• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.7 no.4
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• pp.47-56
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• 2009

The purpose of this study is to present an alternative improving the efficient and reasonable of the physical distribution system management is influenced by many factors. Therefore, the study depends on the documentary method and survey method to achieve the purpose of this study. The major components of a physical distribution system are refers to as elements, include warehouse·storage system, transportation system, inventory system, physical distribution information system. The factors used in this study are ① factor of product(quality·A/S·added value of product·adaption of product·technical competitive power to other enterprises), ② factor of market(market channel·kinds of customer·physical distribution share), ③ factor of warehouse·storage(warehouse design·size·direction·storage ability·warehouse quality), ④ factor of transportation(promptness·reliability·responsibility·kinds of transportation·cooperation united transportation system·national transportation network), ⑤ factor of packaging (packaging design·material·educating program·pollution degree measure program), ⑥ factor of inventory(ordinary inventory criterion·consistence for inventories record), ⑦ factor of unloaded(unloaded machine·having machine ratio), ⑧ factor of information system (physical distribution quantity analysis·usable computer part), ⑨ factor of physical distribution cost(sales ratio to product) ⑩ factor of physical distribution system(physical distribution center etc). The implication of this study can be summarized as follows: ① In firms that have not adopted a systems integrative approach, physical distribution is a fragmented and often uncoordinated set of activities spread throughout various functions with function having its own set of priorities and measurements. ② The physical distribution is recognized as more an important strategic factor than a simple cost reduction factor, ③ It can be used a strategic competition tool to enterprise.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.221-238
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• 2019

Recently, companies and public institutions have been actively introducing chatbot services in the field of customer counseling and response. The introduction of the chatbot service not only brings labor cost savings to companies and organizations, but also enables rapid communication with customers. Advances in data analytics and artificial intelligence are driving the growth of these chatbot services. The current chatbot can understand users' questions and offer the most appropriate answers to questions through machine learning and deep learning. The advancement of chatbot core technologies such as NLP, NLU, and NLG has made it possible to understand words, understand paragraphs, understand meanings, and understand emotions. For this reason, the value of chatbots continues to rise. However, technology-oriented chatbots can be inconsistent with what users want inherently, so chatbots need to be addressed in the area of the user experience, not just in the area of technology. The Fourth Industrial Revolution represents the importance of the User Experience as well as the advancement of artificial intelligence, big data, cloud, and IoT technologies. The development of IT technology and the importance of user experience have provided people with a variety of environments and changed lifestyles. This means that experiences in interactions with people, services(products) and the environment become very important. Therefore, it is time to develop a user needs-based services(products) that can provide new experiences and values to people. This study proposes a chatbot development process based on user needs by applying the design thinking approach, a representative methodology in the field of user experience, to chatbot development. The process proposed in this study consists of four steps. The first step is 'setting up knowledge domain' to set up the chatbot's expertise. Accumulating the information corresponding to the configured domain and deriving the insight is the second step, 'Knowledge accumulation and Insight identification'. The third step is 'Opportunity Development and Prototyping'. It is going to start full-scale development at this stage. Finally, the 'User Feedback' step is to receive feedback from users on the developed prototype. This creates a "user needs-based service (product)" that meets the process's objectives. Beginning with the fact gathering through user observation, Perform the process of abstraction to derive insights and explore opportunities. Next, it is expected to develop a chatbot that meets the user's needs through the process of materializing to structure the desired information and providing the function that fits the user's mental model. In this study, we present the actual construction examples for the domestic cosmetics market to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed process. The reason why it chose the domestic cosmetics market as its case is because it shows strong characteristics of users' experiences, so it can quickly understand responses from users. This study has a theoretical implication in that it proposed a new chatbot development process by incorporating the design thinking methodology into the chatbot development process. This research is different from the existing chatbot development research in that it focuses on user experience, not technology. It also has practical implications in that companies or institutions propose realistic methods that can be applied immediately. In particular, the process proposed in this study can be accessed and utilized by anyone, since 'user needs-based chatbots' can be developed even if they are not experts. This study suggests that further studies are needed because only one field of study was conducted. In addition to the cosmetics market, additional research should be conducted in various fields in which the user experience appears, such as the smart phone and the automotive market. Through this, it will be able to be reborn as a general process necessary for 'development of chatbots centered on user experience, not technology centered'.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.79-102
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• 2011

Researchers in channel dyads have devoted much attention to relationship between interdependence (i.e. interdependence enymmetry and total interdependence) and conflict that promote channel performance. In social science, in spite of the inconsistent results in marketing practice, there are two contradictory theories explain the relationship between interdependence and conflict - bilateral deterrence theory and conflict spiral theory. The authors apply these theories to co-marketing alliance situation in terms that this relationship is also incorporated both company's dependence, either from one company's perspective or each partner about its respective dependence. Using survey data and archival data from 181 companies enlisted in a telecommunication membership program, the authors find out the relationship between interdependence and conflict as well as investigate the antecedents of interdependence - transaction age, transaction frequency, the numbers of alliance partner, and co-marketing alliance specific assets according to previous researches. Using PLS analysis, the authors demonstrate that, with increasing total interdependence in a telecommunication membership program, two co-marketing partners' conflict level is increased in accord with the author's conflict spiral theory predictions. As expected, higher interdependence asymmetry has negative value to level of conflict even though this result is not statistically significant. Other findings can be summarized as follows. In the perspective of telecommunication company, transaction age, transaction frequency, and co-marketing alliance specific assets have influence on its dependence on a partner as independent variables. To the contrary, in a partner's perspective, transaction frequency, co-marketing alliance specific assets and the numbers of alliance partner have significantly impact on its dependence on a telecommunication company. In direct effect analysis, it is shown that transaction age, frequency and co-marketing alliance specific assets have direct influence on conflict. This results suggest that it is more useful for a telecommunication company to select a co-marketing partner which is frequently used by customers and earned high rates of mileage. In addition, the results show that dependence of a telecommunication company on a co-marketing partner is more significantly effected to co-marketing alliance conflict than partner's one. It provide an effective conflict management strategy to a telecommunication company for controling customer's usage rate or having the co-marketing partner deposit high level of alliance specific investment (i.e. mileage). To a co-marketing partner of telecommunication company, it is required control the percentage of co-marketing sales in total sales revenue or seek various co-marketing partners in order for co-marketing conflict management. The research implications, limitation and future research of these results are discussed.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.1-23
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• 2018

A smart phone has been widely spread around world and makes people enjoy online shopping in any time and any place. Recently it also changes the distribution environment. O2O (Online-to-Offline) service becomes new normal due to its convenience of ease shopping of product and services. O2O service market shows steady and steep growth, It is reported that, however, 80% of the businesses has been discontinued within the first year because of unstable business models, customer dissatisfaction and distrust of service. Therefore, it is very important research issue to find out influential factors promoting continuous usage intention of O2O service. Previous study shows that it only considers online characteristics and lack of analysis about offline characteristics and social impact factors. The purpose of this paper is to find out continuous usage intention factors of O2O services by literature review, case analysis, and empirical test. A comprehensive research model and related hypothesis are developed and tested by using a structural equation, Survey was carried out among users who have used O2O service including payment service for at least once. Finally 611 samples are selected out of total 813 surveys. The result shows that the model is theoretically proved and 12 out of 17 hypotheses are accepted. The contribution of this paper is that it provides a new theoretical research model about continuous usage intention factors as well as practical guidelines about promoting continuous usage and growth strategies of O2O service.

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

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.25-57
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• 2012

This study identified motives for writing apparel product reviews in online stores, and determined what motives increase the behavior of writing reviews. It also classified store customers based on the type of writing motives, and clarified the characteristics of internet purchase behavior and of a demographic profile. Data were collected from 252 females aged 20s' and 30s' who have experience of reading and writing reviews on online shopping. The five types of writing motives were altruistic information sharing, remedying of a grievance and vengeance, economic incentives, helping new product development, and the expression of satisfaction feelings. Among five motives, altruistic information sharing, economic incentives, and helping new product development stimulate writing reviews. Store customers who write reviews were classified into three groups based on their writing motive types: Other consumer advocates(29.8%), self-interested shoppers(40.5%) and shoppers with moderate motives(29.8%). There were significant differences among three groups in writing behavior (the frequency of writing reviews, writing intent of reviews, duration of writing reviews, and frequency of online shopping) and age. Based on results, managerial implications were suggested. Long Abstract : The purpose of present study is to identify the types of writing motives on online shopping, and to clarify the motives affecting the behavior of writing reviews. This study also classifies online shoppers based on the motive types, and identifies the characteristics of the classified groups in terms of writing behavior, frequency of online shopping, and demographics. Use and Gratification Theory was adopted in this study. Qualitative research (focus group interview) and quantitative research were used. Korean women(20 to 39 years old) who reported experience with purchasing clothing online, and reading and writing reviews were selected as samples(n=252). Most of the respondents were relatively young (20-34yrs., 86.1%,), single (61.1%), employed(61.1%) and residents living in big cities(50.9%). About 69.8% of respondents read and 40.5% write apparel reviews frequently or very frequently. 24.6% of the respondents indicated an "average" in their writing frequency. Based on the qualitative result of focus group interviews and previous studies on motives for online community activities, measurement items of motives for writing after-purchase reviews were developed. All items were used a five-point Likert scale with endpoints 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree). The degree of writing behavior was measured by items concerning experience of writing reviews, frequency of writing reviews, amount of writing reviews, and intention of writing reviews. A five-point scale(strongly disagree-strongly agree) was employed. SPSS 18.0 was used for exploratory factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis, one-way ANOVA(Scheffe test) and ${\chi}^2$-test. Confirmatory factor analysis and path model analysis were conducted by AMOS 18.0. By conducting principal components factor analysis (varimax rotation, extracting factors with eigenvalues above 1.0) on the measurement items, five factors were identified: Altruistic information sharing, remedying of a grievance and vengeance, economic incentives, helping new product development, and expression of satisfaction feelings(see Table 1). The measurement model including these final items was analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis. The measurement model had good fit indices(GFI=.918, AGFI=.884, RMR=.070, RMSEA=.054, TLI=.941) except for the probability value associated with the ${\chi}^2$ test(${\chi}^2$=189.078, df=109, p=.00). Convergent validities of all variables were confirmed using composite reliability. All SMC values were found to be lower than AVEs confirming discriminant validity. The path model's goodness-of-fit was greater than the recommended limits based on several indices(GFI=.905, AGFI=.872, RMR=.070, RMSEA=.052, TLI=.935; ${\chi}^2$=260.433, df=155, p=.00). Table 2 shows that motives of altruistic information sharing, economic incentives and helping new product development significantly increased the degree of writing product reviews of online shopping. In particular, the effect of altruistic information sharing and pursuit of economic incentives on the behavior of writing reviews were larger than the effect of helping new product development. As shown in table 3, online store shoppers were classified into three groups: Other consumer advocates (29.8%), self-interested shoppers (40.5%), and moderate shoppers (29.8%). There were significant differences among the three groups in the degree of writing reviews (experience of writing reviews, frequency of writing reviews, amount of writing reviews, intention of writing reviews, and duration of writing reviews, frequency of online shopping) and age. For five aspects of writing behavior, the group of other consumer advocates who is mainly comprised of 20s had higher scores than the other two groups. There were not any significant differences between self-interested group and moderate group regarding writing behavior and demographics.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.141-154
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• 2019

Rapid growth of internet technology and social media is progressing. Data mining technology has evolved to enable unstructured document representations in a variety of applications. Sentiment analysis is an important technology that can distinguish poor or high-quality content through text data of products, and it has proliferated during text mining. Sentiment analysis mainly analyzes people's opinions in text data by assigning predefined data categories as positive and negative. This has been studied in various directions in terms of accuracy from simple rule-based to dictionary-based approaches using predefined labels. In fact, sentiment analysis is one of the most active researches in natural language processing and is widely studied in text mining. When real online reviews aren't available for others, it's not only easy to openly collect information, but it also affects your business. In marketing, real-world information from customers is gathered on websites, not surveys. Depending on whether the website's posts are positive or negative, the customer response is reflected in the sales and tries to identify the information. However, many reviews on a website are not always good, and difficult to identify. The earlier studies in this research area used the reviews data of the Amazon.com shopping mal, but the research data used in the recent studies uses the data for stock market trends, blogs, news articles, weather forecasts, IMDB, and facebook etc. However, the lack of accuracy is recognized because sentiment calculations are changed according to the subject, paragraph, sentiment lexicon direction, and sentence strength. This study aims to classify the polarity analysis of sentiment analysis into positive and negative categories and increase the prediction accuracy of the polarity analysis using the pretrained IMDB review data set. First, the text classification algorithm related to sentiment analysis adopts the popular machine learning algorithms such as NB (naive bayes), SVM (support vector machines), XGboost, RF (random forests), and Gradient Boost as comparative models. Second, deep learning has demonstrated discriminative features that can extract complex features of data. Representative algorithms are CNN (convolution neural networks), RNN (recurrent neural networks), LSTM (long-short term memory). CNN can be used similarly to BoW when processing a sentence in vector format, but does not consider sequential data attributes. RNN can handle well in order because it takes into account the time information of the data, but there is a long-term dependency on memory. To solve the problem of long-term dependence, LSTM is used. For the comparison, CNN and LSTM were chosen as simple deep learning models. In addition to classical machine learning algorithms, CNN, LSTM, and the integrated models were analyzed. Although there are many parameters for the algorithms, we examined the relationship between numerical value and precision to find the optimal combination. And, we tried to figure out how the models work well for sentiment analysis and how these models work. This study proposes integrated CNN and LSTM algorithms to extract the positive and negative features of text analysis. The reasons for mixing these two algorithms are as follows. CNN can extract features for the classification automatically by applying convolution layer and massively parallel processing. LSTM is not capable of highly parallel processing. Like faucets, the LSTM has input, output, and forget gates that can be moved and controlled at a desired time. These gates have the advantage of placing memory blocks on hidden nodes. The memory block of the LSTM may not store all the data, but it can solve the CNN's long-term dependency problem. Furthermore, when LSTM is used in CNN's pooling layer, it has an end-to-end structure, so that spatial and temporal features can be designed simultaneously. In combination with CNN-LSTM, 90.33% accuracy was measured. This is slower than CNN, but faster than LSTM. The presented model was more accurate than other models. In addition, each word embedding layer can be improved when training the kernel step by step. CNN-LSTM can improve the weakness of each model, and there is an advantage of improving the learning by layer using the end-to-end structure of LSTM. Based on these reasons, this study tries to enhance the classification accuracy of movie reviews using the integrated CNN-LSTM model.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.27-52
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• 2010

It is not new that today's business organizations are expected to exhibit ethical and moral management and to carry out social responsibility as a good corporate citizen. Since South Korea emerged as a newly industrialized country during the 1980s, Korean corporations have become active in carrying out their social responsibility as a good corporate citizen to society. In spite of the short history of corporate social responsibility, Korean companies have actively participated in corporate philanthropy. Corporations' significant donations to various social causes, no-lay-off policies, corporate volunteerism and green marketing are evidences of their commitment to corporate citizenship. Corporate social responsibility is now an essential management practice whereby corporation can strengthen its sustainable value creation processes by enhancing the trust assets underlying the relationships between the business and the stakeholders. Much of the conceptual work in the area of corporate social responsibility(CSR) has originated from researches conducted in the management field. Carroll(1979) proposed that corporations have four types of social responsibilities: economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic responsibility. Most past research has investigated CSR and its impact on consumers' attitudes toward the corporations and corporate performances. Although there exists a large body of literature on how consumers perceive and respond to CSR, the majority of past studies were conducted in the United States. The stability and applicability of past findings need to be tested across different national/cultural settings, especially since corporate social responsibility is a reflection of implicit conformation with the expectations and criticism that society may have toward a corporation(Matten and Moon, 2004). In this study, we explored whether people in Korea perceive CSR of Korean corporations in the same four dimensions as done in the United States and what were the measurement items tapping each of these four dimensions. In order to investigate the dimensions of CSR and the measurement items for CSR perceived by Korean people, nine focus group interviews were conducted with several stakeholder groups(two with undergraduate students, two with graduate students, three with general consumers, and two with NGO groups). Scripts from the interviews revealed that the Korean stakeholders perceived four types of CSR which are the same as those proposed by Carroll(1979). However we found CSR issues unique to Korean corporations. For example for the economic responsibility, Korean people mentioned that the corporation needed to contribute to the economic development of the country by generating corporate profits. For the legal responsibility, Koreans included the "corporation need to follow the consumer protection law." For the ethical responsibility, they considered that the corporation needed to not promote false advertisement. In addition, Koreans thought that an ethical company should do transparent management. For the philanthropic responsibility, people in Korea thought that a corporation needed to return parts of its profits to the society for the betterment of society. The 28 items were developed based on the results of the nine focus group interviews, while considering the scale developed by Maignan and Ferrell(2001). Following the procedure proposed by Churchill(1979), we started by developing an item poll consisting of 28 items and purified the initial pool of items through exploratory, confirmatory factor analyses. 176 samples were sued for this analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis was performed on the 28 items in order to verify the underlying four factor structure. Study 1 provided new measurement items for tapping the Korean CSR dimensions, which can be useful for the future studies exploring the effects of CSR on Korean consumers' attitudes toward the corporations and corporate performances. And we found the CSR scale(17 items) has good reliability, discriminant validity and nomological validity. Economic Responsibility: "XYZ company continuously improves the quality of our products", "XYZ company has a procedure in place to respond to customer complaint", "XYZ company contributes to the economic development of our country by generating profits", "XYZ company is eager to hire people". Legal Responsibility: "XYZ company's products meet legal standards", "XYZ company seeks to comply with all laws regulating hiring and employee benefits", "XYZ company honors contractual obligations to its suppliers", "XYZ company's managers try to comply with the law related to the business operation". Ethical Responsibility: "XYZ company has a comprehensive code of conduct", "XYZ company does not promote a false or misleading advertisement", "XYZ company seems to conduct a transparent business", "XYZ company does a fair business with its suppliers or sub-contractors". Philanthropic Responsibility: "XYZ company encourages partnerships with local businesses and schools", "XYZ company supports sports and cultural activities", "XYZ company gives adequate contributions to charities considering its business size", "XYZ company encourages employees to support our community". Study 2 was condusted for comprehensive validity. 655 samples were used for this anlysis. Collected samples were tested by factor analysis and Crnbach's Alpha coefficiednts and were found to be satisfactory in terms of validity and reliability. Furthermore, fitness of the measurement model was tested by using conformatory factor analysis. χ²=880.73(df=160), GFI=0.891, AGFI=0.854, NFI=0.908, NNFI=0.913, RMR=0.059, RMESA=0.070. We hope that CSR scale could greatly facilitate research on Corporate social resposibility, it is by no means the final answer.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.141-173
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• 2007

The study examines how the environmental factors of store influence service brand personality and repurchase intention in the service environment. The service industry has been experiencing the intensified competition with the industry's continuous growth and the influence from rapid technological advancement. Under the circumstances, it has become ever more important for the brand competitiveness to be distinctively recognized against competition. A brand needs to be distinguished and differentiated from competing companies because they are all engaged in the similar environment of the service industry. The differentiation of brand achievement has become increasingly important to highlight certain brand functions to include emotional, self-expressive, and symbolic functions since the importance of such functions has been further emphasized in promoting consumption activities. That is the recent role of brand personality that has been emphasized in the service industry. In other words, customers now freely and actively express their personalities or egos in consumption activities, taking an important role in construction of a brand asset. Hence, the study suggests that it is necessary to disperse the recognition and acknowledgement that the maintenance of the existing customers contributes more to boost repurchase intention when it is compared to the efforts to create new customers, particularly in the service industry. Meanwhile, the store itself can offer a unique environment that may influence the consumer's purchase decision. Consumers interact with store environments in the process of,virtually, all household purchase they make (Sarel 1981). Thus, store environments may encourage customers to purchase. The roles that store environments play are to provide informational cues to customers about the store and goods and communicate messages to stimulate consumers' emotions. The store environments differentiate the store from competing stores and build a unique service brand personality. However, the existing studies related to brand in the service industry mostly concentrated on the relationship between the quality of service and customer satisfaction, and they are mostly generalized while the connective studies focused on brand personality. Such approaches show limitations and are insufficient to investigate on the relationship between store environment and brand personality in the service industry. Accordingly, the study intends to identify the level of contribution to the establishment of brand personality made by the store's physical environments that influence on the specific brand characteristics depending on the type of service. The study also intends to identify what kind of relationships with brand personality exists with brand personality while being influenced by store environments. In addition, the study intends to make meaningful suggestions to better direct marketing efforts by identifying whether a brand personality makes a positive influence to induce an intention for repurchase. For this study, the service industry is classified into four categories based on to the characteristics of service: experimental-emotional service, emotional -credible service, credible-functional service, and functional-experimental service. The type of business with the most frequent customer contact is determined for each service type and the enterprise with the highest brand value in each service sector based on the report made by the Korea Management Association. They are designated as the representative of each category. The selected representatives are a fast-food store (experimental-emotional service), a cinema house (emotional-credible service), a bank (credible-functional service), and discount store (functional-experimental service). The survey was conducted for the four selected brands to represent each service category among consumers who are experienced users of the designated stores in Seoul Metropolitan City and Gyeonggi province via written questionnaires in order to verify the suggested assumptions in the study. In particular, the survey adopted 15 scales, which represent each characteristic factor, among the 42 unique characteristics developed by Jennifer Aaker(1997) to assess the brand personality of each service brand. SPSS for Windows Release 12.0 and LISREL were used in the analysis of data verification. The methodology of the structural equation model was used for the study and the pivotal findings are as follows. 1) The environmental factors ware classified as design factors, ambient factors, and social factors. Therefore, the validity of measurement scale of Baker et al. (1994) was proved. 2) The service brand personalities were subdivided as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, which makes the use of the brand personality scales by Jennifer Aaker(1997) appropriate in the service industry as well. 3) One-way ANOVA analysis on the scales of store environment and service brand personality showed that there exist statistically significant differences in each service category. For example, the social factors were highest in discount stores, while the ambient factors and design factors were highest in fast-food stores. The discount stores were highest in the sincerity and excitement, while the highest point for banks was in the competence and ruggedness, and the highest point for fast-food stores was in the sophistication, The consumers will make a different respond to the physical environment of stores and service brand personality that are inherent to the corresponding service interface. Hence, the customers will make a different decision-making when dealing with different service categories. In this aspect, the relationships of variables in the proposed hypothesis appear to work in a different way depending on the exposed service category. 4) The store environment factors influenced on service brand personalities differently by category of service. The factors of store's physical environment are transferred to a brand and were verified to strengthen service brand personalities. In particular, the level of influence on the service brand personality by physical environment differs depending on service category or dimension, which indicates that there is a need to apply a different style of management to a different service category or dimension. It signifies that there needs to be a brand strategy established in order to positively influence the relationship with consumers by utilizing an appropriate brand personality factor depending on different characteristics by service category or dimension. 5) The service brand personalities influenced on the repurchase intention. Especially, the largest influence was made in the sophistication dimension of service brand personality scale; the unique and characteristically appropriate arrangement of physical environment will make customers stay in the service environment for a long time and will lead to give a positive influence on the repurchase intention. 6) The store environment factors influenced on the repurchase intention. Particularly, the largest influence was made on the social factors of store environment. The most intriguing finding is that the service factor among all other environment factors gives the biggest influence to the repurchase intention in most of all service types except fast-food stores. Such result indicates that the customers pay attention to how much the employees try to provide a quality service when they make an evaluation on the service brand. At the same time, it also indicates that the personal factor is directly transmitted to the construction of brand personality. The employees' attitude and behavior are the determinants to establish a service brand personality in the process of enhancing service interface. Hence, there should be a reinforced search for a method to efficiently manage the service staff who has a direct contact with customers in order to make an affirmative improvement of the customers' brand evaluation at the service interface. The findings suggest several managerial implications. 1) Results from the empirical study indicated that store environment factors have a strong positive impact on a service brand personality. To increase customers' repurchase intention of a service brand, the management is required to effectively manage store environment factors and create a friendly brand personality based on the corresponding service environment. 2) Mangers and researchers must understand and recognize that the store environment elements are important marketing tools, and that brand personality influences on consumers' repurchase intention. Based on such result of the study, a service brand could be utilized as an efficient measure to achieve a differentiation by enforcing the elements that are most influential among all other store environments for each service category. Therefore, brand personality established involving various store environments will further reinforce the relationship with customers through the elevated brand identification of which utilization to induce repurchase decision can be used as an entry barrier. 3) The study identified the store environment as a component of service brand personality for the store's effective communication with consumers. For this, all communication channels should be maintained with consistency and an integrated marketing communication should be executed to efficiently approach to a larger number of customers. Mangers and researchers must find strategies for aligning decisions about store environment elements with the retailers' marketing and store personality objectives. All ambient, design, and social factors need to be orchestrated so that consumers can take an appropriate store personality. In this study, the induced results from the previous studies were extended to the service industry so as to identify the customers' decision making process that leads to repurchase intention and a result similar to those of the previous studies. The findings suggested several theoretical and managerial implications. However, the situation that only one service brand served as the subject of analysis for each service category, and the situation that correlations among store environment elements were not identified, as well as the problem of representation in selection of samples should be considered and supplemented in the future when further studies are conducted. In addition, various antecedents and consequences of brand personality must be looked at in the aspect of the service environment for further research.

• The Korean Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.3-8
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• 2010

Purpose: $^{11}C$-Acetate PET/CT is useful in detecting lesions that are related to livers in the human body and leads to a sensitivity of 87.3%. On the other hand, $^{18}F$-FDG PET/CT has a sensitivity of 47.3% and it has been reported that if both $^{18}F$-FDG and $^{11}C$-Acetate PET/CT are carried out together, their cumulative sensitivity is around 100%. However, the normal intake of the pancreas and the spleen in $^{11}C$-Acetate PET/CT can influence the $^{18}F$-FDG PET/CT leading to an inaccurate diagnosis. This research was aimed at the verification of the usefulness of how much influence these two radioactive medical supplies can cause on the medical images through comparative analysis between the one-day and two-day protocol. Materials and Methods: This research was carried out based on 46 patients who were diagnosed with liver cancer and have gone through the PET/CT (35 male, 11 female participants, average age: $54{\pm}10.6$ years, age range: 29-69 years). The equipment used for this test was the Biograph TruePoint40 PET/CT (Siemens Medical Systems, USA) and 21 participants who went through the one-day protocol test were first given the $^{11}C$-Acetate PET/CT and the $^{18}F$-FDG PET/CT, the latter exactly after one hour. The other 25 participants who went through the two-day protocol test were given the $^{11}C$-Acetate PET/CT on the first day and the $^{18}F$-FDG PET/CT on the next day. These two groups were then graded comparatively by assigning identical areas of interest of the pancreas and the spleen in the $^{18}F$-FDG images and by measuring the Standard Uptake Value (SUV). SPSS Ver.17 (SPSS Inc., USA) was used for statistical analysis, where statistical significance was found through the unpaired t-test. Results: After analyzing the participants' medical images from each of the two different protocol types, the average${\pm}$standard deviation of the SUV of the pancreas carried out under the two-day protocol were as follows: head $1.62{\pm}0.32$ g/mL, body $1.57{\pm}0.37$ g/mL, tail $1.49{\pm}0.33$ g/mL and the spleen $1.53{\pm}0.28$ g/mL. Whereas, the results for participants carried out under the one-day protocol were as follows: head $1.65{\pm}0.35$ g/mL, body $1.58{\pm}0.27$ g/mL, tail $1.49{\pm}0.28$ g/mL and the spleen $1.66{\pm}0.29$ g/mL. Conclusion: It was found that no statistical significant difference existed between the one-day and two-day protocol SUV in the pancreas and the spleen (p<0.05), and nothing which could be misconceived as false positive were found from the PET/CT medical image analysis. From this research, it was also found that no overestimation of the SUV occurred from the influence of $^{11}C$-Acetate on the $^{18}F$-FDG medical images where those two tests were carried out for one day. This result was supported by the statistical significance of the SUV of measurement. If $^{11}C$-Acetate becomes commercialized in the future, the diagnostic ability of liver diseases can be improved by $^{18}F$-FDG and one-day protocol. It is from this result where tests can be accomplished in one day without the interference phenomenon of the two radioactive medical supplies and furthermore, could reduce the waiting time improving customer satisfaction.