggest that, at least with current technology, the rule-of-thumb is that less is more. That is, while graphics etc. can draw consumers to a site, they should be kept to a minimum, so as not to impact negatively on consumers' overall site experience.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.233-241
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• 2022

The purpose of this study is to verify the relationship between sports players' SNS interaction, relationship commitment, relationship satisfaction, and loyalty. To this end, a total of 000 copies of data were obtained by conducting a survey on the online community of sports stars who followed or subscribed to sports stars through the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and the results were as follows. First, it was found that sports players' SNS interaction had a positive effect on relationship commitment. Second, it was found that sports players' SNS interaction had a positive effect on relationship satisfaction. Third, it was found that relationship commitment had a positive effect on relationship satisfaction. Fourth, it was found that relationship commitment had a positive effect on loyalty. Fifth, relationship satisfaction was found to have a positive effect on loyalty.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.185-194
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• 2016

Several game developers or publishers adopt open innovation strategies to reduce R&D costs and increase user loyalty about their games. User communities play an important role in increasing users' interests in the game because they can share game information and skills in user communities. In this regard, this study explored key antecedents of game user participation intention in user community. We developed a research model by integrating perceived risk into theory of planned action. The theoretical model was tested by using survey data collected from 110 "Suddenattack" game users. Partial least squares (PLS) was utilized to analysis the research model. The findings of this study indicate that both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment play an important role in forming attitude toward community. However, contrast to our expectations, perceived risk has no signifiant effect on perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, attitude toward community and participation intention. While attention toward community significantly influences community participation intention, social norms are not significantly related to it. The analysis results help game developers or publishers establish effective strategies and policies to increase user participation intention in user community.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.117-149
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• 2007

It can be explained by congruity theory as a process that consumers engage in a matching process to identify personal community that is congruent with their self-images to find the identification between the self and the personal community. Personal community cues that evoke certain images are viewed as activating similar beliefs about the self (e.g., high status). Individuals prompt a comparison process to determine whether the personal community and self-image are congruent and imagine prototypical users of the personal community and select ones that maximize similarity to their actual or desired self-concept. Identity is devided into personal identity and social identity. Consumers are likely to be influenced by both personal identity and social identity. In this article the influencing factors of the commitment to on-line personal community are explored by the sources of both personal identification and social identification. The results are as follows. The maintenance expression and enhancement expression of personal self influence the level of personal identification positively and the maintenance expression and enhancement expression of social self influence the level of social identification positively. The level of both social and personal identification positively influence the commitment to on-line personal community which gives positive responses to the source enterprise that allows the cyberspace and the other benefits to be used.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.191-211
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• 2013

The deployment of social network service(SNS) makes the social network game(SNG) as the new value added service of SNS be popular. But, a few study had identified the reason of this popularity and the elements of SNG. Based on the social presence theory and media richness theory, we had tried to identify three community artifacts (i.e. persistent labeling, self presentation and deep profiling) and two media characteristics(i.e. vividness and interactivity) as the SNG elements in this research. Then we had empirically validated the effect of these elements on the SNGexperience (i.e. social presence, perceived enjoyment) and behavioral intentions (i.e. Continuous usage intention, willingness to pay and loyalty) of the users. We conducted a survey to the actual SNG users. 243 data were collected and analyzed by PLS algorism. The results indicated that the community artifacts mediated by the social presence and media characteristics could significantly affect on the experiences and behavioral intentions. These findings could contribute to identify what element could be the reason of social network game popularity and could also contribute to design more attractive social network game in practice.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.93-105
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• 2013

This paper mainly focuses on comparison analysis of the quality factors targeted at one shopping mall web site in Korea and China. There are a total of 14 hypothesis, and we use the SAS 9.2 statistical package tool. The survey to verify those hypothesis is filled out by 519 voluntary participants. The following describes the results that are found. The shopping mall web site of two countries shows a difference in terms of design, communication, community, commercialization, security, customer satisfaction, repurchase intention, contents, e-commerce, customer loyalty, interaction, technology, reliability, and size. Therefore, we suggest how to implement more effective shopping mall websites based on those 14 factors.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.10D no.6
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• pp.1049-1058
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• 2003

The last few years have been a boom time for the online gaming industry. Internet-based online games have made an increasingly popular form of entertainment. The gaming industry estimates that online gaming players reach over 26 million in 2002. The rapid development of online game-contents and related information technology shall increase the size of industry and have a profound impact on many ways of our living and sociaty. This paper develops the exploratory LISREL model for identifying the factors attecting the players' loyalty for some specific brand of online games. The concept of flow, word of mouth, feedback, challenge, social norms, and online community activities, etc, are all introduced into the model, as the independent variables affecting the loyalty directly and indirectly. Based on data collected from online questionnaire survey, the validity of the model has been tested and interesting conclusions have been developed concerning the relationships between the loyalty, flow, word of mouth and other set of independent vareables. It is hoped that this result might provide the useful guidelines for developing the successful online game contents.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.83-100
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• 2005

In this paper, we investigate the concept of cyber identity built in cyberspace and analyze the effects of general perception toward cyber identity on loyalty and purchase intent. Cyber identity is classified into two types: personal and social cyber identity, and has five components. Avatars and online gaming capability make up personal cyber identity while online communities and instant messenger count as social cyber identity. We regard blog personalities as having both personal and social characteristics. In our survey, we conclude that internet users want to purchase cyber items such as avatars, online game items, and wallpaper pictures to enhance their cyber identities. Based on the survey results , we derive five factors comprising personal cyber identity and social cyber identity using factor analysis and analyze overall effects of cyber identity on loyalty and purchase intention using Structural Equation Model.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.43-72
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• 2007

The recent development of industrial marketing explains the near absence of research on brand equity in business-to-business markets. With recent change, industrial companies have shifted from a production focus to a customer focus. Industrial brand concept is rapidly developing. The basic purpose of this study is to investigate industrial brand equity affecting the result of business relationship between industrial buyers and suppliers. This research presented a comprehensive constructive model consisting of components of industrial brand equity, and then propose the research model base on prior researches and studies about relationships among components of industrial brand equity. Data were gathered from respondents who work in industrial buying center. For this study, Data were analyzed by SPSS 11.0 and AMOS 5.0. The results of this research analysis were as fallow. Industrial brand loyalty was positively related with perceived value, perceived quality, brand awareness, relationship satisfaction, switching cost, relationship commitment. Also, Industrial corporate performance and purchasing value was positively related with brand loyalty and relationship commitment.

• 한국HCI학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2007.02b
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• pp.693-704
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• 2007

지금까지 사이버문화에 대한 연구는 해당 문화의 가장 큰 특성 중인 익명성과 그것이 개별 이용자들의 정체성에 미치는 영향에 대한 많은 관심이 있어왔다. 최근 주목을 받고 있는 싸이월드나 블로그 등 CMC환경에서 매체가 일반적으로 여성의 라이프스타일 및 여성성과 연관되어 정체성의 구성에 영향을 미치게 되며, 이러한 이용 형태를 마케팅과 접목하여 높은 여성 참여와 구매력을 이끌어내고 있다. 반면 온라인게임은 남성 중심의 매체로써의 특징을 가지고 있으며, 상대적으로 여성의 온라인게임 이용 행태 분석 및 마케팅 전략 연구가 미흡하였다. 온라인게임에서 여성 이용자의 참여나 구매력을 이끌어 내기 위해서는 우선적으로 남성 중심적 매체에서 여성 온라인게임 유저의 이용 행태 분석 이 선행되어야 하며, 이를 통하여 여성의 온라인게임 소비 패턴과 특성을 파악하고, 나아가 고객 충성도, 구매력과의 관련성 속에서 마케팅적 시사점을 도출하여야 할 것이다. 본 연구는 온라인게임 여성 유저의 심층 인터뷰를 통하여 우선적으로 연령별 게임 이용 패턴 - 게임이용 장소, 초기 진입 방식, 커뮤니티 활동, 아이템 구매 형태 등 - 에 대해 알아보고, 다음으로 여성 유저의 게임 플레이 방식으로 게임 내 캐릭터의 전유 방식(몰입)과 게임 플레이 스타일을 고찰하고자 한다. 이때 여성의 온라인게임 이용 방식이 남성적 매체라는 구조적 공간 내에서 여성의 성적 특성이 온라인게임 소비 행태에 어떠한 영향을 미치며, 또한 여성 유저의 이용 방식에 따라 고객 충성도에 미치는 효과에 대해 알아보도록 한다.