• Korea Science and Art Forum
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• v.21
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• pp.31-43
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• 2015

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is one of the technologies which represent the core value of the creative economy. It has served as a vehicle connecting the existing industry and corporate infrastructure, developing existing products and services and creating new products and services. In addition to the ICT, new devices including big data, mobile gadgets and wearable products are gaining a great attention sending an expectation for a new market-pioneering. Further, Internet of Things (IoT) is helping solidify the ICT-based social development connecting human-to-human, human-to-things and things-to-things. This means that the manufacturing-based hardware development needs to be achieved simultaneously with software development through convergence. The essential element the convergence between hardware and software is OS, for which world's leading companies such as Google and Apple have launched an intense development recognizing the importance of software. Against this backdrop, the status-quo of the software market has been examined for the study of the present report (Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology: Professional Design Technology Development Project). As a result, the software platform-based Google's android and Apple's iOS are dominant in the global market and late comers are trying to enter the market through various pathways by releasing web-based OS and similar OS to provide a new paradigm to the market. The present study is aimed at finding the way to utilize a smart content by which anyone can be a developer based on OS responding to such as social change, newly defining a smart content to be universally utilized and analyzing the market to deal with a rapid market change. The study method, scope and details are as follows: Literature investigation, Analysis on the app market according to a smart classification system, Trend analysis on the current content market, Identification of five common trends through comparison among the universal definition of smart content, the status-quo of application represented in the app market and content market situation. In conclusion, the smart content market is independent but is expected to develop in the form of a single organic body being connected each other. Therefore, the further classification system and development focus should be made in a way to see the area from multiple perspectives including a social point of view in terms of the existing technology, culture, business and consumers.

• Proceedings of the Korean DIstribution Association Conference
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• 2007.08a
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• pp.3-26
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• 2007

Recently, both scholars and marketers have asserted the importance of boundary spanning behaviors, such as external representation, being vocal advocates to outsiders of the organization's image, goods, and services, internal influence, taking individual initiative in communications to the firm and co-workers to improve service delivery by the organization, co-workers, and oneself, and service delivery, serving customers in a conscientious, responsive, flexible, and courteous manner. However, there is lack of study dealing with bourdary spanning behaviors bewteen organizational dyads, in which boundary spanning behaviors are expected to have important roles. The objectives of this paper is to investigate these important concerns with prior research by developing a theoretical model predicting how distinct buyer's boundary spanning behaviors occur. To be concrete, this paper develops a seller characteristics-based model of the attitudinal antecedents of three conceptually distinct forms of boundary spanning behaviors, and tests the hypothesized differential effects of seller characteristics on the three forms of boundary spanning behaviors, and investigates the extent to which these relationships are mediated by relationship satisfaction and organizational commitment. For the purpose of empirical testing, 420 respondents of leading automobile dealers, dining franchisees, industrial material retailers in Korea were surveyed and the analysis utilizing structural equation model indicated that communication quality, fairness, and marketing program dynamism had positive effects on buyer's boundary spanning behaviors via relationship satisfaction and organizational commitment. In addition, boundary spanning behaviors occurred more in contractural and corporate distribution channel than in conventional distribution channel.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.