• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Science and Nutrition
• /
• v.38 no.12
• /
• pp.1794-1800
• /
• 2009

This research was performed to acquire dietitians' attitudes toward events marketing at school foodservice operations in the Busan area. A total of 359 questionnaires were distributed to dietitians employed at school foodservice operations in Busan from July 1 to 31, 2006 (response rate: 93%). All dietitians assessed the importance and performance of event marketing at 3.39/5.00 and 2.78/5.00. The elementary and high school had significantly (p<0.01) higher average scores of performance of event marketing than those of the middle school. The contract managed foodservices had significantly (p<0.01) higher average scores of performance of event marketing than those of the independent managed foodservices. In the Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA), high importance and high performance (B area: doing great) were seasonal event, traditional festival day event, subdivisions of the seasonal event, environment event, school event, the day event and high importance whereas low performance (A area: focus here) was health event. Event marketing increased customer satisfaction and confidence. Therefore, these results suggest that there may be a need to implement special events at school foodservice in order to increase students' satisfaction.

• Journal of Distribution Science
• /
• v.9 no.3
• /
• pp.5-14
• /
• 2011

One of the new roles of modern retail stores is to supply consumers with a memorable experience. In Korea, enhancing a store's environment so that customers remember a unique shopping experience is recognized as a sound strategy for strengthening the store's competitiveness. Motivated by this incentive, awareness of the experience-store concept is starting to increase in various categories of the retail industry. However, many experience stores, except in a few cases, have yet to derive a significant profit, explaining why Korean consumers are somewhat unfamiliar with, yet fascinated by, the experience stores that now exist in the country. Consumer satisfaction directly, and indirectly, affects a company's future profit and potential financial gain; customer satisfaction also affects loyalty. Therefore, knowing the significant factors that increase satisfaction and loyalty is essential for any company, in any field, to be able to effectively differentiate itself from the competition. Intrigued by increased competition opportunities, most Korean companies have adopted experience-store marketing strategies. When establishing the most effective processes for increasing sales and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage of a new concept, companies should consider certain factors that influence consumers' ability to accept new concepts and ideas. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is a theory that models how people accept new concepts. TAM proposes the following two factors that influence a person's decisions about how, and when, he or she will use a new product: "perceived usefulness" and "perceived ease of use." Much of the existing research has suggested that a person's character also affects the process for accepting new ideas. Such personal character attributes as individual preferences, self-confidence, and a person's values, traits, and/or skills affect the process for willingly consenting to try something new. It will be meaningful to establish how the TAM theory's components, as well as personal character, affect individuals accepting the experience-store concept. To that end, as it pertains to an experience store, the first goal of the study is to examine the influence of innovative factors (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) on satisfaction and loyalty. The second objective is to define the moderate effect of consumers' personal characteristics on the model. The proposed model was tested on 149 respondents who were engaged in leisure sports activities and bought sports outdoor garments and equipment. According to the study's findings, the satisfaction and loyalty of an experience store can be explained by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, with the study's results demonstrating the stronger of the two factors being "perceived ease of use." The study failed to explain the effects of a person's character on the model. In conclusion, when the companies that operate the experience stores execute their marketing and promotion strategies, they should stress the stores' "ease of use" product components. Additionally, it can be extrapolated from the study data that since the experience-store idea is still relatively unfamiliar to Korean consumers, most customers are not yet able to evaluate, nor take a position regarding, their respective attitudes toward experience stores.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.115-132
• /
• 2008

Metal industry is one of the most representative heavy industries and the median sales volume of steel and nonferrous metal companies is over one billion dollars in the case America [Forbes 2006]. As seen in the recent business market situation, an increasing number of industrial manufacturers and suppliers are moving from adversarial to cooperative exchange attitudes that support the long-term relationships with their customers. This article presents the results of an empirical study of the antecedent factors of business relationships in metal industry of the United States. Commitment has been reviewed as a significant and critical variable in research on inter-organizational relationships (Hong et al. 2007, Kim et al. 2007). The future stability of any buyer-seller relationship depends upon the commitment made by the interactants to their relationship. Commitment, according to Dwyer et al. [1987], refers to "an implicit or explicit pledge of relational continuity between exchange partners" and they consider commitment to be the most advanced phase of buyer-seller exchange relationship. Bonds are made because the members need their partners in order to do something and this integration on a task basis can be either symbiotic or cooperative (Svensson 2008). To the extent that members seek the same or mutually supporting ends, there will be strong bonds among them. In other words, the principle that affects the strength of bonds is 'economy of decision making' [Turner 1970]. These bonds provide an important idea to study the causes of business long-term relationships in a sense that organizations can be mutually bonded by a common interest in the economic matters. Recently, the framework of structural bonding has been used to study the buyer-seller relationships in industrial marketing [Han and Sung 2008, Williams et al. 1998, Wilson 1995] in that this structural bonding is a crucial part of the theoretical justification for distinguishing discrete transactions from ongoing long-term relationships. The major antecedent factors of buyer commitment such as technology, CLalt, transaction-specific assets, and importance were identified and explored from the perspective of structural bonding. Research hypotheses were developed and tested by using survey data from the middle managers in the metal industry. H1: Level of technology of the relationship partner is positively related to the level of structural bonding between the buyer and the seller. H2: Comparison level of alternatives is negatively related to the level of structural bonding between the buyer and the seller. H3: Amount of the transaction-specific assets is positively related to the level of structural bonding between the buyer and the seller. H4: Importance of the relationship partner is positively related to the level of structural bonding between the buyer and the seller. H5: Level of structural bonding is positively related to the level of commitment to the relationship. To examine the major antecedent factors of industrial buyer's structural bonding and long-term relationship, questionnaire was prepared, mailed out to the sample of 400 purchasing managers of the US metal industry (SIC codes 33 and 34). After a follow-up request, 139 informants returnedthe questionnaires, resulting in a response rate of 35 percent. 134 responses were used in the final analysis after dropping 5 incomplete questionnaires. All measures were analyzed for reliability and validity following the guidelines offered by Churchill [1979] and Anderson and Gerbing [1988]., the results of fitting the model to the data indicated that the hypothesized model provides a good fit to the data. Goodness-of-fit index (GFI = 0.94) and other indices ( chi-square = 78.02 with p-value = 0.13, Adjusted GFI = 0.90, Normed Fit Index = 0.92) indicated that a major proportion of variances and covariances in the data was accounted for by the model as a whole, and all the parameter estimates showed statistical significance as evidenced by large t-values. All the factor loadings were significantly different from zero. On these grounds we judged the hypothesized model to be a reasonable representation of the data. The results from the present study suggest several implications for buyer-seller relationships. Theoretically, we attempted to conceptualize the antecedent factors of buyer-seller long-term relationships from the perspective of structural bondingin metal industry. The four underlying determinants (i.e. technology, CLalt, transaction-specific assets, and importance) of structural bonding are very critical variables of buyer-seller long-term business relationships. Our model of structural bonding makes an attempt to systematically examine the relationship between the antecedent factors of structural bonding and long-term commitment. Managerially, this research provides industrial purchasing managers with a good framework to assess the interaction processes with their partners and, ability to position their business relationships from the perspective of structural bonding. In other words, based on those underlying variables, industrial purchasing managers can determine the strength of the company's relationships with the key suppliers and its state of preparation to be a successful partner with those suppliers. Both the supplying and customer companies can also benefit by using the concept of 'structural bonding' and evaluating their relationships with key business partners from the structural point of view. In general, the results indicate that structural bonding gives a critical impact on the level of relationship commitment. Managerial implications and limitations of the study are also discussed.