• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.265-285
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• 2015

After the establishment of WTO for strengthening of GATT in 1995, the world economy has gradually been integrating toward economic globalisation. Even though this multilateral agreement may be beneficial to many countries but it also interferes domestic policies of member countries and threatens the role of local government and policy independence. For these reasons, FTA between countries or regions has been increasing. According to this trend, Korea and China has reached a substantial agreement of Korea-China FTA for mutual benefits. In general, the Korean automobile industry will benefit from Korea-China FTA due to its competitiveness in the global market and improvement of market access. However in the provisional schedule of concessions and commitment reported by press, the automobile seems to be excluded in this schedule of concessions. Hence, Korean automobile industry can not use the price competitiveness from tariff elimination. Therefore, Korean automobile industry needs aggressive marketing strategies for enhancement of brand equity as well as development of environment-friendly cars for following environment policies of Chinese government. Furthermore, they should make efforts to create the efficient investment environment by the removal of non-tariff barriers.

• The Korean Journal of Franchise Management
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.1-12
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• 2022

Purpose: In 2020, the franchise industry accomplished a significant growth compared to the previous year, as the number of franchise companies increased by 9.0% while the number of franchise brands increased by 12.5%. Despite growth in size, the Korean franchise industry underwent many negative incidents, such as franchise ownership sales to private equity funds, that led to deterioration of businesses. From this point of view, this study aims to make various proposals to help policy makers develop franchise industry policies by analyzing trends of the current and previous presidential administrations' franchise policies and regulations using newspaper articles. Research design, data and methodology: A total of 7,439 articles registered in Naver API from February 25, 2013 to November 29, 2021 were extracted. Among them, 34 unrelated video articles were deleted, and a total of 7,405 articles from both administrations were used for analysis. The R package was used for word frequency analysis, word clouding, word correlation analysis, and LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) topic modeling. Results: The keyword frequency analysis shows that the most frequently mentioned keywords during the previous administration include 'no-brand', 'major company', 'bill', 'business field', and 'SMEs', and those mentioned during the current administration include 'industry' and 'policy'. As a result of LDA topic modeling, 9 topics such as 'global startups' and 'job creation' from the previous administration, and 10 topics such as 'franchise business' and 'distribution industry' from the current administration were derived. The results of LDAvis showed that the previous administration operated a policy based on mutual growth of large and small businesses rather than hostile regulations in the franchise business, whereas the current administration extended the regulation related to franchise business to the employment sector. Conclusions: The analysis of past two administrations' franchise policy, it can be suggested that franchisors and franchisees may complement each other in developing the Fair Transactions in Franchise Business Act and achieving balanced growth. Moreover, political support is needed for sound development of franchisors. Limitations and future research suggestions are presented at the end of this study.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.129-154
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• 2013

Product-harm crises, which are connected to defective or dangerous products, are perceived as the most common threats to a company. Product harm crises can distort long standing favorable equality perceptions, tarnish a company's reputation, cause major revenue and market-share losses, lead to costly product recalls, and devastate a carefully nurtured brand equity. However, in spite of the devastating impact of product-harm crises, little systematic research exists to asses its marketing consequences. So, the purpose of this study is to investigate how Koreans react to the crisis response in the aftermath of different crises(competence violation vs. integrity violation) and inspire additional research in crisis communication. This study has three main findings which run counter to the assumptions of Kim et al.(2007). Namely, the current study expands on the research of Kim et al. (2004, 2007) by examining how companies repair customers' trust and corporate attitude after crises. Different from previous studies, this study assumes that apology for an integrity-based crisis is the most appropriate way to repair consumer trust and corporate attitude. As for competence-based crisis, similarly, apology for competence-based crisis can be more successful repairing consumer trust and corporate attitude. Concerning silence strategy, remaining silent dose not admit or deny guilt right away, but instead of asking the perceiver to withhold judgment, suggesting that, silence could be expected to be superior to apology but inferior to denial. Finally, apology for competence violation will be expected to bemore effective than apology for integrity violation. Research conceptual model was as follows: According to the results, apology is found to be the most effective strategy to repair corporate attitude no matter the crisis is perceived as a violation of competence or integrity. Second, company may consider keeping silent as a desirable response because they does not admit nor deny responsibility but ask the public to withhold judgment. However, the result of this study shows that, in the overall crisis situations, silence strategy did not differ significantly from the denial strategy, which suggested that the public wants explanation instead of uncertainty. Third, there was the interaction effect between crisis type and crisis response strategies. In this study, apology is more effective for the competence violated situation in terms of regaining consumer trust and repairing their attitude toward company, while the apology's effectiveness is lower for the integrity-violated situation. More specifically, when the crisis is perceived due to company's lack of ability(competence violation), consumer's trust belief and attitude toward the company is more easily to repair when the company issued a sincere apology. Damaged product is perceived less intentional so participants are more likely to give the company second chance when they apology to the public. By contrast, exaggerated advertisement(integrity violation) is perceived intentionally and thus makes participants angrier toward the accused company. Although apology is perceived as the most effective strategy, when issuing apology, it also means the company admitted their intention. Therefore, in this kind of crisis situation, trust repair needs not only a sincere apology but additional efforts.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.53-77
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• 2013

As advertising and promotions are categorized as operating expenses, managers tend to reduce marketing budget to improve their short term profitability. Gauging the value and accountability of marketing spending is therefore considered as a major research priority in marketing. To respond this call, recent studies have documented that financial market reacts positively to a firm's marketing activity or marketing related outcomes such as brand equity and customer satisfaction. However, prior studies focus on the relation of marketing variable and financial market variables. This study suggests a channel about how marketing activity increases firm valuation. Specifically, we propose that a firm's marketing activity increases the level of the firm's product market information and thereby the dispersion in financial analysts' earnings forecasts decreases. With less uncertainty about the firm's future prospect, the firm's managers and shareholders have less information asymmetry, which reduces the firm's cost of capital and thereby increases the valuation of the firm. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to examine how informational benefits can mediate the effect of marketing activity on firm value. To test whether marketing activity contributes to increase in firm value by mitigating information asymmetry, this study employs a longitudinal data which contains 12,824 firm-year observations with 2,337 distinct firms from 1981 to 2006. Firm value is measured by Tobin's Q and one-year-ahead buy-and-hold abnormal return (BHAR). Following prior literature, dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts is used as a proxy for the information gap between management and shareholders. For model specification, to identify mediating effect, the three-step regression approach is adopted. All models are estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to test the statistical significance of the mediating effect. The analysis shows that marketing intensity has a significant negative relationship with dispersion in analysts' earnings forecasts. After including the mediator variable about analyst dispersion, the effect of marketing intensity on firm value drops from 1.199 (p < .01) to 1.130 (p < .01) in Tobin's Q model and the same effect drops from .192 (p < .01) to .188 (p < .01) in BHAR model. The results suggest that analysts' forecast dispersion partially accounts for the positive effect of marketing on firm valuation. Additionally, the same analysis was conducted with an alternative dependent variable (forecast accuracy) and a marketing metric (advertising intensity). The analysis supports the robustness of the main results. In sum, the results provide empirical evidence that marketing activity can increase shareholder value by mitigating problem of information asymmetry in the capital market. The findings have important implications for managers. First, managers should be cognizant of the role of marketing activity in providing information to the financial market as well as to the consumer market. Thus, managers should take into account investors' reaction when they design marketing communication messages for reducing the cost of capital. Second, this study shows a channel on how marketing creates shareholder value and highlights the accountability of marketing. In addition to the direct impact of marketing on firm value, an indirect channel by reducing information asymmetry should be considered. Potentially, marketing managers can justify their spending from the perspective of increasing long-term shareholder value.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.113-136
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• 2011

Product harm crises can distort long standing favorable equality perceptions, tarnish a company's reputation, cause major revenue and market-share losses, lead to costly product recalls, and devastate a carefully nurtured brand equity. However, in spite of the devastating impact of product-harm crises, little systematic research exists to asses its marketing consequences. So, this study focuses on the negative publicity about companies and their products. Namely, this study presented how inclusion effect supported the relationship between negative publicity and consumers' response, market performance. According to the results, after negativity publicity was happened, it was appeared that the negativity image spread into other product lines(spillover effect; inclusion effect). Also, when they contact with the negative publicity, respondents negatively evaluated both production evaluation and corporate evaluation. And, in that case of the products with negativity publicity, compared with refutation strategy(defense strategy<study 2>), improving strategy(correction notice) had positive influence on recovery of sales, product evaluation, and corporate evaluation. Finally, as the reaction time toward negativity publicity was faster, the market performance got worse. Especially, according to two-way interaction, when the reaction time was fast, the difference between refutation strategy(defense strategy<study 2>) and improving strategy was not existed in product evaluation and corporate evaluation. However, when the reaction time was late(after a month), improving strategy had more positive evaluation than defense strategy in product evaluation, and corporate evaluation.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.83-98
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• 2012

In a market where new and used cars are competing with each other, we would run the risk of obtaining biased estimates of cross elasticity between them if we focus on only new cars or on only used cars. Unfortunately, most of previous studies on the automobile industry have focused on only new car models without taking into account the effect of used cars' pricing policy on new cars' market shares and vice versa, resulting in inadequate prediction of reactive pricing in response to competitors' rebate or price discount. However, there are some exceptions. Purohit (1992) and Sullivan (1990) looked into both new and used car markets at the same time to examine the effect of new car model launching on the used car prices. But their studies have some limitations in that they employed the average used car prices reported in NADA Used Car Guide instead of actual transaction prices. Some of the conflicting results may be due to this problem in the data. Park (1998) recognized this problem and used the actual prices in his study. His work is notable in that he investigated the qualitative effect of new car model launching on the pricing policy of the used car in terms of reinforcement of brand equity. The current work also used the actual price like Park (1998) but the quantitative aspect of competitive price promotion between new and used cars of the same model was explored. In this study, I develop a model that assumes that the cross elasticity between new and used cars of the same model is higher than those amongst new cars and used cars of the different model. Specifically, I apply the nested logit model that assumes the car model choice at the first stage and the choice between new and used cars at the second stage. This proposed model is compared to the IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) model that assumes that there is no decision hierarchy but that new and used cars of the different model are all substitutable at the first stage. The data for this study are drawn from Power Information Network (PIN), an affiliate of J.D. Power and Associates. PIN collects sales transaction data from a sample of dealerships in the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. These are retail transactions, i.e., sales or leases to final consumers, excluding fleet sales and including both new car and used car sales. Each observation in the PIN database contains the transaction date, the manufacturer, model year, make, model, trim and other car information, the transaction price, consumer rebates, the interest rate, term, amount financed (when the vehicle is financed or leased), etc. I used data for the compact cars sold during the period January 2009- June 2009. The new and used cars of the top nine selling models are included in the study: Mazda 3, Honda Civic, Chevrolet Cobalt, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Elantra, Ford Focus, Volkswagen Jetta, Nissan Sentra, and Kia Spectra. These models in the study accounted for 87% of category unit sales. Empirical application of the nested logit model showed that the proposed model outperformed the IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) model in both calibration and holdout samples. The other comparison model that assumes choice between new and used cars at the first stage and car model choice at the second stage turned out to be mis-specfied since the dissimilarity parameter (i.e., inclusive or categroy value parameter) was estimated to be greater than 1. Post hoc analysis based on estimated parameters was conducted employing the modified Lanczo's iterative method. This method is intuitively appealing. For example, suppose a new car offers a certain amount of rebate and gains market share at first. In response to this rebate, a used car of the same model keeps decreasing price until it regains the lost market share to maintain the status quo. The new car settle down to a lowered market share due to the used car's reaction. The method enables us to find the amount of price discount to main the status quo and equilibrium market shares of the new and used cars. In the first simulation, I used Jetta as a focal brand to see how its new and used cars set prices, rebates or APR interactively assuming that reactive cars respond to price promotion to maintain the status quo. The simulation results showed that the IIA model underestimates cross elasticities, resulting in suggesting less aggressive used car price discount in response to new cars' rebate than the proposed nested logit model. In the second simulation, I used Elantra to reconfirm the result for Jetta and came to the same conclusion. In the third simulation, I had Corolla offer $1,000 rebate to see what could be the best response for Elantra's new and used cars. Interestingly, Elantra's used car could maintain the status quo by offering lower price discount ($160) than the new car ($205). In the future research, we might want to explore the plausibility of the alternative nested logit model. For example, the NUB model that assumes choice between new and used cars at the first stage and brand choice at the second stage could be a possibility even though it was rejected in the current study because of mis-specification (A dissimilarity parameter turned out to be higher than 1). The NUB model may have been rejected due to true mis-specification or data structure transmitted from a typical car dealership. In a typical car dealership, both new and used cars of the same model are displayed. Because of this fact, the BNU model that assumes brand choice at the first stage and choice between new and used cars at the second stage may have been favored in the current study since customers first choose a dealership (brand) then choose between new and used cars given this market environment. However, suppose there are dealerships that carry both new and used cars of various models, then the NUB model might fit the data as well as the BNU model. Which model is a better description of the data is an empirical question. In addition, it would be interesting to test a probabilistic mixture model of the BNU and NUB on a new data set.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-24
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• 2012

Nowadays, customer satisfaction has been one of company's major objectives, and the index to measure and communicate customer satisfaction has been generally accepted among business practices. The major issues of CSI(customer satisfaction index) are three questions, as follows: (a)what level of customer satisfaction is tolerable, (b)whether customer satisfaction and company performance has positive causality, and (c)what to do to improve customer satisfaction. Among these, the second issue is recently attracting academic research in several perspectives. On this study, the second issue will be addressed. Many researchers including Anderson have regarded customer satisfaction as core competencies, such as brand equity, customer equity. They want to verify following causality "customer satisfaction → market performance(market share, sales growth rate) → financial performance(operating margin, profitability) → corporate value performance(stock price, credit ratings)" based on the process model of marketing performance. On the other hand, Insoo Jeon and Aeju Jeong(2009) verified sequential causality based on the process model by the domestic data. According to the rejection of several hypotheses, they suggested the balance model of marketing performance as an alternative. The objective of this study, based on the existing process model, is to examine the causal relationship between customer satisfaction and corporate value performance. Anderson and Mansi(2009) proved the relationship between ACSI(American Customer Satisfaction Index) and credit ratings using 2,574 samples from 1994 to 2004 on the assumption that credit rating could be an indicator of a corporate value performance. The similar study(Sangwoon Yoon, 2010) was processed in Korean data, but it didn't confirm the relationship between KCSI(Korean CSI) and credit ratings, unlike the results of Anderson and Mansi(2009). The summary of these studies is in the Table 1. Two studies analyzing the relationship between customer satisfaction and credit ratings weren't consistent results. So, in this study we are to test the conflicting results of the relationship between customer satisfaction and credit ratings based on the research model considering Korean credit ratings. To prove the hypothesis, we suggest the research model as follows. Two important features of this model are the inclusion of important variables in the existing Korean credit rating system and government support. To control their influences on credit ratings, we included three important variables of Korean credit rating system and government support, in case of financial institutions including banks. ROA, ER, TA, these three variables are chosen among various kinds of financial indicators since they are the most frequent variables in many previous studies. The results of the research model are relatively favorable : R², F-value and p-value is .631, 233.15 and .000 respectively. Thus, the explanatory power of the research model as a whole is good and the model is statistically significant. The research model has good explanatory power, the regression coefficients of the KCSI is .096 as positive(+) and t-value and p-value is 2.220 and .0135 respectively. As a results, we can say the hypothesis is supported. Meanwhile, all other explanatory variables including ROA, ER, log(TA), GS_DV are identified as significant and each variables has a positive(+) relationship with CRS. In particular, the t-value of log(TA) is 23.557 and log(TA) as an explanatory variables of the corporate credit ratings shows very high level of statistical significance. Considering interrelationship between financial indicators such as ROA, ER which include total asset in their formula, we can expect multicollinearity problem. But indicators like VIF and tolerance limits that shows whether multicollinearity exists or not, say that there is no statistically significant multicollinearity in all the explanatory variables. KCSI, the main subject of this study, is a statistically significant level even though the standardized regression coefficients and t-value of KCSI is .055 and 2.220 respectively and a relatively low level among explanatory variables. Considering that we chose other explanatory variables based on the level of explanatory power out of many indicators in the previous studies, KCSI is validated as one of the most significant explanatory variables for credit rating score. And this result can provide new insights on the determinants of credit ratings. However, KCSI has relatively lower impact than main financial indicators like log(TA), ER. Therefore, KCSI is one of the determinants of credit ratings, but don't have an exceedingly significant influence. In addition, this study found that customer satisfaction had more meaningful impact on corporations of small asset size than those of big asset size, and on service companies than manufacturers. The findings of this study is consistent with Anderson and Mansi(2009), but different from Sangwoon Yoon(2010). Although research model of this study is a bit different from Anderson and Mansi(2009), we can conclude that customer satisfaction has a significant influence on company's credit ratings either Korea or the United State. In addition, this paper found that customer satisfaction had more meaningful impact on corporations of small asset size than those of big asset size and on service companies than manufacturers. Until now there are a few of researches about the relationship between customer satisfaction and various business performance, some of which were supported, some weren't. The contribution of this study is that credit rating is applied as a corporate value performance in addition to stock price. It is somewhat important, because credit ratings determine the cost of debt. But so far it doesn't get attention of marketing researches. Based on this study, we can say that customer satisfaction is partially related to all indicators of corporate business performances. Practical meanings for customer satisfaction department are that it needs to actively invest in the customer satisfaction, because active investment also contributes to higher credit ratings and other business performances. A suggestion for credit evaluators is that they need to design new credit rating model which reflect qualitative customer satisfaction as well as existing variables like ROA, ER, TA.