• Title/Summary/Keyword: Design variables

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Analysis on Statistical Characteristics of Household Water End-uses (가정용수 용도별 사용량의 통계적 특성 분석)

  • Kim, Hwa Soo;Lee, Doo Jin;Park, No Suk;Jung, Kwan Soo
    • KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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    • v.28 no.5B
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    • pp.603-614
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    • 2008
  • End-uses of household water have been changed by a life style, housing type, weather, water rate and water supply facilities etc. and those variables can be considered as an internal and exogenous factors to estimate long-term demand forecasts. Analysis of influential factors on water consumption in households would give an explanation to cause on the change of trend and would help predicting the water demand of end-use in household. The purpose of this study is to analyze the demand trends and patterns of household water uses by metering and questionnaire such as occupation, revenue, numbers of family member, housing types, age, floor area and installation of water saving device, etc. The peak water uses were shown at Saturday among weekdays and July in a year based on the analysis results of water use pattern. A steep increase of total water volume can be found in the analysis of water demand trend according to temperature from $-14^{\circ}C$ to $0^{\circ}C$, while there are no significant variations in the phase of more than $0^{\circ}C$, with an almost stable demand. Washbowl water shows the highest and toilet water shows the lowest relation with temperature in correlation analysis results. In the results of ANOVA to find the significant difference in each unit water use by exogenous factors such as housing type, occupation, number of generation, residential area and income et al., difference was shown in bathtub water by housing type and shown in kitchen, toilet and miscellaneous water by numbers of resident. Especially, definite differences in components except washbowl and bathtub water, could be found by numbers of resident. Based on the result, average residents in a house should be carefully considered and the results can be applied as reference information, in decision making process for predicting water demand and establishing water conservation policy. It is expected that these can be used as design factors in planning stage for water and wastewater facilities.

Influence on Impulse Buying by Shopping Style according to Sales Promotion : Focusing on Consumers of Low-Cost Cosmetic Goods (소비자의 쇼핑성향이 충동구매행동에 미치는 영향 : 저가화장품의 판매촉진 전략의 매개효과를 중심으로)

  • Bok, Yun-gyoung;Kim, Jun-sung
    • Journal of Venture Innovation
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    • v.4 no.3
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    • pp.109-124
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    • 2021
  • This study intends to find out the influence of a consumer's shopping style on impulse buying mediated by sales promotion, based on low-cost cosmetic goods. For the study, pleasure, economical, and convenience shopping styles were set as the independent variables, and impulse buying was set as the dependent variable, and as the mediating variable between the two, sales promotions such as price discount event, free giveaway event, and visit-inducing activity were reviewed. Accordingly, the influence relation of shopping style, sales promotion, and impulse buying were reviewed with hierarchical regression analysis to examine the mutual influence relation. The data for this study employed a structured questionnaire, and 230 copies were collected against men and women in their 20s-30s, who are the main consumers of low-cost cosmetic goods, and 197 faithful responses were analyzed, and the major findings from the analysis results are as follows. First, pleasure-style consumers were found to have influenced impulse buying, while economical-style consumers were found to have a negative influence, and convenience-style was found to have no significant relation. Second, as for the examination of the mediating effect of sales promotion, price discount event, free giveaway event, and visit-inducing activity were found to have a partial mediating effect on the influence of pleasure shopping style on impulse buying, and did not fulfill the economical shopping style mediating effect condition. Also, as convenience shopping style was found to be insignificant towards impulse buying, it was excluded from the mediating effect. Such result is thought to be a useful elementary material for establishing a sales promotion strategy according to shopping styles through the analysis of styles of major consumers in order to increase the sales of businesses. The theoretical and pragmatic implications of such study results were discussed and the future study directions were suggested.

Analysis of the Effect of the Etching Process and Ion Injection Process in the Unit Process for the Development of High Voltage Power Semiconductor Devices (고전압 전력반도체 소자 개발을 위한 단위공정에서 식각공정과 이온주입공정의 영향 분석)

  • Gyu Cheol Choi;KyungBeom Kim;Bonghwan Kim;Jong Min Kim;SangMok Chang
    • Clean Technology
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    • v.29 no.4
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    • pp.255-261
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    • 2023
  • Power semiconductors are semiconductors used for power conversion, transformation, distribution, and control. Recently, the global demand for high-voltage power semiconductors is increasing across various industrial fields, and optimization research on high-voltage IGBT components is urgently needed in these industries. For high-voltage IGBT development, setting the resistance value of the wafer and optimizing key unit processes are major variables in the electrical characteristics of the finished chip. Furthermore, the securing process and optimization of the technology to support high breakdown voltage is also important. Etching is a process of transferring the pattern of the mask circuit in the photolithography process to the wafer and removing unnecessary parts at the bottom of the photoresist film. Ion implantation is a process of injecting impurities along with thermal diffusion technology into the wafer substrate during the semiconductor manufacturing process. This process helps achieve a certain conductivity. In this study, dry etching and wet etching were controlled during field ring etching, which is an important process for forming a ring structure that supports the 3.3 kV breakdown voltage of IGBT, in order to analyze four conditions and form a stable body junction depth to secure the breakdown voltage. The field ring ion implantation process was optimized based on the TEG design by dividing it into four conditions. The wet etching 1-step method was advantageous in terms of process and work efficiency, and the ring pattern ion implantation conditions showed a doping concentration of 9.0E13 and an energy of 120 keV. The p-ion implantation conditions were optimized at a doping concentration of 6.5E13 and an energy of 80 keV, and the p+ ion implantation conditions were optimized at a doping concentration of 3.0E15 and an energy of 160 keV.

Analysis of the Influence of Role Models on College Students' Entrepreneurial Intentions: Exploring the Multiple Mediating Effects of Growth Mindset and Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy (대학생 창업의지에 대한 롤모델의 영향 분석: 성장마인드셋과 창업자기효능감의 다중매개효과를 중심으로)

  • Jin Soo Maing;Sun Hyuk Kim
    • Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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    • v.18 no.5
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    • pp.17-32
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    • 2023
  • The entrepreneurial activities of college students play a significant role in modern economic and social development, particularly as a solution to the changing economic landscape and youth unemployment issues. Introducing innovative ideas and technologies into the market through entrepreneurship can contribute to sustainable economic growth and social value. Additionally, the entrepreneurial intentions of college students are shaped by various factors, making it crucial to deeply understand and appropriately support these elements. To this end, this study systematically explores the importance and impact of role models through a multiple serial mediation analysis. Through a survey of 300 college students, the study analyzed how two psychological variables, growth mindset and entrepreneurial self-efficacy, mediate the influence of role models on entrepreneurial intentions. The presence and success stories of role models were found to enhance the growth mindset of college students, which in turn boosts their entrepreneurial self-efficacy and ultimately strengthens their entrepreneurial intentions. The analysis revealed that exposure to role models significantly influences the formation of a growth mindset among college students. This mindset fosters a positive attitude towards viewing challenges and failures in entrepreneurship as learning opportunities. Such a mindset further enhances entrepreneurial self-efficacy, thereby strengthening the intention to engage in entrepreneurial activities. This research offers insights by integrating various theories, such as mindset theory and social learning theory, to deeply understand the complex process of forming entrepreneurial intentions. Practically, this study provides important guidelines for the design and implementation of college entrepreneurship education. Utilizing role models can significantly enhance students' entrepreneurial intentions, and educational programs can strengthen students' growth mindset and entrepreneurial self-efficacy by sharing entrepreneurial experiences and knowledge through role models. In conclusion, this study provides a systematic and empirical analysis of the various factors and their complex interactions that impact the entrepreneurial intentions of college students. It confirms that psychological factors like growth mindset and entrepreneurial self-efficacy play a significant role in shaping entrepreneurial intentions, beyond mere information or technical education. This research emphasizes that these psychological factors should be comprehensively considered when developing and implementing policies and programs related to college entrepreneurship education.

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Feasibility of Deep Learning Algorithms for Binary Classification Problems (이진 분류문제에서의 딥러닝 알고리즘의 활용 가능성 평가)

  • Kim, Kitae;Lee, Bomi;Kim, Jong Woo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.1
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    • pp.95-108
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    • 2017
  • Recently, AlphaGo which is Bakuk (Go) artificial intelligence program by Google DeepMind, had a huge victory against Lee Sedol. Many people thought that machines would not be able to win a man in Go games because the number of paths to make a one move is more than the number of atoms in the universe unlike chess, but the result was the opposite to what people predicted. After the match, artificial intelligence technology was focused as a core technology of the fourth industrial revolution and attracted attentions from various application domains. Especially, deep learning technique have been attracted as a core artificial intelligence technology used in the AlphaGo algorithm. The deep learning technique is already being applied to many problems. Especially, it shows good performance in image recognition field. In addition, it shows good performance in high dimensional data area such as voice, image and natural language, which was difficult to get good performance using existing machine learning techniques. However, in contrast, it is difficult to find deep leaning researches on traditional business data and structured data analysis. In this study, we tried to find out whether the deep learning techniques have been studied so far can be used not only for the recognition of high dimensional data but also for the binary classification problem of traditional business data analysis such as customer churn analysis, marketing response prediction, and default prediction. And we compare the performance of the deep learning techniques with that of traditional artificial neural network models. The experimental data in the paper is the telemarketing response data of a bank in Portugal. It has input variables such as age, occupation, loan status, and the number of previous telemarketing and has a binary target variable that records whether the customer intends to open an account or not. In this study, to evaluate the possibility of utilization of deep learning algorithms and techniques in binary classification problem, we compared the performance of various models using CNN, LSTM algorithm and dropout, which are widely used algorithms and techniques in deep learning, with that of MLP models which is a traditional artificial neural network model. However, since all the network design alternatives can not be tested due to the nature of the artificial neural network, the experiment was conducted based on restricted settings on the number of hidden layers, the number of neurons in the hidden layer, the number of output data (filters), and the application conditions of the dropout technique. The F1 Score was used to evaluate the performance of models to show how well the models work to classify the interesting class instead of the overall accuracy. The detail methods for applying each deep learning technique in the experiment is as follows. The CNN algorithm is a method that reads adjacent values from a specific value and recognizes the features, but it does not matter how close the distance of each business data field is because each field is usually independent. In this experiment, we set the filter size of the CNN algorithm as the number of fields to learn the whole characteristics of the data at once, and added a hidden layer to make decision based on the additional features. For the model having two LSTM layers, the input direction of the second layer is put in reversed position with first layer in order to reduce the influence from the position of each field. In the case of the dropout technique, we set the neurons to disappear with a probability of 0.5 for each hidden layer. The experimental results show that the predicted model with the highest F1 score was the CNN model using the dropout technique, and the next best model was the MLP model with two hidden layers using the dropout technique. In this study, we were able to get some findings as the experiment had proceeded. First, models using dropout techniques have a slightly more conservative prediction than those without dropout techniques, and it generally shows better performance in classification. Second, CNN models show better classification performance than MLP models. This is interesting because it has shown good performance in binary classification problems which it rarely have been applied to, as well as in the fields where it's effectiveness has been proven. Third, the LSTM algorithm seems to be unsuitable for binary classification problems because the training time is too long compared to the performance improvement. From these results, we can confirm that some of the deep learning algorithms can be applied to solve business binary classification problems.

Optimization and Development of Prediction Model on the Removal Condition of Livestock Wastewater using a Response Surface Method in the Photo-Fenton Oxidation Process (Photo-Fenton 산화공정에서 반응표면분석법을 이용한 축산폐수의 COD 처리조건 최적화 및 예측식 수립)

  • Cho, Il-Hyoung;Chang, Soon-Woong;Lee, Si-Jin
    • Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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    • v.30 no.6
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    • pp.642-652
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    • 2008
  • The aim of our research was to apply experimental design methodology in the optimization condition of Photo-Fenton oxidation of the residual livestock wastewater after the coagulation process. The reactions of Photo-Fenton oxidation were mathematically described as a function of parameters amount of Fe(II)($x_1$), $H_2O_2(x_2)$ and pH($x_3$) being modeled by the use of the Box-Behnken method, which was used for fitting 2nd order response surface models and was alternative to central composite designs. The application of RSM using the Box-Behnken method yielded the following regression equation, which is an empirical relationship between the removal(%) of livestock wastewater and test variables in coded unit: Y = 79.3 + 15.61x$_1$ - 7.31x$_2$ - 4.26x$_3$ - 18x$_1{^2}$ - 10x$_2{^2}$ - 11.9x$_3{^2}$ + 2.49x$_1$x$_2$ - 4.4x$_2$x$_3$ - 1.65x$_1$x$_3$. The model predicted also agreed with the experimentally observed result(R$^2$ = 0.96) The results show that the response of treatment removal(%) in Photo-Fenton oxidation of livestock wastewater were significantly affected by the synergistic effect of linear terms(Fe(II)($x_1$), $H_2O_2(x_2)$, pH(x$_3$)), whereas Fe(II) $\times$ Fe(II)(x$_1{^2}$), $H_2O_2$ $\times$ $H_2O_2$(x$_2{^2}$) and pH $\times$ pH(x$_3{^2}$) on the quadratic terms were significantly affected by the antagonistic effect. $H_2O_2$ $\times$ pH(x$_2$x$_3$) had also a antagonistic effect in the cross-product term. The estimated ridge of the expected maximum response and optimal conditions for Y using canonical analysis were 84 $\pm$ 0.95% and (Fe(II)(X$_1$) = 0.0146 mM, $H_2O_2$(X$_2$) = 0.0867 mM and pH(X$_3$) = 4.704, respectively. The optimal ratio of Fe/H$_2O_2$ was also 0.17 at the pH 4.7.

Customer Behavior Prediction of Binary Classification Model Using Unstructured Information and Convolution Neural Network: The Case of Online Storefront (비정형 정보와 CNN 기법을 활용한 이진 분류 모델의 고객 행태 예측: 전자상거래 사례를 중심으로)

  • Kim, Seungsoo;Kim, Jongwoo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.24 no.2
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    • pp.221-241
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    • 2018
  • Deep learning is getting attention recently. The deep learning technique which had been applied in competitions of the International Conference on Image Recognition Technology(ILSVR) and AlphaGo is Convolution Neural Network(CNN). CNN is characterized in that the input image is divided into small sections to recognize the partial features and combine them to recognize as a whole. Deep learning technologies are expected to bring a lot of changes in our lives, but until now, its applications have been limited to image recognition and natural language processing. The use of deep learning techniques for business problems is still an early research stage. If their performance is proved, they can be applied to traditional business problems such as future marketing response prediction, fraud transaction detection, bankruptcy prediction, and so on. So, it is a very meaningful experiment to diagnose the possibility of solving business problems using deep learning technologies based on the case of online shopping companies which have big data, are relatively easy to identify customer behavior and has high utilization values. Especially, in online shopping companies, the competition environment is rapidly changing and becoming more intense. Therefore, analysis of customer behavior for maximizing profit is becoming more and more important for online shopping companies. In this study, we propose 'CNN model of Heterogeneous Information Integration' using CNN as a way to improve the predictive power of customer behavior in online shopping enterprises. In order to propose a model that optimizes the performance, which is a model that learns from the convolution neural network of the multi-layer perceptron structure by combining structured and unstructured information, this model uses 'heterogeneous information integration', 'unstructured information vector conversion', 'multi-layer perceptron design', and evaluate the performance of each architecture, and confirm the proposed model based on the results. In addition, the target variables for predicting customer behavior are defined as six binary classification problems: re-purchaser, churn, frequent shopper, frequent refund shopper, high amount shopper, high discount shopper. In order to verify the usefulness of the proposed model, we conducted experiments using actual data of domestic specific online shopping company. This experiment uses actual transactions, customers, and VOC data of specific online shopping company in Korea. Data extraction criteria are defined for 47,947 customers who registered at least one VOC in January 2011 (1 month). The customer profiles of these customers, as well as a total of 19 months of trading data from September 2010 to March 2012, and VOCs posted for a month are used. The experiment of this study is divided into two stages. In the first step, we evaluate three architectures that affect the performance of the proposed model and select optimal parameters. We evaluate the performance with the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model, which combines both structured and unstructured information, is superior compared to NBC(Naïve Bayes classification), SVM(Support vector machine), and ANN(Artificial neural network). Therefore, it is significant that the use of unstructured information contributes to predict customer behavior, and that CNN can be applied to solve business problems as well as image recognition and natural language processing problems. It can be confirmed through experiments that CNN is more effective in understanding and interpreting the meaning of context in text VOC data. And it is significant that the empirical research based on the actual data of the e-commerce company can extract very meaningful information from the VOC data written in the text format directly by the customer in the prediction of the customer behavior. Finally, through various experiments, it is possible to say that the proposed model provides useful information for the future research related to the parameter selection and its performance.

Differential Effects of Recovery Efforts on Products Attitudes (제품태도에 대한 회복노력의 차별적 효과)

  • Kim, Cheon-GIl;Choi, Jung-Mi
    • Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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    • v.18 no.1
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    • pp.33-58
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    • 2008
  • Previous research has presupposed that the evaluation of consumer who received any recovery after experiencing product failure should be better than the evaluation of consumer who did not receive any recovery. The major purposes of this article are to examine impacts of product defect failures rather than service failures, and to explore effects of recovery on postrecovery product attitudes. First, this article deals with the occurrence of severe and unsevere failure and corresponding service recovery toward tangible products rather than intangible services. Contrary to intangible services, purchase and usage are separable for tangible products. This difference makes it clear that executing an recovery strategy toward tangible products is not plausible right after consumers find out product failures. The consumers may think about backgrounds and causes for the unpleasant events during the time gap between product failure and recovery. The deliberation may dilutes positive effects of recovery efforts. The recovery strategies which are provided to consumers experiencing product failures can be classified into three types. A recovery strategy can be implemented to provide consumers with a new product replacing the old defective product, a complimentary product for free, a discount at the time of the failure incident, or a coupon that can be used on the next visit. This strategy is defined as "a rewarding effort." Meanwhile a product failure may arise in exchange for its benefit. Then the product provider can suggest a detail explanation that the defect is hard to escape since it relates highly to the specific advantage to the product. The strategy may be called as "a strengthening effort." Another possible strategy is to recover negative attitude toward own brand by giving prominence to the disadvantages of a competing brand rather than the advantages of its own brand. The strategy is reflected as "a weakening effort." This paper emphasizes that, in order to confirm its effectiveness, a recovery strategy should be compared to being nothing done in response to the product failure. So the three types of recovery efforts is discussed in comparison to the situation involving no recovery effort. The strengthening strategy is to claim high relatedness of the product failure with another advantage, and expects the two-sidedness to ease consumers' complaints. The weakening strategy is to emphasize non-aversiveness of product failure, even if consumers choose another competitive brand. The two strategies can be effective in restoring to the original state, by providing plausible motives to accept the condition of product failure or by informing consumers of non-responsibility in the failure case. However the two may be less effective strategies than the rewarding strategy, since it tries to take care of the rehabilitation needs of consumers. Especially, the relative effect between the strengthening effort and the weakening effort may differ in terms of the severity of the product failure. A consumer who realizes a highly severe failure is likely to attach importance to the property which caused the failure. This implies that the strengthening effort would be less effective under the condition of high product severity. Meanwhile, the failing property is not diagnostic information in the condition of low failure severity. Consumers would not pay attention to non-diagnostic information, and with which they are not likely to change their attitudes. This implies that the strengthening effort would be more effective under the condition of low product severity. A 2 (product failure severity: high or low) X 4 (recovery strategies: rewarding, strengthening, weakening, or doing nothing) between-subjects design was employed. The particular levels of product failure severity and the types of recovery strategies were determined after a series of expert interviews. The dependent variable was product attitude after the recovery effort was provided. Subjects were 284 consumers who had an experience of cosmetics. Subjects were first given a product failure scenario and were asked to rate the comprehensibility of the failure scenario, the probability of raising complaints against the failure, and the subjective severity of the failure. After a recovery scenario was presented, its comprehensibility and overall evaluation were measured. The subjects assigned to the condition of no recovery effort were exposed to a short news article on the cosmetic industry. Next, subjects answered filler questions: 42 items of the need for cognitive closure and 16 items of need-to-evaluate. In the succeeding page a subject's product attitude was measured on an five-item, six-point scale, and a subject's repurchase intention on an three-item, six-point scale. After demographic variables of age and sex were asked, ten items of the subject's objective knowledge was checked. The results showed that the subjects formed more favorable evaluations after receiving rewarding efforts than after receiving either strengthening or weakening efforts. This is consistent with Hoffman, Kelley, and Rotalsky (1995) in that a tangible service recovery could be more effective that intangible efforts. Strengthening and weakening efforts also were effective compared to no recovery effort. So we found that generally any recovery increased products attitudes. The results hint us that a recovery strategy such as strengthening or weakening efforts, although it does not contain a specific reward, may have an effect on consumers experiencing severe unsatisfaction and strong complaint. Meanwhile, strengthening and weakening efforts were not expected to increase product attitudes under the condition of low severity of product failure. We can conclude that only a physical recovery effort may be recognized favorably as a firm's willingness to recover its fault by consumers experiencing low involvements. Results of the present experiment are explained in terms of the attribution theory. This article has a limitation that it utilized fictitious scenarios. Future research deserves to test a realistic effect of recovery for actual consumers. Recovery involves a direct, firsthand experience of ex-users. Recovery does not apply to non-users. The experience of receiving recovery efforts can be relatively more salient and accessible for the ex-users than for non-users. A recovery effort might be more likely to improve product attitude for the ex-users than for non-users. Also the present experiment did not include consumers who did not have an experience of the products and who did not perceive the occurrence of product failure. For the non-users and the ignorant consumers, the recovery efforts might lead to decreased product attitude and purchase intention. This is because the recovery trials may give an opportunity for them to notice the product failure.

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The Influence of Store Environment on Service Brand Personality and Repurchase Intention (점포의 물리적 환경이 서비스 브랜드 개성과 재구매의도에 미치는 영향)

  • Kim, Hyoung-Gil;Kim, Jung-Hee;Kim, Youn-Jeong
    • 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.

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An Intervention Study on Integration of Family Planning and Maternal/Infant Care Services in Rural Korea (가족계획과 모자보건 통합을 위한 조산원의 투입효과 분석 -서산지역의 개입연구 평가보고-)

  • Bang, Sook;Han, Seung-Hyun;Lee, Chung-Ja;Ahn, Moon-Young;Lee, In-Sook;Kim, Eun-Shil;Kim, Chong-Ho
    • Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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    • v.20 no.1 s.21
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    • pp.165-203
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    • 1987
  • This project was a service-cum-research effort with a quasi-experimental study design to examine the health benefits of an integrated Family Planning (FP)/Maternal & Child health (MCH) Service approach that provides crucial factors missing in the present on-going programs. The specific objectives were: 1) To test the effectiveness of trained nurse/midwives (MW) assigned as change agents in the Health Sub-Center (HSC) to bring about the changes in the eight FP/MCH indicators, namely; (i)FP/MCH contacts between field workers and their clients (ii) the use of effective FP methods, (iii) the inter-birth interval and/or open interval, (iv) prenatal care by medically qualified personnel, (v) medically supervised deliveries, (vi) the rate of induced abortion, (vii) maternal and infant morbidity, and (viii) preinatal & infant mortality. 2) To measure the integrative linkage (contacts) between MW & HSC workers and between HSC and clients. 3) To examine the organizational or administrative factors influencing integrative linkage between health workers. Study design; The above objectives called for quasi-experimental design setting up a study and control area with and without a midwife. An active intervention program (FP/MCH minimum 'package' program) was conducted for a 2 year period from June 1982-July 1984 in Seosan County and 'before and after' surveys were conducted to measure the change. Service input; This study was undertaken by the Soonchunhyang University in collaboration with WHO. After a baseline survery in 1981, trained nurses/midwives were introduced into two health sub-centers in a rural setting (Seosan county) for a 2 year period from 1982 to 1984. A major service input was the establishment of midwifery services in the existing health delivery system with emphasis on nurse/midwife's role as the link between health workers (nurse aids) and village health workers, and the referral of risk patients to the private physician (OBGY specialist). An evaluation survey was made in August 1984 to assess the effectiveness of this alternative integrated approach in the study areas in comparison with the control area which had normal government services. Method of evaluation; a. In this study, the primary objective was first to examine to what extent the FP/MCH package program brought about changes in the pre-determined eight indicators (outcome and impact measures) and the following relationship was first analyzed; b. Nevertheless, this project did not automatically accept the assumption that if two or more activities were integrated, the results would automatically be better than a non-integrated or categorical program. There is a need to assess the 'integration process' itself within the package program. The process of integration was measured in terms of interactive linkages, or the quantity & quality of contacts between workers & clients and among workers. Intergrative linkages were hypothesized to be influenced by organizational factors at the HSC clinic level including HSC goals, sltrurture, authority, leadership style, resources, and personal characteristics of HSC staff. The extent or degree of integration, as measured by the intensity of integrative linkages, was in turn presumed to influence programme performance. Thus as indicated diagrammatically below, organizational factors constituted the independent variables, integration as the intervening variable and programme performance with respect to family planning and health services as the dependent variable: Concerning organizational factors, however, due to the limited number of HSCs (2 in the study area and 3 in the control area), they were studied by participatory observation of an anthropologist who was independent of the project. In this observation, we examined whether the assumed integration process actually occurred or not. If not, what were the constraints in producing an effective integration process. Summary of Findings; A) Program effects and impact 1. Effects on FP use: During this 2 year action period, FP acceptance increased from 58% in 1981 to 78% in 1984 in both the study and control areas. This increase in both areas was mainly due to the new family planning campaign driven by the Government for the same study period. Therefore, there was no increment of FP acceptance rate due to additional input of MW to the on-going FP program. But in the study area, quality aspects of FP were somewhat improved, having a better continuation rate of IUDs & pills and more use of effective Contraceptive methods in comparison with the control area. 2. Effects of use of MCH services: Between the study and control areas, however, there was a significant difference in maternal and child health care. For example, the coverage of prenatal care was increased from 53% for 1981 birth cohort to 75% for 1984 birth cohort in the study area. In the control area, the same increased from 41% (1981) to 65% (1984). It is noteworthy that almost two thirds of the recent birth cohort received prenatal care even in the control area, indicating that there is a growing demand of MCH care as the size of family norm becomes smaller 3. There has been a substantive increase in delivery care by medical professions in the study area, with an annual increase rate of 10% due to midwives input in the study areas. The project had about two times greater effect on postnatal care (68% vs. 33%) at delivery care(45.2% vs. 26.1%). 4. The study area had better reproductive efficiency (wanted pregancies with FP practice & healthy live births survived by one year old) than the control area, especially among women under 30 (14.1% vs. 9.6%). The proportion of women who preferred the 1st trimester for their first prenatal care rose significantly in the study area as compared to the control area (24% vs 13%). B) Effects on Interactive Linkage 1. This project made a contribution in making several useful steps in the direction of service integration, namely; i) The health workers have become familiar with procedures on how to work together with each other (especially with a midwife) in carrying out their work in FP/MCH and, ii) The health workers have gotten a feeling of the usefulness of family health records (statistical integration) in identifying targets in their own work and their usefulness in caring for family health. 2. On the other hand, because of a lack of required organizational factors, complete linkage was not obtained as the project intended. i) In regards to the government health worker's activities in terms of home visiting there was not much difference between the study & control areas though the MW did more home visiting than Government health workers. ii) In assessing the service performance of MW & health workers, the midwives balanced their workload between 40% FP, 40% MCH & 20% other activities (mainly immunization). However, $85{\sim}90%$ of the services provided by the health workers were other than FP/MCH, mainly for immunizations such as the encephalitis campaign. In the control area, a similar pattern was observed. Over 75% of their service was other than FP/MCH. Therefore, the pattern shows the health workers are a long way from becoming multipurpose workers even though the government is pushing in this direction. 3. Villagers were much more likely to visit the health sub-center clinic in the study area than in the control area (58% vs.31%) and for more combined care (45% vs.23%). C) Organization factors (admistrative integrative issues) 1. When MW (new workers with higher qualification) were introduced to HSC, it was noted that there were conflicts between the existing HSC workers (Nurse aids with less qualification than MW) and the MW for the beginning period of the project. The cause of the conflict was studied by an anthropologist and it was pointed out that these functional integration problems stemmed from the structural inadequacies of the health subcenter organization as indicated below; i) There is still no general consensus about the objectives and goals of the project between the project staff and the existing health workers. ii) There is no formal linkage between the responsibility of each member's job in the health sub-center. iii) There is still little chance for midwives to play a catalytic role or to establish communicative networks between workers in order to link various knowledge and skills to provide better FP/MCH services in the health sub-center. 2. Based on the above findings the project recommended to the County Chief (who has power to control the administrative staff and the technical staff in his county) the following ; i) In order to solve the conflicts between the individual roles and functions in performing health care activities, there must be goals agreed upon by both. ii) The health sub·center must function as an autonomous organization to undertake the integration health project. In order to do that, it is necessary to support administrative considerations, and to establish a communication system for supervision and to control of the health sub-centers. iii) The administrative organization, tentatively, must be organized to bind the health worker's midwive's and director's jobs by an organic relationship in order to achieve the integrative system under the leadership of health sub-center director. After submitting this observation report, there has been better understanding from frequent meetings & communication between HW/MW in FP/MCH work as the program developed. Lessons learned from the Seosan Project (on issues of FP/MCH integration in Korea); 1) A majority or about 80% of the couples are now practicing FP. As indicated by the study, there is a growing demand from clients for the health system to provide more MCH services than FP in order to maintain the achieved small size of family through FP practice. It is fortunate to see that the government is now formulating a MCH policy for the year 2,000 and revising MCH laws and regulations to emphasize more MCH care for achieving a small size family through family planning practice. 2) Goal consensus in FP/MCH shouBd be made among the health workers It administrators, especially to emphasize the need of care of 'wanted' child. But there is a long way to go to realize the 'real' integration of FP into MCH in Korea, unless there is a structural integration FP/MCH because a categorical FP is still first priority to reduce the rate of population growth for economic reasons but not yet for health/welfare reasons in practice. 3) There should be more financial allocation: (i) a midwife should be made available to help to promote the MCH program and coordinate services, (in) there should be a health sub·center director who can provide leadership training for managing the integrated program. There is a need for 'organizational support', if the decision of integration is made to obtain benefit from both FP & MCH. In other words, costs should be paid equally to both FP/MCH. The integration slogan itself, without the commitment of paying such costs, is powerless to advocate it. 4) Need of management training for middle level health personnel is more acute as the Government has already constructed 90 MCH centers attached to the County Health Center but without adequate manpower, facilities, and guidelines for integrating the work of both FP and MCH. 5) The local government still considers these MCH centers only as delivery centers to take care only of those visiting maternity cases. The MCH center should be a center for the managment of all pregnancies occurring in the community and the promotion of FP with a systematic and effective linkage of resources available in the county such as i.e. Village Health Worker, Community Health Practitioner, Health Sub-center Physicians & Health workers, Doctors and Midwives in MCH center, OBGY Specialists in clinics & hospitals as practiced by the Seosan project at primary health care level.

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