Korea's famous soccer players are steadily performing well in international leagues, which led to higher interests of Korean fans in the international leagues. Reflecting the growing social phenomenon of rising interests on international leagues by Korean fans, the study examined the overall consumer perception in the consumption of uniform by domestic soccer fans and compared the changes in perception following the transfers of the players. Among others, the paper examined the consumer perception and purchase factors of soccer fans shown in social media, focusing on periods before and after the recruitment of Heung-Min Son to English Premier League's Tottenham Football Club. To this end, the EPL uniform is the collection keyword the paper utilized and collected consumer postings from domestic website and social media via Python 3.7, and analyzed them using Ucinet 6, NodeXL 1.0.1, and SPSS 25.0 programs. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the uniform of the club that consistently topped the league, has been gaining attention as a popular uniform, and the players' performance, and the players' position have been identified as key factors in the purchase and search of professional football uniforms. In the case of the club, the actual ranking and whether the league won are shown to be important factors in the purchase and search of professional soccer uniforms. The club's emblem and the sponsor logo that will be attached to the uniform are also factors of interest to consumers. In addition, in the decision making process of purchase of a uniform by professional soccer fan, uniform's form, marking, authenticity, and sponsors are found to be more important than price, design, size, and logo. The official online store has emerged as a major purchasing channel, followed by gifts for friends or requests from acquaintances when someone travels to the United Kingdom. Second, a classification of key control categories through the convergence of iteration correlation analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm shows differences in the classification of individual groups, but groups that include the EPL's club and player keywords are identified as the key topics in relation to professional football uniforms. Third, between 2002 and 2006, the central theme for professional football uniforms was World Cup and English Premier League, but from 2012 to 2015, the focus has shifted to more interest of domestic and international players in the English Premier League. The subject has changed to the uniform itself from this time on. In this context, the paper can confirm that the major issues regarding the uniforms of professional soccer players have changed since Ji-Sung Park's transfer to Manchester United, and Sung-Yong Ki, Chung-Yong Lee, and Heung-Min Son's good performances in these leagues. The paper also identified that the uniforms of the clubs to which the players have transferred to are of interest. Fourth, both male and female consumers are showing increasing interest in Son's league, the English Premier League, which Tottenham FC belongs to. In particular, the increasing interest in Son has shown a tendency to increase interest in football uniforms for female consumers. This study presents a variety of researches on sports consumption and has value as a consumer study by identifying unique consumption patterns. It is meaningful in that the accuracy of the interpretation has been enhanced by using a cluster analysis via convergence of iteration correlation analysis and Clauset-Newman-Moore clustering algorithm to identify the main topics. Based on the results of this study, the clubs will be able to maximize its profits and maintain good relationships with fans by identifying key drivers of consumer awareness and purchasing for professional soccer fans and establishing an effective marketing strategy.
Information and communication and home appliance industries, which were one of South Korea's main industries, are gradually losing their export share as their export competitiveness is weakening. This study objectively analyzed export competitiveness and suggested export-promising countries in order to help South Korea's information communication and home appliance industries improve exports. In this study, network properties, centrality, and structural hole analysis were performed during network analysis to evaluate export competitiveness. In order to select promising export countries, we proposed a new variable that can take into account the characteristics of an already established International Trade Network (ITN), that is, the Global Value Chain (GVC), in addition to the existing economic factors. The conditional log-odds for individual links derived from the Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) in the analysis of the cross-border trade network were assumed as a proxy variable that can indicate the export potential. In consideration of the possibility of ERGM linkage, a parametric approach and a non-parametric approach were used to recommend export-promising countries, respectively. In the parametric method, a regression analysis model was developed to predict the export value of the information and communication and home appliance industries in South Korea by additionally considering the link-specific characteristics of the network derived from the ERGM to the existing economic factors. Also, in the non-parametric approach, an abnormality detection algorithm based on the clustering method was used, and a promising export country was proposed as a method of finding outliers that deviate from two peers. According to the research results, the structural characteristic of the export network of the industry was a network with high transferability. Also, according to the centrality analysis result, South Korea's influence on exports was weak compared to its size, and the structural hole analysis result showed that export efficiency was weak. According to the model for recommending promising exporting countries proposed by this study, in parametric analysis, Iran, Ireland, North Macedonia, Angola, and Pakistan were promising exporting countries, and in nonparametric analysis, Qatar, Luxembourg, Ireland, North Macedonia and Pakistan were analyzed as promising exporting countries. There were differences in some countries in the two models. The results of this study revealed that the export competitiveness of South Korea's information and communication and home appliance industries in GVC was not high compared to the size of exports, and thus showed that exports could be further reduced. In addition, this study is meaningful in that it proposed a method to find promising export countries by considering GVC networks with other countries as a way to increase export competitiveness. This study showed that, from a policy point of view, the international trade network of the information communication and home appliance industries has an important mutual relationship, and although transferability is high, it may not be easily expanded to a three-party relationship. In addition, it was confirmed that South Korea's export competitiveness or status was lower than the export size ranking. This paper suggested that in order to improve the low out-degree centrality, it is necessary to increase exports to Italy or Poland, which had significantly higher in-degrees. In addition, we argued that in order to improve the centrality of out-closeness, it is necessary to increase exports to countries with particularly high in-closeness. In particular, it was analyzed that Morocco, UAE, Argentina, Russia, and Canada should pay attention as export countries. This study also provided practical implications for companies expecting to expand exports. The results of this study argue that companies expecting export expansion need to pay attention to countries with a relatively high potential for export expansion compared to the existing export volume by country. In particular, for companies that export daily necessities, countries that should pay attention to the population are presented, and for companies that export high-end or durable products, countries with high GDP, or purchasing power, relatively low exports are presented. Since the process and results of this study can be easily extended and applied to other industries, it is also expected to develop services that utilize the results of this study in the public sector.
Personalized services directly and indirectly acquire personal data, in part, to provide customers with higher-value services that are specifically context-relevant (such as place and time). Information technologies continue to mature and develop, providing greatly improved performance. Sensory networks and intelligent software can now obtain context data, and that is the cornerstone for providing personalized, context-specific services. Yet, the danger of overflowing personal information is increasing because the data retrieved by the sensors usually contains privacy information. Various technical characteristics of context-aware applications have more troubling implications for information privacy. In parallel with increasing use of context for service personalization, information privacy concerns have also increased such as an unrestricted availability of context information. Those privacy concerns are consistently regarded as a critical issue facing context-aware personalized service success. The entire field of information privacy is growing as an important area of research, with many new definitions and terminologies, because of a need for a better understanding of information privacy concepts. Especially, it requires that the factors of information privacy should be revised according to the characteristics of new technologies. However, previous information privacy factors of context-aware applications have at least two shortcomings. First, there has been little overview of the technology characteristics of context-aware computing. Existing studies have only focused on a small subset of the technical characteristics of context-aware computing. Therefore, there has not been a mutually exclusive set of factors that uniquely and completely describe information privacy on context-aware applications. Second, user survey has been widely used to identify factors of information privacy in most studies despite the limitation of users' knowledge and experiences about context-aware computing technology. To date, since context-aware services have not been widely deployed on a commercial scale yet, only very few people have prior experiences with context-aware personalized services. It is difficult to build users' knowledge about context-aware technology even by increasing their understanding in various ways: scenarios, pictures, flash animation, etc. Nevertheless, conducting a survey, assuming that the participants have sufficient experience or understanding about the technologies shown in the survey, may not be absolutely valid. Moreover, some surveys are based solely on simplifying and hence unrealistic assumptions (e.g., they only consider location information as a context data). A better understanding of information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services is highly needed. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to identify a generic set of factors for elemental information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services and to develop a rank-order list of information privacy concern factors. We consider overall technology characteristics to establish a mutually exclusive set of factors. A Delphi survey, a rigorous data collection method, was deployed to obtain a reliable opinion from the experts and to produce a rank-order list. It, therefore, lends itself well to obtaining a set of universal factors of information privacy concern and its priority. An international panel of researchers and practitioners who have the expertise in privacy and context-aware system fields were involved in our research. Delphi rounds formatting will faithfully follow the procedure for the Delphi study proposed by Okoli and Pawlowski. This will involve three general rounds: (1) brainstorming for important factors; (2) narrowing down the original list to the most important ones; and (3) ranking the list of important factors. For this round only, experts were treated as individuals, not panels. Adapted from Okoli and Pawlowski, we outlined the process of administrating the study. We performed three rounds. In the first and second rounds of the Delphi questionnaire, we gathered a set of exclusive factors for information privacy concern in context-aware personalized services. The respondents were asked to provide at least five main factors for the most appropriate understanding of the information privacy concern in the first round. To do so, some of the main factors found in the literature were presented to the participants. The second round of the questionnaire discussed the main factor provided in the first round, fleshed out with relevant sub-factors. Respondents were then requested to evaluate each sub factor's suitability against the corresponding main factors to determine the final sub-factors from the candidate factors. The sub-factors were found from the literature survey. Final factors selected by over 50% of experts. In the third round, a list of factors with corresponding questions was provided, and the respondents were requested to assess the importance of each main factor and its corresponding sub factors. Finally, we calculated the mean rank of each item to make a final result. While analyzing the data, we focused on group consensus rather than individual insistence. To do so, a concordance analysis, which measures the consistency of the experts' responses over successive rounds of the Delphi, was adopted during the survey process. As a result, experts reported that context data collection and high identifiable level of identical data are the most important factor in the main factors and sub factors, respectively. Additional important sub-factors included diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionalities, and embedded and disappeared sensor devices. The average score of each factor is very useful for future context-aware personalized service development in the view of the information privacy. The final factors have the following differences comparing to those proposed in other studies. First, the concern factors differ from existing studies, which are based on privacy issues that may occur during the lifecycle of acquired user information. However, our study helped to clarify these sometimes vague issues by determining which privacy concern issues are viable based on specific technical characteristics in context-aware personalized services. Since a context-aware service differs in its technical characteristics compared to other services, we selected specific characteristics that had a higher potential to increase user's privacy concerns. Secondly, this study considered privacy issues in terms of service delivery and display that were almost overlooked in existing studies by introducing IPOS as the factor division. Lastly, in each factor, it correlated the level of importance with professionals' opinions as to what extent users have privacy concerns. The reason that it did not select the traditional method questionnaire at that time is that context-aware personalized service considered the absolute lack in understanding and experience of users with new technology. For understanding users' privacy concerns, professionals in the Delphi questionnaire process selected context data collection, tracking and recording, and sensory network as the most important factors among technological characteristics of context-aware personalized services. In the creation of a context-aware personalized services, this study demonstrates the importance and relevance of determining an optimal methodology, and which technologies and in what sequence are needed, to acquire what types of users' context information. Most studies focus on which services and systems should be provided and developed by utilizing context information on the supposition, along with the development of context-aware technology. However, the results in this study show that, in terms of users' privacy, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the activities that acquire context information. To inspect the results in the evaluation of sub factor, additional studies would be necessary for approaches on reducing users' privacy concerns toward technological characteristics such as highly identifiable level of identical data, diverse types of context data collected, tracking and recording functionality, embedded and disappearing sensor devices. The factor ranked the next highest level of importance after input is a context-aware service delivery that is related to output. The results show that delivery and display showing services to users in a context-aware personalized services toward the anywhere-anytime-any device concept have been regarded as even more important than in previous computing environment. Considering the concern factors to develop context aware personalized services will help to increase service success rate and hopefully user acceptance for those services. Our future work will be to adopt these factors for qualifying context aware service development projects such as u-city development projects in terms of service quality and hence user acceptance.
This study is to empirically examine the primary dimensions of visual merchandising (VMD) of internet shopping mall, namely store design, merchandise, and merchandising cues, to be a attractive virtual store to the shoppers. The authors reviewed the literature related to the major components of VMD from the perspective of the AIDA model, which has been mainly applied to the offline store settings. The major purposes of the study are as follows; first, tries to derive the variables related with the components of visual merchandising through reviewing the existing literatures, establish the hypotheses, and test it empirically. Second, examines the relationships between the components of VMD and the attitude toward the VMD, however, putting more emphasis on finding out the component structure of the VMD. VMD needs to be examined with the perspective that an online shopping mall is a virtual self-service or clerkless store, which could reduce the number of employees, help the shoppers search, evaluate and purchase for themselves, and to be explored in terms of the in-store persuasion processes of customers. This study reviewed the literatures related to store design, merchandise, and merchandising cues which might be relevant to the store, product, and promotion respectively. VMD is a total communication tool, and AIDA model could explain the in-store consumer behavior of online shopping. Store design has to do with triggering a consumer attention to the online mall, merchandise with a product related interest, and merchandising cues with promotions such as recommendation and links that induce the desire to pruchase. These three steps might be seen as the processes for purchase actions. The theoretical rationale for the relationship between VMD and AIDA could be found in Tyagi(2005) that the three steps of consumer-oriented merchandising are a store, a product assortment, and placement, in Omar(1999) that three types of interior display are a architectural design display, commodity display, and point-of-sales(POS) display, and in Davies and Ward(2005) that the retail store interior image is related to an atmosphere, merchandise, and in-store promotion. Lee et al(2000) suggested as the web merchandising components a merchandising cues, a shopping metaphor which is an assistant tool for search, a store design, a layout(web design), and a product assortment. The store design which includes differentiation, simplicity and navigation is supposed to be related to the attention to the virtual store. Second, the merchandise dimensions comprising product assortments, visual information and product reputation have to do with the interest in the product offerings. Finally, the merchandising cues that refer to merchandiser(MD)'s recommendation of products and providing the hyperlinks to relevant goods for the shopper is concerned with attempt to induce the desire to purchase. The questionnaire survey was carried out to collect the data about the consumers who would shop at internet shopping malls frequently. To select the subject malls, the mall ranking data announced by a mall rating agency was used to differentiate the most popular and least popular five mall each. The subjects was instructed to answer the questions after navigating the designated mall for five minutes. The 300 questionnaire was distributed to the consumers, 166 samples were used in the final analysis. The empirical testing focused on identifying and confirming the dimensionality of VMD and its subdimensions using a structural equation modeling method. The confirmatory factor analysis for the endogeneous and exogeneous variables was carried out in four parts. The second-order factor analysis was done for a store design, a merchandise, and a merchandising cues, and first-order confirmatory factor analysis for the attitude toward the VMD. The model test results shows that the chi-square value of structural equation is 144.39(d.f 49), significant at 0.01 level which means the proposed model was rejected. But, judging from the ratio of chi-square value vs. degree of freedom, the ratio was 2.94 which smaller than an acceptable level of 3.0, RMR is 0.087 which is higher than a generally acceptable level of 0.08. GFI and AGFI is turned out to be 0.90 and 0.84 respectively. Both NFI and NNFI is 0.94, and CFI 0.95. The major test results are as follows; first, the second-order factor analysis and structural equational modeling reveals that the differentiation, simplicity and ease of identifying current status of the transaction are confirmed to be subdimensions of store design and to be a significant predictors of the dependent variable. This result implies that when designing an online shopping mall, it is necessary to differentiate visually from other malls to improve the effectiveness of the communications of store design. That is, the differentiated store design raise the contrast stimulus to sensory organs to promote the memory of the store and to have a favorable attitude toward the VMD of a store. The results that navigation which means the easiness of identifying current status of shopping affects the attitude to VMD could be interpreted that the navigating processes via the hyperlinks which is characteristics of an internet shopping is a complex and cognitive process and shoppers are likely to lack the sense of overall structure of the store. Consequently, shoppers are likely to be alost amid shopping not knowing where to go. The orientation tool enhance the accessibility of information to raise the perceptive power about the store environment.(Titus & Everett 1995) Second, the primary dimension of merchandise and its subdimensions was confirmed to be unidimensional respectively, have a construct validity, and nomological validity which the VMD dimensions supposed to have a positive correlation with the dependent variable. The subdimensions of product assortment, brand fame and information provision proved to have a positive effect on the attitude toward the VMD. It could be interpreted that the more plentiful the product and brand assortment of the mall is, the more likely the shoppers to favor it. Brand fame and information provision as well affect the VMD attitude, which means that the more famous the brand, the more likely the shoppers would trust and feel familiar with the mall, and the plentifully and visually presented information could have the shopper have a favorable attitude toward the store VMD. Third, it turned out to be that merchandising cue of product recommendation and hyperlinks affect the VMD attitude. This could be interpreted that recommended products could reduce the uncertainty related with the purchase decision, and the hyperlinks to relevant products would help the shopper save the cognitive effort exerted into the information search and gathering, which could lead to a favorable attitude to the VMD. This study tried to sheds some new light on the VMD of online store by reviewing the variables mentioned to be relevant with offline VMD in the existing literatures, and tried to link the VMD components from the perspective of AIDA model. The effect size of the VMD dimensions on the attitude was in the order of the merchandise, the store design and the merchandising cues.It is said that an internet has an unlimited place for display, however, the virtual store is not unlimited since the consumer has a limited amount of cognitive ability to process the external information and internal memory. Particularly, the shoppers are likely to face some difficulties in decision making on account of too many alternative and information overloads. Therefore, the internet shopping mall manager should take into consideration the cost of information search on the part of the consumer, to establish the optimal product placements and search routes. An efficient store composition would be possible by reducing the psychological burdens and cognitive efforts exerted to information search and alternatives evaluation. The store image is in most part determined by the product category and its brand it deals in. The results of this study support this proposition that the merchandise is most important to the VMD attitude than other components, the manager is required to take a strategic approach to VMD. The internet users are getting more accustomed and more knowledgeable about the internet media and more likely to accept the internet as a shopping channel as the period of time during which they use the internet to shop become longer. The web merchandiser should be aware that the product introduction using a moving pictures and a bulletin board become more important in order to present the interactive product information visually and communicate with customers more actively, therefore leading to making the quantity and quality of product information more rich.