• Title/Summary/Keyword: Customer/User Factor

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A Study on Consumer Trust Building in an Internet Marketplace (인터넷 오픈마켓 거래안전 요인과 소비자신뢰의 관계 연구)

  • Lee, Ki-Heon
    • CRM연구
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    • v.1 no.1
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    • pp.23-48
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    • 2006
  • Internet B2C marketplace such as 'Auction', 'G Market', 'Daum onket' etc.(called open market) has grown sharply in sales about yearly 100% rate increase in recent 1-2 years in Korea. Although Open marketplace has much reputation and the customer loyalty, almost of merchants participated in open market, which size in sales are medium/small, has poor reputation and trust. Consumers, who have to get in touch with untrustworthy merchants for trade in openmarket, perceive high trade risk which undergo the monetary damages such as 'merchandise never received'. This examines what factors consumer trust develop in online marketplace. This study explores several perceived risk factors in an open market by factor analysis and multi-regression to prove the relationships between the degree of trust for the merchants and the perceived trade risk. 133 data collected from the open market user data in this survey. In this study, the consumer's trade satisfaction in open market is low by 4.2 point degree of 7 point likert scale. and perceives 4 trade risk factors such as (1) 'failure to honor warranty or guarantee' (2) 'defective/poor goods in quality' (3) 'merchandise never received or received late' (4) 'poor information'. the degree of merchant's trust has significant relationship with the degree of perceived risk(sig. = 0.0000, $R^2=.327$) We find that the open market has to enhance the relationship marketing of trust by developing the strategies.

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Improvement and Promotion Plan for the Screen Baseball Utilization (스크린야구 이용의 개선 및 증진방안)

  • Koo, Soo-Yong;Jeon, Yong-Bae;Choi, Eui-Yul
    • 한국체육학회지인문사회과학편
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    • v.54 no.4
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    • pp.363-372
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    • 2015
  • The purpose of this study was to suggest marketing plan to improve and promote screen baseball utilization, applying Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) incorporating marketing mix 4Cs; Customer value, Convenience, Cost, and Communication. A convenience sample was made up of 267 users in screen baseball clubs located in metropolitan area. Evidence on validity and reliability of the data was obtained through exploratory factor analysis and internal consistency analysis. Frequency analysis and paired sample t-test for the difference verification of IPA were conducted also in SPSS version 21.0 with .05 of significance level. The main results of the study were as follows. First, there were partially significant differences between importance and satisfaction regarding the sub-categories of Customer value and Convenience. Second, there were all significant differences between importance and satisfaction regarding the sub-categories of Cost and Communication. Third, as the results regarding IPA, quadrant I indicating 'Keep up Good Work' included healthy use of leisure time, improvement of self-achievement, accessibility, communication between service user and provider, etc. Fourth, quadrant II indicating 'Concentrate Here' included diversification of screen baseball program, cost regarding facility use, etc. Fifth, quadrant III indicating 'Low Priority' included interpersonal relationship, subsidiary facilities, cost of food and beverage, etc. Lastly, quadrant IV indicating 'Possible Overkill' included improvement of physical health and life satisfaction and rules and procedures of screen baseball.

IT Service Strategy on Development of Online Floral Distribution Service : A Typhoon Positioning Strategy (화훼소매점의 온라인 유통서비스 진화에 따른 정보기술서비스 전략 - A Typhoon Positioning Strategy를 중심으로 -)

  • Lee, Seung-chang;Ahn, Sung-hyuck;Lee, Soong
    • Journal of Distribution Science
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    • v.7 no.4
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    • pp.15-26
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    • 2009
  • The internet has dramatically changed a way of business management and competition in the business environment. Especially, it stimulated not only to evolve online floral distribution service but also to change a phase of competition among floral retail stores in industry. And that also led to keen competition among IT service providers as well. This study is to examine how floral retail stores have been evolved and competed with the radical situation of the floral distribution industry through IT service in the aspect of business and information technology. In addition, the Typhoon Positioning Strategy(TPS), a strategy for the IT service positioning, is introduced from IT service provider's perspective. For IT service providers to create high business value and continuous service providing, IT service should be positioned on the customers' "core business" and developed to the level of "solution." The Typhoon Positioning Strategy(TPS) is a strategy for the IT service positioning, indicating that IT service should be positioned according to a Business Process-Service model with the consideration of business development direction, IT service trend, and user's IT capability. That is, IT service providers should find out customers' "core business" area first to provide a right IT service to the company, and the IT service provided should meet to the level of business solution. The capability of the IT solution users is also an important factor to be considered for the advanced IT service. There are four principles of the Typhoon Positioning Strategy(TPS). Principle 1) IT service provided should be an IT solution Map suitable for customer business processes. Principle 2) IT service provided should be able to support customer core business. Principle 3) IT service provided should be a business solution. Principle. 4) IT service provided should be applied differently according to the level of customer's IT capability.

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A Study on Consumer Characteristics According to Social Media Use Clusters When Purchasing Agri-food Online (온라인 농식품 구매시 소셜미디어 이용 군집에 따른 소비자특성에 대한 연구)

  • Lee, Myoung-Kwan;Park, Sang-Hyeok;Kim, Yeon-Jong
    • Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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    • v.16 no.4
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    • pp.195-209
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    • 2021
  • According to the 2019-2020 social media usage survey conducted by the Seoul e-commerce center, 5 out of 10 consumers have experienced shopping through social media. The cost of traditional advertising media has been reduced and advertising spending on social media has risen by 74%, indicating that social media is becoming a more important marketing element. While the number of users of social media has increased and corporate marketing activities have increased accordingly, research has been conducted in various aspects of marketing such as user motivation for social media, satisfaction, and purchase intention. There was no subdivided study on the differences in the social media usage frequency of consumers in actual purchasing behavior. This study attempted to identify differences in consumer characteristics by cluster in the agrifood purchase situation by grouping them by type according to the frequency of use of social media for consumers who purchase agri-food online. Product involvement, product need, and online purchase channel Consumer characteristics such as demographic distribution, perceived risk, and eating and lifestyle in each cluster were checked for the three agrifood purchase situations including choice, and types for each cluster were presented. To this end, questionnaire data on the frequency of social media use and online agrifood purchase behavior were collected from 245 consumers, and the validity of the measurement variables was secured through factor analysis and reliability analysis. As a result of cluster analysis according to the frequency of social media use, it was divided into three clusters. The first cluster was a group that mainly used open social media, and the second cluster was a group that used both open and closed social media and online shopping malls; The third cluster was a group with low online media usage overall, and the characteristics of each cluster appeared. Through regression analysis, the effect on product involvement, product need, and purchase channel selection when purchasing agri-food online through each of the three clusters was confirmed through regression analysis. As a result of the regression analysis, the characteristic of cluster 1 in the situation of purchasing agri-food online is a male in his 30s living in a rural area who has no reluctance to purchase agri-food on social media or online shopping malls. The characteristics of cluster 2 are mainly consumers who are interested in purchasing health food, and the consumer characteristics are represented. In the case of cluster 3, when purchasing products online, they purchase after considering quality and price a lot, and the consumer characteristics are represented as people who are more confident in purchasing offline than online. Through this study, it is judged that by identifying the differences in consumer characteristics that appear in the agri-food purchase situation according to the frequency of social media use, it can be helpful in strategic judgments in marketing practice on social media customer targeting and customer segmentation.

Literature Review of Key Success Factors of Management Innovation Actions in Domestic - Focused on Six Sigma, TQM, Lean Six Sigma, ERP, TPM, BPR, Project Management, System Engineering - (국내 경영혁신 활동의 핵심 성공요인 문헌 연구 - 6시그마, TQM, 린 6시그마, ERP, TPM, BPR, Project Management, System Engineering 중심으로 -)

  • Mun, JeOk;Yoon, SungPil
    • Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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    • v.44 no.3
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    • pp.639-648
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    • 2016
  • Purpose: Existing precedent studies include success factors of individual management innovation activities constantly. However, those studies have limitations about the common key success factors of individual management innovation activities. Methods: For this study, we investigate the key success factors using literature research of the most typical management innovation activities adopted and implemented by many companies in Korea, such as 6sigma, TQM, Lean 6sigma, ERP, TPM, BPR, Project Management, System Engineering. Factors emerging repeatedly was combined into common factors and inherent factors that are necessary for the success of individual management innovation activities are designated to essential factors. Results: 'Essential factors for Six Sigma' consist of 5 items. Black belt operating system, personnel management system linkage, the correct management of the data, perform improvement projects associated with financial performance financial result, linked to financial performance improvement project, project progress management. 'Essential factors of TQM' are arranged 4 items. Quality team's independence and role, goal-setting, Quality Information System, corporate's philosophy of quality first. 'Essential factors of Lean Six Sigma' are the selection of value stream which is based on the customer needs and the value creation and identify the project based on the selected value in the company. 'Essential factors of ERP' are investigated 6 items. Ongoing system maintenance and upgrades, the measurement and support of user satisfaction, the operating systems and the policies for the maintenance, IT infrastructure, change adaption condition monitoring, focusing on improving business performance. 'Essential factors for TPM' are arranged 4 items. Motivated and energetic Bottom-Up, CEO's recognition of the importance facility management, long-term perspective of necessity and ongoing patience. 'Essential factors for BPR' are the pursuit of change process and the staff's sense of crisis management. 'Essential factors for Project Management' are the strategy that reduce the risk management skills through risk management and the understanding and organized management for the project participant's needs. 'Essential factors for System Engineering' consist of 2 items. The first is the design for the best balanced system with pre-analysis about the compromise the cost, schedule and the performance. The second is the analysis of large problem into small problems which can solved. We have found the solution considering components of the interface through the systematic perspective. Conclusion: Common factors and essential factors presented in this study will properly help to introduce the individual management innovation activities for the each business sector and implement management innovation. After this study, new literature research that reflect new studies should accomplish steadily.

A Study on the Customer's Use of and Satisfaction with oriental medical services by local resident - Focused on Asan City - (지역 주민의 한방 의료 서비스에 관한 조사연구 - 아산시를 중심으로 -)

  • Kim, Kyoung-Shin;Um, Ji-Tae;An, Jong-Min;Kim, So-Hi;Choi, Mi-Young;Kim, Byoung-Soo
    • Journal of Haehwa Medicine
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.143-151
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    • 2010
  • The purpose of this study is to survey the current status of the oriental medical service satisfaction and needs that the people who utilizing the medical services and suggest the primary factors of consumption and satisfaction in the oriental medical services the city of Asan. We analyze the use and satisfaction of the customers for the oriental medical services with using the questionnaires to the citizens of Asan. The method of this study is that the participants of the survey was 556 people of Asan City. The survey was conducted from August 15th, 2009 to September 15th, 2009(during 30 days) with disease index that specially developed as oriental medicine. The results of this study are as follows: 556 people were responded the survey. 471(84.7%) of respondents were who have ever been treated with oriental medical service and 85(15.3%) of respondents were who have never been treated with oriental medical service. 25(4.7%) of respondents were who doesn't believe the treat of oriental medicine. 76(13.6%) of respondents prefered the oriental medical service. 413(50.1%) of respondents prefered the acupuncture and moxa treatment and 280(33.9%) prefered the herbs. 227(39.6%) of respondents were treated for musculoskeletal disorders The conclusions from this study are as follows: Firstly, it was found that the people who prefer to use oriental medical services usually have one or more of these following diseases: musculoskeletal disorders, paralysis, unclear diseases or injuries. Secondly, the main factor of customers' satisfaction with oriental medical services lies in the age of the user. The more aged, the more high in customers' satisfaction with oriental medical services was found through the survey. The results of this study can be used to develop marketing strategies for oriental medical institutions in the city of Asan.

A Study on Perceived Quality affecting the Service Personal Value in the On-off line Channel - Focusing on the moderate effect of the need for cognition - (온.오프라인 채널에서 지각된 품질이 서비스의 개인가치에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구 -인지욕구의 조정효과를 중심으로-)

  • Sung, Hyung-Suk
    • Journal of Distribution Research
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    • v.15 no.3
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    • pp.111-137
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    • 2010
  • The basic purpose of this study is to investigate perceived quality and service personal value affecting the result of long-term relationship between service buyers and suppliers. This research presented a constructive model(perceived quality affecting the service personal value and the moderate effect of NFC) in the on off line and then propose the research model base on prior researches and studies about relationships among components of service. Data were gathered from respondents who visit at the education service market. For this study, Data were analyzed by AMOS 7.0. We integrate the literature on services marketing with researches on personal values and perceived quality. The SERPVAL scale presented here allows for the creation of a common ground for assessing service personal values, giving a clear understanding of the key value dimensions behind service choice and usage. It will lead to a focus of future research in services marketing, extending knowledge in the field and stimulating further empirical research on service personal values. At the managerial level, as a tool the SERPVAL scale should allow practitioners to evaluate and improve the value of a service, and consequently, to define strategies and actions to address services for customers based on their fundamental personal values. Through qualitative and empirical research, we find that the service quality construct conforms to the structure of a second-order factor model that ties service quality perceptions to distinct and actionable dimensions: outcome, interaction, and environmental quality. In turn, each has two subdimensions that define the basis of service quality perceptions. The authors further suggest that for each of these subdimensions to contribute to improved service quality perceptions, the quality received by consumers must be perceived to be reliable, responsive, and empathetic. Although the service personal value may be found in researches that explore individual values and their consequences for consumer behavior, there is no established operationalization of a SERPVAL scale. The inexistence of an established scale, duly adapted in order to understand and analyze personal values behind services usage, exposes the need of a measurement scale with such a purpose. This need has to be rooted, however, in a conceptualization of the construct being scaled. Service personal values can be defined as a customer's overall assessment of the use of a service based on the perception of what is achieved in terms of his own personal values. As consumer behaviors serve to show an individual's values, the use of a service can also be a way to fulfill and demonstrate consumers'personal values. In this sense, a service can provide more to the customer than its concrete and abstract attributes at both the attribute and the quality levels, and more than its functional consequences at the value level. Both values and services literatures agree, that personal value is the highest-level concept, followed by instrumental values, attitudes and finally by product attributes. Purchasing behaviors are agreed to be the end result of these concepts' interaction, with personal values taking a major role in the final decision process. From both consumers' and practitioners' perspectives, values are extremely relevant, as they are desirable goals that serve as guiding principles in people's lives. While building on previous research, we propose to assess service personal values through three broad groups of individual dimensions; at the self-oriented level, we use (1) service value to peaceful life (SVPL) and, at the social-oriented level, we use (2) service value to social recognition (SVSR), and (3) service value to social integration (SVSI). Service value to peaceful life is our first dimension. This dimension emerged as a combination of values coming from the RVS scale, a scale built specifically to assess general individual values. If a service promotes a pleasurable life, brings or improves tranquility, safety and harmony, then its user recognizes the value of this service. Generally, this service can improve the user's pleasure of life, since it protects or defends the consumer from threats to life or pressures on it. While building upon both the LOV scale, a scale built specifically to assess consumer values, and the RVS scale for individual values, we develop the other two dimensions: SVSR and SVSI. The roles of social recognition and social integration to improve service personal value have been seriously neglected. Social recognition derives its outcome utility from its predictive utility. When applying this underlying belief to our second dimension, SVSR, we assume that people use a service while taking into consideration the content of what is delivered. Individuals consider whether the service aids in gaining respect from others, social recognition and status, as well as whether it allows achieving a more fulfilled and stimulating life, which might then be revealed to others. People also tend to engage in behavior that receives social recognition and to avoid behavior that leads to social disapproval, and this contributes to an individual's social integration. This leads us to the third dimension, SVSI, which is based on the fact that if the consumer perceives that a service strengthens friendships, provides the possibility of becoming more integrated in the group, or promotes better relationships at the social, professional or family levels, then the service will contribute to social integration, and naturally the individual will recognize personal value in the service. Most of the research in business values deals with individual values. However, to our knowledge, no study has dealt with assessing overall personal values as well as their dimensions in a service context. Our final results show that the scales adapted from the Schwartz list were excluded. A possible explanation is that although Schwartz builds on Rokeach work in order to explore individual values, its dimensions might be especially focused on analyzing societal values. As we are looking for individual dimensions, this might explain why the values inspired by the Schwartz list were excluded from the model. The hierarchical structure of the final scale presented in this paper also presents theoretical implications. Although we cannot claim to definitively capture the dimensions of service personal values, we believe that we come close to capturing these overall evaluations because the second-order factor extracts the underlying commonality among dimensions. In addition to obtaining respondents' evaluations of the dimensions, the second-order factor model captures the common variance among these dimensions, reflecting the respondents' overall assessment of service personal values. Towards this fact, we expect that the service personal values conceptualization and measurement scale presented here contributes to both business values literature and the service marketing field, allowing for the delineation of strategies for adding value to services. This new scale also presents managerial implications. The SERPVAL dimensions give some guidance on how to better pursue a highly service-oriented business strategy. Indeed, the SERPVAL scale can be used for benchmarking purposes, as this scale can be used to identify whether or not a firms' marketing strategies are consistent with consumers' expectations. Managerial assessment of the personal values of a service might be extremely important because it allows managers to better understand what customers want or value. Thus, this scale allows us to identify what services are really valuable to the final consumer; providing knowledge for making choices regarding which services to include. Traditional approaches have focused their attention on service attributes (as quality) and service consequences(as service value), but personal values may be an important set of variables to be considered in understanding what attracts consumers to a certain service. By using the SERPVAL scale to assess the personal values associated with a services usage, managers may better understand the reasons behind services' usage, so that they may handle them more efficiently. While testing nomological validity, our empirical findings demonstrate that the three SERPVAL dimensions are positively and significantly associated with satisfaction. Additionally, while service value to social integration is related only with loyalty, service value to peaceful life is associated with both loyalty and repurchase intent. It is also interesting and surprising that service value to social recognition appears not to be significantly linked with loyalty and repurchase intent. A possible explanation is that no mobile service provider has yet emerged in the market as a luxury provider. All of the Portuguese providers are still trying to capture market share by means of low-end pricing. This research has implications for consumers as well. As more companies seek to build relationships with their customers, consumers are easily able to examine whether these relationships provide real value or not to their own lives. The selection of a strategy for a particular service depends on its customers' personal values. Being highly customer-oriented means having a strong commitment to customers, trying to create customer value and understanding customer needs. Enhancing service distinctiveness in order to provide a peaceful life, increase social recognition and gain a better social integration are all possible strategies that companies may pursue, but the one to pursue depends on the outstanding personal values held by the service customers. Data were gathered from 284 respondents in the korean discount store and online shopping mall market. This research proposed 3 hypotheses on 6 latent variables and tested through structural equation modeling. 6 alternative measurements were compared through statistical significance test of the 6 paths of research model and the overall fitting level of structural equation model. and the result was successful. and Perceived quality more positively influences service personal value when NFC is high than when no NFC is low in the off-line market. The results of the study indicate that service quality is properly modeled as an antecedent of service personal value. We consider the research and managerial implications of the study and its limitations. In sum, by knowing the dimensions a consumer takes into account when choosing a service, a better understanding of purchasing behaviors may be realized, guiding managers toward customers expectations. By defining strategies and actions that address potential problems with the service personal values, managers might ultimately influence their firm's performance. we expect to contribute to both business values and service marketing literatures through the development of the service personal value. At a time when marketing researchers are challenged to provide research with practical implications, it is also believed that this framework may be used by managers to pursue service-oriented business strategies while taking into consideration what customers value.

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A Study on the Relationship Between Online Community Characteristics and Loyalty : Focused on Mediating Roles of Self-Congruency, Consumer Experience, and Consumer to Consumer Interactivity (온라인 커뮤니티 특성과 충성도 간의 관계에 대한 연구: 자아일치성, 소비자 체험, 상호작용성의 매개적 역할을 중심으로)

  • Kim, Moon-Tae;Ock, Jung-Won
    • 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.

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An Empirical Study on the Determinants of Supply Chain Management Systems Success from Vendor's Perspective (참여자관점에서 공급사슬관리 시스템의 성공에 영향을 미치는 요인에 관한 실증연구)

  • Kang, Sung-Bae;Moon, Tae-Soo;Chung, Yoon
    • Asia pacific journal of information systems
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    • v.20 no.3
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    • pp.139-166
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    • 2010
  • The supply chain management (SCM) systems have emerged as strong managerial tools for manufacturing firms in enhancing competitive strength. Despite of large investments in the SCM systems, many companies are not fully realizing the promised benefits from the systems. A review of literature on adoption, implementation and success factor of IOS (inter-organization systems), EDI (electronic data interchange) systems, shows that this issue has been examined from multiple theoretic perspectives. And many researchers have attempted to identify the factors which influence the success of system implementation. However, the existing studies have two drawbacks in revealing the determinants of systems implementation success. First, previous researches raise questions as to the appropriateness of research subjects selected. Most SCM systems are operating in the form of private industrial networks, where the participants of the systems consist of two distinct groups: focus companies and vendors. The focus companies are the primary actors in developing and operating the systems, while vendors are passive participants which are connected to the system in order to supply raw materials and parts to the focus companies. Under the circumstance, there are three ways in selecting the research subjects; focus companies only, vendors only, or two parties grouped together. It is hard to find researches that use the focus companies exclusively as the subjects probably due to the insufficient sample size for statistic analysis. Most researches have been conducted using the data collected from both groups. We argue that the SCM success factors cannot be correctly indentified in this case. The focus companies and the vendors are in different positions in many areas regarding the system implementation: firm size, managerial resources, bargaining power, organizational maturity, and etc. There are no obvious reasons to believe that the success factors of the two groups are identical. Grouping the two groups also raises questions on measuring the system success. The benefits from utilizing the systems may not be commonly distributed to the two groups. One group's benefits might be realized at the expenses of the other group considering the situation where vendors participating in SCM systems are under continuous pressures from the focus companies with respect to prices, quality, and delivery time. Therefore, by combining the system outcomes of both groups we cannot measure the system benefits obtained by each group correctly. Second, the measures of system success adopted in the previous researches have shortcoming in measuring the SCM success. User satisfaction, system utilization, and user attitudes toward the systems are most commonly used success measures in the existing studies. These measures have been developed as proxy variables in the studies of decision support systems (DSS) where the contribution of the systems to the organization performance is very difficult to measure. Unlike the DSS, the SCM systems have more specific goals, such as cost saving, inventory reduction, quality improvement, rapid time, and higher customer service. We maintain that more specific measures can be developed instead of proxy variables in order to measure the system benefits correctly. The purpose of this study is to find the determinants of SCM systems success in the perspective of vendor companies. In developing the research model, we have focused on selecting the success factors appropriate for the vendors through reviewing past researches and on developing more accurate success measures. The variables can be classified into following: technological, organizational, and environmental factors on the basis of TOE (Technology-Organization-Environment) framework. The model consists of three independent variables (competition intensity, top management support, and information system maturity), one mediating variable (collaboration), one moderating variable (government support), and a dependent variable (system success). The systems success measures have been developed to reflect the operational benefits of the SCM systems; improvement in planning and analysis capabilities, faster throughput, cost reduction, task integration, and improved product and customer service. The model has been validated using the survey data collected from 122 vendors participating in the SCM systems in Korea. To test for mediation, one should estimate the hierarchical regression analysis on the collaboration. And moderating effect analysis should estimate the moderated multiple regression, examines the effect of the government support. The result shows that information system maturity and top management support are the most important determinants of SCM system success. Supply chain technologies that standardize data formats and enhance information sharing may be adopted by supply chain leader organization because of the influence of focal company in the private industrial networks in order to streamline transactions and improve inter-organization communication. Specially, the need to develop and sustain an information system maturity will provide the focus and purpose to successfully overcome information system obstacles and resistance to innovation diffusion within the supply chain network organization. The support of top management will help focus efforts toward the realization of inter-organizational benefits and lend credibility to functional managers responsible for its implementation. The active involvement, vision, and direction of high level executives provide the impetus needed to sustain the implementation of SCM. The quality of collaboration relationships also is positively related to outcome variable. Collaboration variable is found to have a mediation effect between on influencing factors and implementation success. Higher levels of inter-organizational collaboration behaviors such as shared planning and flexibility in coordinating activities were found to be strongly linked to the vendors trust in the supply chain network. Government support moderates the effect of the IS maturity, competitive intensity, top management support on collaboration and implementation success of SCM. In general, the vendor companies face substantially greater risks in SCM implementation than the larger companies do because of severe constraints on financial and human resources and limited education on SCM systems. Besides resources, Vendors generally lack computer experience and do not have sufficient internal SCM expertise. For these reasons, government supports may establish requirements for firms doing business with the government or provide incentives to adopt, implementation SCM or practices. Government support provides significant improvements in implementation success of SCM when IS maturity, competitive intensity, top management support and collaboration are low. The environmental characteristic of competition intensity has no direct effect on vendor perspective of SCM system success. But, vendors facing above average competition intensity will have a greater need for changing technology. This suggests that companies trying to implement SCM systems should set up compatible supply chain networks and a high-quality collaboration relationship for implementation and performance.