• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.11 no.9
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• pp.5-15
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• 2013

Purpose - The research aim is to shed empirical light on whether quality-focused retailer brands such as Premium brand of Tesco Korea, Prime of Lotte Mart, and Best of E-Mart in the grocery market, make a contribution to developing store loyalty in the Korean market particularly. Research design, data, methodology - After developing sixconstructs, such as higher quality, stock availability, price levels, national brands, retailer brand attitudes, and store loyalty, the authors adopted exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, chi-square test and structural equation modelling as a research technique. Results - It was found that higher quality strongly influences the retailer brand attitude formation, and that retailer brand customers were sensitive to price levels. Buyers are, nevertheless, relatively less aware of price levels, when purchasing quality-oriented retailer brand types. Conclusions - The research implied that quality-oriented retailer brand types make a significant contribution to retailer brands attitude formation, and further, building store loyalty.

• Food Science and Preservation
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.786-794
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• 2011

To investigate the sanitary-quality level of commercial kimchi in South Korea, the pH, acidity, and microbial-flora changes in the kimchi were determined. Samples of kimchi produced by three different manufacturers (a small grocery store, a small/medium-sized enterprise, and a large food company) were collected. Freshly made kimchi was purchased and fermented at $10^{\circ}C$ for 10 days. The pH of the commercial kimchi on the purchased day was approximately pH 5.8, and that on the $10^{th}$ day of fermentation was ${\simeq}pH$ 4.1. The kimchi purchased from a large company showed a more rapid decline in pH level during fermentation. The saltiness of the kimchi purchased from a medium-sized company was slightly higher than those of the other commercial kimchi samples. The saccharinity index of the kimchi produced by a small grocery store was higher than those of the other samples, and its value deviation was also higher than those of the other commercial kimchi samples. A higher total viable-cell count and a higher lactic-acid bacteria (LAB) count were detected in the kimchi from the large food company at the beginning of fermentation compared to the samples of the two other kimchi manufacturers. The highest cell numbers of gram-positive bacteria (except LAB) and coliform bacteria were detected from the small-grocery-store kimchi, but the coliform bacteria count gradually decreased during fermentation although such bacteria were still detected until the $10^{th}$ day of fermentation. In contrast, coliform bacteria were not detected in the samples from the medium-sized and large food companies. Yeast, which is detected in over-ripened kimchi, was detected in the unfermented kimchi from the small grocery store, which had a below-0.36% acidity level. The gram-positive bacteria (except LAB) that were detected in all the tested commercial kimchi samples were determined to be Bacillus spp., and the gram-negative bacteria were determined to be Escherichia coli, Enterobacter spp., Sphingomonase spp., and Strenophomonas spp. The proportions of all the aforementioned bacteria in the kimchi samples, however, were different depending on the samples that were taken. These results indicate that a more sanitary kimchi production process and a more systematic kimchi production manual should be developed to industrialize and globalize kimchi.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
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• v.47 no.6
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• pp.11-20
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perception and utilization of salted seafood in Korean women. We also asked them about their opinions on how to increase the production range of popular salted seafood. Data were collected from 1,137 women and were analyzed with SAS 9.1 program. Women aged between 40 and 59 had higher positive perception of salted seafood than women aged between 20 and 39. The older age group (i.e. 40 to 59) believed that the production of salted seafood, such as like as Kimchi and soy sauce, should be globalized because of their taste and nutritional value. However, the younger age group (i.e. 20 to 39) had negative perceptions of salted seafood because of their unhygienic production and excess amount of salt. Women aged 50 and over used salted seafood frequently as a side dish or seasoning to make Kimchi, stew, or soup. The younger age group preferred to purchase a small package (200g or less) of salted seafoods from the grocery store instead of preparing it themselves. When purchasing salted seafood, they considered the taste, manufacturer, and expiration date. Finally, all interviewees agreed on the importance of salted seafood as part of traditional Korean cuisine, and wanted to see further local development. However, manufacturing and packaging processes need to be standardized, and hygiene and nutritional contents should be improved in order to achieve good quality local production. To succeed and develop high quality salted seafood, younger consumers need to be enticed with better nutritional value, taste, and hygienic production. Furthermore, the production range of popular salted seafood needs to be expanded beyond Kimchi and Soy Sauce. Hence new recipes are needed.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.113-125
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• 2020

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of interaction between product category (fresh vs. indulgent product) and shopping options (shipping charge and delivery time) on customer satisfaction and purchase intent in an e-commerce context. When ordering groceries online, consumers begin to allocate a larger share of their grocery budget toward product categories that generally contain healthier items at the expense of product categories that generally contain more indulgent products. Moreover, customers are extremely sensitive to shipping options such as shipping charges and delivery time. Therefore, this research investigates the issue at a more segmented level to focus on the impact that one dimension of logistics service quality - product category, shipping charge, and delivery time have on customer satisfaction and purchase intent. Research design, data, and methodology: To test the theoretically derived priori hypotheses concerning product category, shipping charges, delivery time, satisfaction, and purchase intent, this research presented a scenario-based experiment. Eight treatment groups were assigned by the method of product category (fresh produce vs. indulgent product), shipping charge (free vs. paid), and delivery time (one-day vs. two to three days). A total of 240 subjects were divided into groups and exposed to one of the eight scenarios. Participant's purchase intention was the dependent variable, and ANOVA and L-matrix were used to analyze for main and interactive effects between factors. Conclusions: Results indicated that in tests 1 and 2, free shipping and fast delivery time increased consumer satisfaction as well as purchase intent, and fast delivery moderated the impact of free shipping on consumer satisfaction and purchase intent. Test 3 showed that the effect of free shipping on consumer satisfaction and purchase intent moderated by fast delivery for indulgent products. In contrast, fast delivery for fresh products moderated the effect of paid shipping on consumer satisfaction and purchase intent. Consistent with this proposed mechanism, the relative importance of fresh produce versus indulgent products highlights the effect of shipping options on consumer satisfaction and purchase intent when ordering the target product in an e-commerce context. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.42-51
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• 2008

We believe that smart spaces, offering pervasive services, will proliferate. However, at present, those islands of smart spaces should be joined seamlessly with each other. As users move about, they will have to roam from one autonomous smart space to another. When they move into the new island of smart space, they should setup their devices and service manually or not have access to the services available in their home spaces. Sometimes, there will conflicts between users when they try to occupy the same space or use a specific device at the same time. It will also be critical to elder people who suffer from Alzheimer or other cognitive impairments when they travel from their smart space to other visited spaces (e.g., grocery stores, museums). Furthermore our experience in building the Gator Tech Smart House reveals to us that home residents generally do not want to lose or be denied all the features or services they have come to expect simply because they move to a new smart space. The seamless inter-space interaction requirements and issues are raised automatically when the ubiquitous pervasive computing system tries to establish the user's service environment by allocating relevant resources after the user moves to a new location where there are no prior settings for the new environment. In this paper, we raise and present several critical inter-space interactions issues impacting middleware architecture design of ubiquitous pervasive computing. We propose requirements for resolving these issues on seamless inter-space operation. We also illustrate our approach and ideas via a service scenario moving around two smart spaces.

• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.8 no.spc1
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• pp.360-390
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• 2005

The paradigm of the corporate innovations has been changed from the intra-company innovations to the inter-company innovations. A prevalent approach to the inter-company innovations is the supply chain management. Three key words of the core concept of supply chain management are the long-term relationship, resource integration, and value creation. Specifically, it means that the supply chain management aims to make value creation through the resource integration for the supply chain entities, based on the long-term relationship between buyers and sellers. To make more effective long-term relationship among the supply chain entities, it is very important for the supply chain entities to analyze followings: i) What variables can influence the long-term relationship, ii) How these variables can influence to the long-term relationship. However, previous researches mostly deals the long-term relationship in the marketing area in fragment, and thus few research efforts have been done for the development of conceptual model using supply chain management theories. In contrast to previous studies, our research tried to develop and examine the integrative research model by introducing both the marketing theories and the supply chain management theories, and thus related hypotheses are derived. A multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the influence of the antecedents of the long-term relationship, for the 87 retailers of grocery supply chains. The empirical results confirm that cultural similarity, reputation, interdependency, and trust positively influence long-term relationship (i.e., partnership orientation and partnership symmetry). And results also confirm that the supply implementation factors such as organization integration, information system integration, and process integration playa moderating role between antecedents and long-term relationship. These findings suggest that companies should perceive the importance of managing the process, organization, information system integration in the long-term relationship implementation process as well as the factors such as cultural similarity, reputation, interdependency, and trust in the long-term relationship establishment process.

• Food Science of Animal Resources
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• v.42 no.5
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• pp.762-774
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• 2022

The COVID 19 pandemic resulted in a considerable influence on the world economy. Being a big sector of the economy, the food supply chain struggled. The meat supply chain was most notably affected as every part of the supply chain from farm to shelf was closely inter-related. With the closure of businesses and restaurants the demand for at home food from grocery stores increased. Meat production facilities were impacted when the virus spread to the workers causing facilities to close or line speeds to slow. The combination of these two issues, in turn, led to there being less meat on the shelves. With less meat animals being harvested, there was less demand for livestock leading to farmers having an excess in slaughter ready animals. The decreased demand for livestock led to economic issues as money was lost in multiple sections of the supply chain. Aside from the economy and supply chain issues, other issues include concerns over the safety of meat products due to decreased safety protocols to increase line speed. Additionally, concerns of animal welfare with the excess of animals being culled were raised due to decreased capacity in processing facilities. While this review paper mainly focuses on characterizing the impact of COVID 19 on the meat supply chain in the USA, the compiled information should be able to provide practical insights to the meat/food industry across the globe to develop potential mitigating strategies against the COVID 19 and/or any similar pandemic incidences in the future.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.67-86
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• 2020

Recommender Systems have been huge influence users and business more and more. Recently the importance of E-commerce has been reached rapid growth greatly in world-wide COVID-19 pandemic. Recommender system is the center of E-commerce lively. Top ranked E-commerce managers mentioned that recommender systems have a major influence on customer's purchase such as about 50% of Netflix, Amazon sales from their recommender systems. Most algorithms have been focused on improving accuracy of recommender system regardless of novelty, diversity, serendipity etc. Recommender systems with only high accuracy cannot satisfy business long-term profit because of generating sales polarization. In addition, customers do not experience enjoyment of shopping from only focusing accuracy recommender system because customer's preference is changed constantly. Therefore, recommender systems with various values need to be developed for user's high satisfaction. Reranking is the most useful methodology to realize diversity of recommender system. In this paper, diversity of recommender system is represented through constructing high similarity with users who have different preference using each user's purchased item's category algorithm. It is distinguished from past research approach which is changing the algorithm of recommender system without user's diversity preference level. We tried to discover user's diversity preference level and observed the results how the effect was different according to user's diversity preference level. In addition, graph-based recommender system was used to show diversity through user's network, not collaborative filtering. In this paper, Amazon Grocery and Gourmet Food data was used because the low-involvement product, such as habitual product, foods, low-priced goods etc., had high probability to show customer's diversity. First, a bipartite graph with users and items simultaneously is constructed to make graph-based recommender system. However, each users and items unipartite graph also need to be established to show diversity of recommender system. The weight of each unipartite graph has played crucial role changing Jaccard Distance of item's category. We can observe two important results from the user's unipartite network. First, the user's diversity preference level is observed from the network and second, dissimilar users can be discovered in the user's network. Through the research process, diversity of recommender system is presented highly with small accuracy loss and optimalization for higher accuracy is possible controlling diversity ratio. This paper has three important theoretical points. First, this research expands recommender system research for user's satisfaction with various values. Second, the graph-based recommender system is developed newly. Third, the evaluation indicator of diversity is made for diversity. In addition, recommender systems are useful for corporate profit practically and this paper has contribution on business closely. Above all, business long-term profit can be improved using recommender system with diversity and the recommender system can provide right service according to user's diversity level. Lastly, the corporate selling low-involvement products have great effect based on the results.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.105-127
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• 2002

This paper presents an analysis of how the business models of organizations are getting transformed in the Marketspace created by the Internet. We use a research model comprising the transformation scores of four Ps(Product, Price, Promotion, and Place) as dependent variables and three dimensions, Demographics, Technology, and Community elements on the Websites, as explaining variables about the Cyber Transformation of the 4Ps. While most existing literatures have focused on Website's technology, our research model includes 22 five-point-scale items; 10 Demographics /Technology items and 12 Community items. To measure the 4P's transformation scores, the authors selected 14 workable items from the Marketspace Model by Dutta, Kwan, & Segev(1997). A sample of 123 shopping mall Websites comprising three categories(grocery, jewelry/accessory, and cosmetics) from the 100hot.co.kr list are evaluated and the data is analyzed by SPSSWIN 8.0 version. The result shows that there are five significant factors, Technology, Interaction, Connectedness, Business Features, and Domain, while the average transformation scores of 4Ps are at very low level. The factor scores are used in regression analysis for each P. Two factors, Technology and Interaction are influencing all four Ps; Connectedness is influencing only two, Product and Place. Organizations must not simply take their existing business models. They have to adopt the Technology items(navigation, logo, e-mail, guide, graphics) and to facilitate the Interaction items(consulting, number/quality of bulletin boards, participation, offline events) and Connectedness(club activation, contents, partner/site link, entertainment contents) in order to get transformed in the Marketspace successfully in the near future.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.25-36
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• 2011

Owing to the rapid growth of hypermarket/discount store formats since 1996, Korean retailing has suddenly attracted the significant attention from researchers. Before the emergence of large scale retailers such as E-Mart, Lotte Mart and Tesco Korea, there were the two retail formats who led the Korean retailing in the modern retailing history: department store and supermarket formats. Nevertheless, there has been little literature concerned about the two retail formats as a case study, while some authors have paid their attention to hypermarket/discount store formats. In addition, when mentioning the development process of retailing history, it is less likely that authors have made an effort to illustrate supermarket retailing history. In order to regard supermarket retailing as part of the Korean retailing, it is interesting to look at a representative supermarket retailer, Haitai, who was one of the subsidiaries of Haitai chaebol. Based on supermarket retailing, the company which was established as a joint venture in 1974 led a supermarket retailing in the Korean modernised retailing history. Before analysing whether Haitai failed or not, the definition of failure should be illustrated. With regard to the term, failure, in the academic world, authors have interchangeably used the following terms: failure, divestment, closure, organisational restructuring, and exit. To collect research data as a case study, the author adopted an in-depth interview method. The research is based on research interviews with 13 ex-staff who left after Haitai went bankruptcy, from store management department to merchandise department. By investigating Haitai's experiences through field interviews, the research found that Haitai restructured organisational decision-making process at the early stage when companies started to modernise organisational charts, benchmarking sophisticated retailing knowledge through the strategic alliance with a Japanese retailer. In respect of buying system, the company established firmly buying functions by adopting central buying system, and further, outstandingly allocated considerable marketing resources to the development of retailer brands with the dedicated team of retailer brand development. In the grocery retailing, abandoning a 'no-frill' packaging concept, the introduction of retailer brand packaging equal to, or better than national brand packaging design, encouraged other retailers to change their retailer brand development strategies. In product sourcing ways, Haitai organised for the first time the overseas sourcing team with the aim of improving the profit margins of foreign products and providing exotic products for customers, followed by other retailers. Regarding distribution system, the company introduced the innovative idea which delivered products ordered by stores directly to each store withboth its own vehicles and its own warehouse in which could deal with dry foods, chilly foods, frozen food, and non-foods, and even, process produce. In addition, Haitai developed many promotional methods to attract more customers like 'the guarantee of the lowest price', and expanded its own business to US in 1996, although withdrew, because of bankruptcy in 1997. Together with POS introduction in 1994, Haitai made a significant contribution to the development of the Korean retailing, influencing other retailers in many aspects. As a case study, the study has provided a number of lessons from Haitai's experiences for academicians and practitioners, suggesting that its history should be involved in the Korean modernised retailing.