• Title/Summary/Keyword: Enterprise 2.0

Search Result 169, Processing Time 0.036 seconds

GIS-based Disaster Management System for a Private Insurance Company in Case of Typhoons(I) (지리정보기반의 재해 관리시스템 구축(I) -민간 보험사의 사례, 태풍의 경우-)

  • Chang Eun-Mi
    • Journal of the Korean Geographical Society
    • /
    • v.41 no.1 s.112
    • /
    • pp.106-120
    • /
    • 2006
  • Natural or man-made disaster has been expected to be one of the potential themes that can integrate human geography and physical geography. Typhoons like Rusa and Maemi caused great loss to insurance companies as well as public sectors. We have implemented a natural disaster management system for a private insurance company to produce better estimation of hazards from high wind as well as calculate vulnerability of damage. Climatic gauge sites and addresses of contract's objects were geo-coded and the pressure values along all the typhoon tracks were vectorized into line objects. National GIS topog raphic maps with scale of 1: 5,000 were updated into base maps and digital elevation model with 30 meter space and land cover maps were used for reflecting roughness of land to wind velocity. All the data are converted to grid coverage with $1km{\times}1km$. Vulnerability curve of Munich Re was ad opted, and preprocessor and postprocessor of wind velocity model was implemented. Overlapping the location of contracts on the grid value coverage can show the relative risk, with given scenario. The wind velocities calculated by the model were compared with observed value (average $R^2=0.68$). The calibration of wind speed models was done by dropping two climatic gauge data, which enhanced $R^2$ values. The comparison of calculated loss with actual historical loss of the insurance company showed both underestimation and overestimation. This system enables the company to have quantitative data for optimizing the re-insurance ratio, to have a plan to allocate enterprise resources and to upgrade the international creditability of the company. A flood model, storm surge model and flash flood model are being added, at last, combined disaster vulnerability will be calculated for a total disaster management system.

Economic Analysis of Rice Production by Seed Broadcasting -In the Case of Daeho Large Scale Tidal and Development Area- (수도 직파재배의 경제성분석 -대단위 대호간척농지를 중심으로-)

  • Lim, Jae Hwan;Ryu, Yong Hee
    • Korean Journal of Agricultural Science
    • /
    • v.23 no.2
    • /
    • pp.301-322
    • /
    • 1996
  • This study is first aimed at identifying the possibility of labour saving and production cost decreasing in rice production with respect to seed broad casting technology. Comparison of labour inputs and production costs of rice in-between USA and Korea and recommendation of policy guidelines for the continous rice cultivation are the second objective of this study. Under the WTO system, rice enterprice is the most vulnerable crop in the sense of labour productivity and price competitiveness in the international market. How to adapt labour saving technology and how to decrease production costs are the most imminent problems to be solved in rice production. To achieve the objectives, survey on nine rice enterprice farms were made in Daeho tidal farmland with respect to the size of farm, labour inputs, productivity, farm mechanization and farm land base development. The existing data on labour saving technology by seed broadcasting which had surveyed by Rural Development Administration were collected to compare the surveyed data from Daeho tidal farm land The study results and policy recommendation are summarized as follows; 1. Labour requirements per 10a for rice enterprise farms with seed broadcasting and with transplanting were estimated 11.4 and 18.5hours respectively. 'This above labour inputs were equivalent to 1/3-1/5 of the national average labour inputs of 53.6 hours which were included transplanting and harvesting by machinery. Considering the labour requirement of 1.7 hours per 10a for the USA rice production, Korea rice culture has possibility to decrease labour demand upto USA level of labour inputs. 2. Production cost of rice in Korea were estimated US$4,181 per ha which were higher than that of USA by 3.00 times and production costs per ton were shown as US$313 for USA rice and US$1,018 for Korean rice. 3. Land productivity of rice per 10a in America was reached to 4,325kg and the counterpart of Korea was about 4,181kg in recent year. In the sense of land productivity, both yields of rice were comparable. 4. The price of japonica type rice similar to Korean traditional rice in international market in 1994 was f.o.b US$466 per ton which was equivalent to import parity price of US$830 per ton in domestic market. The price of rice purchased by Korean G't and received by farmers were amounted to US$ 2,013 and US$ 1,663 respectively in the same year. Domestic prices mentioned above were higher than the import parity price as US$830 by 2.0-2.4 times. 5. American rice production competitive to Korean rice was equivalent to 17,012 thousand tons, 1.28% of the world production of rice in 1991 and consumption of rice in America was amounted to 2,633 thousand tons. Exportable quantity of USA rice were estimated as 4,379 thousand tons of which 52.3%, 2,300 thousand tons, were exported indeed in the same year. 6. The quantity of Korean rice produced in 1991 was estimated 1.00% of the world production. The world amount of rice exported in 1991 was reached to 2.45% of the world production of which 34.2% was occupied by USA The remaining quantities of world exported rice were dominated by Tiland, Pakistan and Vietnam where produced indica variety. 7. Under the given technology, labour inputs per 10a for rice production could be possible to save by 70% of the national average labour requirement of 53.6 hours through implmenting complete farm mechanization with land consolidation and on-farm development and improvement of fanning practices like seedbroad casting txchnology etc. On the other hand, prduction costs of rice could be decreased by 10% rather than 49% as target indicated in the Rural Development Counter Measures of Korean Government in 1994 owing to increasing farm mechanization cost and interest on land service with high price. Accordingly production cost of rice per kg could be decreased only by 10% of the 1994 production cost. 8. Rice policy of Korean government in the future should take into account the labour saving technology to solve labour shortage in rural area and to enhance off-farm incomes by creating job opportunities in agro-industrial zones and special production area. On account of the staple food and main energy source for people's health, rice production even encountered vulnerable economic settings should be continued without price distortion policies and discouraging farmer's intention to cultivate rice by importing institutionally the direct income subsidy system.

  • PDF

Change in the Microbial Profiles of Commercial Kimchi during Fermentation (국내 시판김치의 김치담금부터 숙성까지의 미생물 균총 변화)

  • Chang, Ji-Yoon;Choi, Yu-Ri;Chang, Hae-Choon
    • Food Science and Preservation
    • /
    • v.18 no.5
    • /
    • pp.786-794
    • /
    • 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.

A Hybrid Forecasting Framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Artificial Neural Network (사례기반 추론기법과 인공신경망을 이용한 서비스 수요예측 프레임워크)

  • Hwang, Yousub
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.18 no.4
    • /
    • pp.43-57
    • /
    • 2012
  • To enhance the competitive advantage in a constantly changing business environment, an enterprise management must make the right decision in many business activities based on both internal and external information. Thus, providing accurate information plays a prominent role in management's decision making. Intuitively, historical data can provide a feasible estimate through the forecasting models. Therefore, if the service department can estimate the service quantity for the next period, the service department can then effectively control the inventory of service related resources such as human, parts, and other facilities. In addition, the production department can make load map for improving its product quality. Therefore, obtaining an accurate service forecast most likely appears to be critical to manufacturing companies. Numerous investigations addressing this problem have generally employed statistical methods, such as regression or autoregressive and moving average simulation. However, these methods are only efficient for data with are seasonal or cyclical. If the data are influenced by the special characteristics of product, they are not feasible. In our research, we propose a forecasting framework that predicts service demand of manufacturing organization by combining Case-based reasoning (CBR) and leveraging an unsupervised artificial neural network based clustering analysis (i.e., Self-Organizing Maps; SOM). We believe that this is one of the first attempts at applying unsupervised artificial neural network-based machine-learning techniques in the service forecasting domain. Our proposed approach has several appealing features : (1) We applied CBR and SOM in a new forecasting domain such as service demand forecasting. (2) We proposed our combined approach between CBR and SOM in order to overcome limitations of traditional statistical forecasting methods and We have developed a service forecasting tool based on the proposed approach using an unsupervised artificial neural network and Case-based reasoning. In this research, we conducted an empirical study on a real digital TV manufacturer (i.e., Company A). In addition, we have empirically evaluated the proposed approach and tool using real sales and service related data from digital TV manufacturer. In our empirical experiments, we intend to explore the performance of our proposed service forecasting framework when compared to the performances predicted by other two service forecasting methods; one is traditional CBR based forecasting model and the other is the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. We ran each service forecasting 144 times; each time, input data were randomly sampled for each service forecasting framework. To evaluate accuracy of forecasting results, we used Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as primary performance measure in our experiments. We conducted one-way ANOVA test with the 144 measurements of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches. For example, the F-ratio of MAPE for three different service forecasting approaches is 67.25 and the p-value is 0.000. This means that the difference between the MAPE of the three different service forecasting approaches is significant at the level of 0.000. Since there is a significant difference among the different service forecasting approaches, we conducted Tukey's HSD post hoc test to determine exactly which means of MAPE are significantly different from which other ones. In terms of MAPE, Tukey's HSD post hoc test grouped the three different service forecasting approaches into three different subsets in the following order: our proposed approach > traditional CBR-based service forecasting approach > the existing forecasting approach used by Company A. Consequently, our empirical experiments show that our proposed approach outperformed the traditional CBR based forecasting model and the existing service forecasting model used by Company A. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides some research background information such as summary of CBR and SOM. Section 3 presents a hybrid service forecasting framework based on Case-based Reasoning and Self-Organizing Maps, while the empirical evaluation results are summarized in Section 4. Conclusion and future research directions are finally discussed in Section 5.

S-MADP : Service based Development Process for Mobile Applications of Medium-Large Scale Project (S-MADP : 중대형 프로젝트의 모바일 애플리케이션을 위한 서비스 기반 개발 프로세스)

  • Kang, Tae Deok;Kim, Kyung Baek;Cheng, Ki Ju
    • KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
    • /
    • v.2 no.8
    • /
    • pp.555-564
    • /
    • 2013
  • Innovative evolution in mobile devices along with recent spread of Tablet PCs and Smart Phones makes a new change not only in individual life but also in enterprise applications. Especially, in the case of medium-large mobile applications for large enterprises which generally takes more than 3 months of development periods, importance and complexity increase significantly. Generally Agile-methodology is used for a development process for the medium-large scale mobile applications, but some issues arise such as high dependency on skilled developers and lack of detail development directives. In this paper, S-MADP (Smart Mobile Application Development Process) is proposed to mitigate these issues. S-MADP is a service oriented development process extending a object-oriented development process, for medium-large scale mobile applications. S-MADP provides detail development directives for each activities during the entire process for defining services as server-based or client-based and providing the way of reuse of services. Also, in order to support various user interfaces, S-MADP provides detail UI development directives. To evaluate the performance of S-MADP, three mobile application development projects were conducted and the results were analyzed. The projects are 'TBS(TB Mobile Service) 3.0' in TB company, mobile app-store in TS company, and mobile groupware in TG group. As a result of the projects, S-MADP accounts for more detailed design information about 'Minimizing the use of resources', 'Service-based designing' and 'User interface optimized for mobile devices' which are needed to be largely considered for mobile application development environment when we compare with existing Agile-methodology. Therefore, it improves the usability, maintainability, efficiency of developed mobile applications. Through field tests, it is observed that S-MADP outperforms about 25% than a Agile-methodology in the aspect of the required man-month for developing a medium-large mobile application.

The effect of Big-data investment on the Market value of Firm (기업의 빅데이터 투자가 기업가치에 미치는 영향 연구)

  • Kwon, Young jin;Jung, Woo-Jin
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.25 no.2
    • /
    • pp.99-122
    • /
    • 2019
  • According to the recent IDC (International Data Corporation) report, as from 2025, the total volume of data is estimated to reach ten times higher than that of 2016, corresponding to 163 zettabytes. then the main body of generating information is moving more toward corporations than consumers. So-called "the wave of Big-data" is arriving, and the following aftermath affects entire industries and firms, respectively and collectively. Therefore, effective management of vast amounts of data is more important than ever in terms of the firm. However, there have been no previous studies that measure the effects of big data investment, even though there are number of previous studies that quantitatively the effects of IT investment. Therefore, we quantitatively analyze the Big-data investment effects, which assists firm's investment decision making. This study applied the Event Study Methodology, which is based on the efficient market hypothesis as the theoretical basis, to measure the effect of the big data investment of firms on the response of market investors. In addition, five sub-variables were set to analyze this effect in more depth: the contents are firm size classification, industry classification (finance and ICT), investment completion classification, and vendor existence classification. To measure the impact of Big data investment announcements, Data from 91 announcements from 2010 to 2017 were used as data, and the effect of investment was more empirically observed by observing changes in corporate value immediately after the disclosure. This study collected data on Big Data Investment related to Naver 's' News' category, the largest portal site in Korea. In addition, when selecting the target companies, we extracted the disclosures of listed companies in the KOSPI and KOSDAQ market. During the collection process, the search keywords were searched through the keywords 'Big data construction', 'Big data introduction', 'Big data investment', 'Big data order', and 'Big data development'. The results of the empirically proved analysis are as follows. First, we found that the market value of 91 publicly listed firms, who announced Big-data investment, increased by 0.92%. In particular, we can see that the market value of finance firms, non-ICT firms, small-cap firms are significantly increased. This result can be interpreted as the market investors perceive positively the big data investment of the enterprise, allowing market investors to better understand the company's big data investment. Second, statistical demonstration that the market value of financial firms and non - ICT firms increases after Big data investment announcement is proved statistically. Third, this study measured the effect of big data investment by dividing by company size and classified it into the top 30% and the bottom 30% of company size standard (market capitalization) without measuring the median value. To maximize the difference. The analysis showed that the investment effect of small sample companies was greater, and the difference between the two groups was also clear. Fourth, one of the most significant features of this study is that the Big Data Investment announcements are classified and structured according to vendor status. We have shown that the investment effect of a group with vendor involvement (with or without a vendor) is very large, indicating that market investors are very positive about the involvement of big data specialist vendors. Lastly but not least, it is also interesting that market investors are evaluating investment more positively at the time of the Big data Investment announcement, which is scheduled to be built rather than completed. Applying this to the industry, it would be effective for a company to make a disclosure when it decided to invest in big data in terms of increasing the market value. Our study has an academic implication, as prior research looked for the impact of Big-data investment has been nonexistent. This study also has a practical implication in that it can be a practical reference material for business decision makers considering big data investment.

An Exploratory Study on the Industry/Market Characteristics of the 'Hyper-Growing Companies' and the Firm Strategies: A Focus on Firms with more than Annual Revenue of 100 Million dollars from 'Inc. the 5,000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America' (초고성장 기업의 산업/시장 특성과 전략 선택에 대한 탐색적 연구: 'Inc. the 5,000 Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America' 기업 중 연간 매출액 1억 달러 이상 기업을 중심으로)

  • Lee, Young-Dall;Oh, Soyoung
    • Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
    • /
    • v.16 no.2
    • /
    • pp.51-78
    • /
    • 2021
  • Followed by 'start-up', the theme of 'scale-up' has been considered as an important agenda in both corporate and policy spheres. In particular, although it is a term commonly used in industry and policy fields, even a conceptual definition has not been achieved from the academic perspective. "Corporate Growth" in the academic aspect and "Business Growth" in the practical management field have different understandings (Achtenhagen et al., 2010). Previous research on corporate growth has not departed from Penrose(1959)'s "Firm as a bundle of resources" and "the role of managers". Based on the theory and background of economics, existing research has mainly examined factors that contribute to firms' growth and their growth patterns. Comparatively, we lack knowledge on the firms' growth with a focus on 'annual revenue growth rate'. In the early stage of the firms, they tend to exhibit a high growth rate as it started with a lower level of annual revenue. However, when the firms reach annual revenue of more than 100 billion KRW, a threshold to be classified as a 'middle-standing enterprise' by Korean standards, they are unlikely to reach a high level of revenue growth rate. In our study, we used our sample of 333 companies (6.7% out of 5,000 'fastest-growing' companies) which reached 15% of the compound annual growth rate in the last three years with more than USD 100 million. It shows that sustaining 'high-growth' above a certain firm size is difficult. The study focuses on firms with annual revenue of more than $100 billion (approximately 120 billion KRW) from the 'Inc. 2020 fast-growing companies 5,000' list. The companies have been categorized into 1) Fast-growing companies (revenue CAGR 15%~40% between 2016 and 2019), 2) Hyper-growing companies (40%~99.9%), and 3) Super-growing (100% or more) with in-depth analysis of each group's characteristics. Also, the relationship between the revenue growth rate, individual company's strategy choice (market orientation, generic strategy, growth strategy, pioneer strategy), industry/market environment, and firm age is investigated with a quantitative approach. Through conducting the study, it aims to provide a reference to the 'Hyper-Growing Model' that combines the paths and factors of growth strategies. For policymakers, our study intends to provide a reference to which factors or environmental variables should be considered for 'optimal effective combinations' to promote firms' growth.

Improved Social Network Analysis Method in SNS (SNS에서의 개선된 소셜 네트워크 분석 방법)

  • Sohn, Jong-Soo;Cho, Soo-Whan;Kwon, Kyung-Lag;Chung, In-Jeong
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
    • /
    • v.18 no.4
    • /
    • pp.117-127
    • /
    • 2012
  • Due to the recent expansion of the Web 2.0 -based services, along with the widespread of smartphones, online social network services are being popularized among users. Online social network services are the online community services which enable users to communicate each other, share information and expand human relationships. In the social network services, each relation between users is represented by a graph consisting of nodes and links. As the users of online social network services are increasing rapidly, the SNS are actively utilized in enterprise marketing, analysis of social phenomenon and so on. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is the systematic way to analyze social relationships among the members of the social network using the network theory. In general social network theory consists of nodes and arcs, and it is often depicted in a social network diagram. In a social network diagram, nodes represent individual actors within the network and arcs represent relationships between the nodes. With SNA, we can measure relationships among the people such as degree of intimacy, intensity of connection and classification of the groups. Ever since Social Networking Services (SNS) have drawn increasing attention from millions of users, numerous researches have made to analyze their user relationships and messages. There are typical representative SNA methods: degree centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality. In the degree of centrality analysis, the shortest path between nodes is not considered. However, it is used as a crucial factor in betweenness centrality, closeness centrality and other SNA methods. In previous researches in SNA, the computation time was not too expensive since the size of social network was small. Unfortunately, most SNA methods require significant time to process relevant data, and it makes difficult to apply the ever increasing SNS data in social network studies. For instance, if the number of nodes in online social network is n, the maximum number of link in social network is n(n-1)/2. It means that it is too expensive to analyze the social network, for example, if the number of nodes is 10,000 the number of links is 49,995,000. Therefore, we propose a heuristic-based method for finding the shortest path among users in the SNS user graph. Through the shortest path finding method, we will show how efficient our proposed approach may be by conducting betweenness centrality analysis and closeness centrality analysis, both of which are widely used in social network studies. Moreover, we devised an enhanced method with addition of best-first-search method and preprocessing step for the reduction of computation time and rapid search of the shortest paths in a huge size of online social network. Best-first-search method finds the shortest path heuristically, which generalizes human experiences. As large number of links is shared by only a few nodes in online social networks, most nods have relatively few connections. As a result, a node with multiple connections functions as a hub node. When searching for a particular node, looking for users with numerous links instead of searching all users indiscriminately has a better chance of finding the desired node more quickly. In this paper, we employ the degree of user node vn as heuristic evaluation function in a graph G = (N, E), where N is a set of vertices, and E is a set of links between two different nodes. As the heuristic evaluation function is used, the worst case could happen when the target node is situated in the bottom of skewed tree. In order to remove such a target node, the preprocessing step is conducted. Next, we find the shortest path between two nodes in social network efficiently and then analyze the social network. For the verification of the proposed method, we crawled 160,000 people from online and then constructed social network. Then we compared with previous methods, which are best-first-search and breath-first-search, in time for searching and analyzing. The suggested method takes 240 seconds to search nodes where breath-first-search based method takes 1,781 seconds (7.4 times faster). Moreover, for social network analysis, the suggested method is 6.8 times and 1.8 times faster than betweenness centrality analysis and closeness centrality analysis, respectively. The proposed method in this paper shows the possibility to analyze a large size of social network with the better performance in time. As a result, our method would improve the efficiency of social network analysis, making it particularly useful in studying social trends or phenomena.

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
    • /
    • v.17 no.4
    • /
    • pp.141-173
    • /
    • 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.

  • PDF