• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.152-161
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• 2023

Modern people live a life connected with the real world and the virtual world by relying on the new media of enterprises and social consumption led by innovative technologies. In this environment, virtual influencers actively communicate with consumers and build relationships through social media, which is a new marketing tool that has attracted widespread attention. From a business perspective, it is necessary to have a solid understanding of this phenomenon, and then explore communication strategies to effectively develop virtual influencers. To investigate followers' preference for virtual influencers, this study employs the Q-method, which studies human subjective attributes, an empirical research effort to uncover complex issues in human subjectivity. To determine the factors that trigger people's voluntary and active practice and the preference degree of virtual influencers, the Q method is implemented to examine human subjectivity, thoughts and attitudes. According to the results of this study, virtual influencers are a new group of idols full of vitality. The interviews found that there are still many virtual influencers who do not know about followers, but each type can be clearly understood through the intuitive understanding of the interviewees. Divided out, type 1 one egoideal virtual influencers aim to represent an idealized version of the creator or target audience. Embodies ideal physical characteristics, personality or lifestyle desired by the audience. Type 2 is charismatic and attractive, and has the characteristics of most virtual influencers. It is suggested that it can be developed into a potential type, doing brand cooperation, and content production on social media platforms. Type 3: Game animation, derived from the image of characters in games or comics, with stylized features and energetic personalities, which can be integrated into games or entertainment experiences. Type 4 development potential type is the most successful type among virtual imagers, and it is also the purpose of marketing virtual influencers. It is essential that brand endorsement on social media platforms, integrated marketing, and driving advertising traffic. It is recommended to improve production technology to reduce investment costs.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.193-203
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• 2024

In a situation where news usage through YouTube is rapidly increasing, this study investigated which attributes of issues news producers prominently report on based on the two-stage agenda setting theory to empirically investigate the influence of various news producers on YouTube. Through the research results, we confirmed that broadcasters have the influence to set the agenda and form public opinion on YouTube, and discovered the possibility of a two-stage agenda setting effect occurring in the YouTube environment. We criticized whether news producers abuse emotional words due to their partisanship when reporting political issues, and discussed that an emotional approach to political issues can have a negative impact on news users' perception of reality.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.5-13
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• 2011

This study provides analysis of the effectiveness of domestic marketing strategies of the Korean coffee shop "Caffe Bene". It bases its evaluation on statistical outputs of 'choice attributes,' "market segmentation," demographic characteristics," and "satisfaction differences." The results are summarized in four points. First, five choice attributes were extracted from factor analysis: price, atmosphere, comfort, taste, and location; these are related to coffee shop selection behavior. Based on these five factors, cluster analysis was conducted, with statistical results classifying customers into three major groups: atmosphere oriented; comfort oriented; and taste oriented. Second, discriminant analysis tested cluster analysis and showed two discriminant functions: location and atmosphere. Third, cross-tabulation analysis based on demographic characteristics showed distinctive demographic characteristics within the three groups. Atmosphere oriented group, early-20s, as women of all ages was found to be 'walking down the street 'and 'through acquaintances' in many cases, as the cognitive path, and mostly found the store through 'outdoor advertising', and 'introduction'. Comfort oriented group was mainly women who are students in their early twenties or professionals, and appeared as a group to be very loyal because of high recommendation to other customers compared to other groups. Taste oriented group, unlike the other group, was mainly late-20s' college graduates, and was confirmed, as low loyalty, with lower recommendation activity. Fourth, to analyze satisfaction differences, one-way ANOVA was conducted. It shows that groups which show high satisfaction in the five main factors also show high menu satisfaction and high overall satisfaction. This results show that segmented marketing strategies are necessary because customers are considering price, atmosphere, comfort, taste, location when they choose coffee shop and demographics show different attributes based on segmented groups. For example, atmosphere oriented group is satisfied with shop interior and comfort while dissatisfied with price because most of the customers in this group are early 20s and do not have great financial capability. Thus, price discounting marketing strategies based on individual situations through CRM system is critical. Comfort oriented group shows high satisfaction level about location and shop comfort. Also, in this group, there are many early 20s female customers, students, and self-employed people. This group customers show high word of mouth tendency, hence providing positive brand image to the customers would be important. In case of taste oriented group, while the scores of taste and location are high, word of mouth score is low. This group is mainly composed of educated and professional many late 20s customers, therefore, menu differentiation, increasing quality of coffee taste and price discrimination is critical to increase customers' satisfaction. However, it is hard to generalize the results of study to other coffee shop brand, because this study have researched only one domestic coffee shop, Caffe Bene. Thus if future study expand the scope of locations, brands, and occupations, the results of the study would provide more generalizable results. Finally, research of customer satisfactions of menu, trust, loyalty, and switching cost would be critical in the future study.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.7
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• pp.353-374
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• 2001

Price and brand are two major attributes of products that consumer purchases. Price is important because it is often a measure of worth and quality. Some consumers purchase only well-known national brands. However, By reason of the price competition on account of new business condition and depressions, and consumers practical and rational purchasing tendency, consumers tend to purchase private brands(PB hereafter) because as consumers they expect that producers have reasonable and acceptable quality. Accordingly, The study, with intrinsic cue, extrinsic cue, familiarity anything like these cues from the study of Richardson et aI(1994, 1996), intends to present current topics we guide in retailer's promotion strategy for PB. As for investigating how quality evaluation has on effect on the private brands purchasing behavior of discount store grocery items. This study establishes a hypotheses on the basis of the quality evaluation cues of PB and literature review for purchasing behavior and collects materials for consumers about 196, and also analyzes them using a variety of SPSS/PC+package program. Therefore, the findings of this study provide the following managerial implications. 1) Retailer will successful in increasing private brand market share through dramatic improvement in package design, labeling, advertising, and branding strategies. 2) Planned Purchasers have high intention to repurchase PB because they buy them reasonably in accordance with the estimate therefore, they might have word-of-mouth effect for the evaluation of quality and recognition. They need to acknowledge benefits for PB purchases to maintain purchase like that. 3) The main consumers are housewives in their thirties and forties and they something reasonably because they have a lot of family and retailer will work out.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.35 no.5
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• pp.74-85
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• 2020

Smart phone zombie or Smombie means pedestrians who walk without attention to their surroundings because they are focused upon their smart phone. Because the traffic accidents and injuries caused by Smombie have been increased rapidly in recent years, the social attention and policies are needed to prevent it. This study was conducted to analyze Smombie's current status and some solutions used before and to propose new improved method through the latest ICT trend. In this study, we did the field survey to check Smombies at several places in Seoul through people counting, and found that a lot of pedestrians still use the smart phone while walking. And we analyzed many case studies about some solutions to prevent Smombies previously. The case studies include legal regulations, government policies, smart phone app services and facilities that are used before. We studied them through internet searches and reference studies and we also checked the current operating situation as visiting several places that the solutions actually has been operated. Therefore, we found there are some limitations in previous solutions in terms of effectiveness and management. To consider new solution that can be expected to overcome the limitations, we analyzed the latest ICT trends focused on features to utilize the Smombie prevention, especially video recognition and digital signage. In these days, video recognition has been developed rapidly with assistance of AI technology and it can recognize the specific pedestrian's characteristics such as holding smart phone as well as hair style, clothes, backpack and etc. On the other hands, the digital signage is the convergence device that includes big display, network connection and various IoT sensors. It can be used as public media in many places for public services as well as advertising. Through these analysis results, we show the requirements and the user scenario for the improved method to prevent Smombie. Finally, we propose to develop R&D technology to recognize Smombie exactly as pedestrian attributes and to spread creative contents to increase pedestrian's interest and engagement for Smombie prevention through digital signage.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.247-269
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• 2007

In recent years, one of the major reasons for the fierce competition amongst firms is that they strive to increase their own market shares and customer acquisition rate in the same market with similar and apparently undifferentiated products in terms of quality and perceived benefit. Because of this change in recent marketing environment, the differentiated after-sales service and diversified promotion strategies have become more important to gain competitive advantage. Price promotion is the favorite strategy that most retailers use to achieve short-term sales increase, induce consumer's brand switch, in troduce new product into market, and so forth. However, if marketers apply or copy an identical price promotion strategy without considering the characteristic differences in product and consumer preference, it will cause serious problems because discounted price itself could make people skeptical about product quality, and the changes of perceived value might appear differently depending on other factors such as consumer involvement or brand attitude. Previous studies showed that price promotion would certainly increase sales, and the discounted price compared to regular price would enhance the consumer's perceived values. On the other hand, discounted price itself could make people depreciate or skeptical about product quality, and reduce the consumers' positivity bias because consumers might be unsure whether the current price promotion is the retailer's best price offer. Moreover, we cannot say that discounted price absolutely enhances the consumer's perceived values regardless of product category and purchase situations. That is, the factors that affect consumers' value perceptions and buying behavior are so diverse in reality that the results of studies on the same dependent variable come out differently depending on what variable was used or how experiment conditions were designed. Majority of previous researches on the effect of price-comparison advertising have used consumers' buying behavior as dependent variable. In order to figure out consumers' buying behavior theoretically, analysis of value perceptions which influence buying intentions is needed. In addition, they did not combined the independent variables such as brand loyalty and price discount rate together. For this reason, this paper tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception. And we provided with theoretical and managerial implications that marketers need to consider such variables as product attributes, brand loyalty, and consumer involvement at the same time, and then establish a differentiated pricing strategy case by case in order to enhance consumer's perceived values properl. Three research concepts were used in our study and each concept based on past researches was defined. The perceived acquisition value in this study was defined as the perceived net gains associated with the products or services acquired. That is, the perceived acquisition value of the product will be positively influenced by the benefits buyers believe they are getting by acquiring and using the product, and negatively influenced by the money given up to acquire the product. And the perceived transaction value was defined as the perception of psychological satisfaction or pleasure obtained from taking advantage of the financial terms of the price deal. Lastly, the brand loyalty was defined as favorable attitude towards a purchased product. Thus, a consumer loyal to a brand has an emotional attachment to the brand or firm. Repeat purchasers continue to buy the same brand even though they do not have an emotional attachment to it. We assumed that if the degree of brand loyalty is high, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value will increase when higher discount rate is provided. But we found that there are no significant differences in values between two different discount rates as a result of empirical analysis. It means that price reduction did not affect consumer's brand choice significantly because the perceived sacrifice decreased only a little, and customers are satisfied with product's benefits when brand loyalty is high. From the result, we confirmed that consumers with high degree of brand loyalty to a specific product are less sensitive to price change. Thus, using price promotion strategy to merely expect sale increase is not recommendable. Instead of discounting price, marketers need to strengthen consumers' brand loyalty and maintain the skimming strategy. On the contrary, when the degree of brand loyalty is low, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value decreased significantly when higher discount rate is provided. Generally brands that are considered inferior might be able to draw attention away from the quality of the product by making consumers focus more on the sacrifice component of price. But considering the fact that consumers with low degree of brand loyalty are known to be unsatisfied with product's benefits and have relatively negative brand attitude, bigger price reduction offered in experiment condition of this paper made consumers depreciate product's quality and benefit more and more, and consumer's psychological perceived sacrifice increased while perceived values decreased accordingly. We infer that, in the case of inferior brand, a drastic price-cut or frequent price promotion may increase consumers' uncertainty about overall components of product. Therefore, it appears that reinforcing the augmented product such as after-sale service, delivery and giving credit which is one of the levels consisting of product would be more effective in reality. This will be better rather than competing with product that holds high brand loyalty by reducing sale price. Although this study tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception, there are several limitations. This study was conducted in controlled conditions where the high involvement product and two different levels of discount rate were applied. Given the presence of low involvement product, when both pieces of information are available, it is likely that the results we have reported here may have been different. Thus, this research results explain only the specific situation. Second, the sample selected in this study was university students in their twenties, so we cannot say that the results are firmly effective to all generations. Future research that manipulates the level of discount along with the consumer involvement might lead to a more robust understanding of the effects various discount rate. And, we used a cellular phone as a product stimulus, so it would be very interesting to analyze the result when the product stimulus is an intangible product such as service. It could be also valuable to analyze whether the change of perceived value affects consumers' final buying behavior positively or negatively.