• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.22
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• pp.137-165
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• 2007

It seems high time to increase productivity by adopting e-business to overcome challenges posed by both external factors including the appreciation of Korean won, oil hikes and fierce global competition and domestic issues represented by disparities between large corporations and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), Seoul metropolitan and local cities, and export and domestic demand all of which weaken future growth engines in the Korean economy. The demands of the globalization era are for innovative changes in businessprocess and industrial structure aiming for creating new values. To this end, e-business is expected to play a core role in the sophistication of the Korean economy through new values and innovation. In order to examine business performance in e-business-adopting industries, this study analyzed the home shopping industry by closely looking into the financial ratios including the ratio of net profit to sales, the ratio of operation income to sales, the ratio of gross cost to sales cost, the ratio of gross cost to selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expense, and return of investment (ROI). This study, for best outcome, referred to corporate financial statements as a main resource to calculate financial ratios by utilizing Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System (DART) of the Financial Supervisory Service, one of the Korea's financial supervisory authorities. First of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of net profit to sales is as following. CJ Home Shopping has registered a remarkable increase in its ratio of net profit rate to sales since 2002 while its competitors find it hard to catch up with CJ's stunning performances. This is partly due to the efficient management compared to CJ's value of capital. Such significance, if the current trend continues, will make the front-runner assume the largest market share. On the other hand, GS Home Shopping, despite its best organized system and largest value of capital among others, lacks efficiency in management. Second of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of operation income to sales is as following. Both CJ Home Shopping and GS Home Shopping have, until 2004, recorded similar growth trend. However, while CJ Home Shopping's operating income continued to increase in 2005, GS Home Shopping observed its operating income declining which resulted in the increasing income gap with CJ Home Shopping. While CJ Home Shopping with the largest market share in home shopping industryis engaged in aggressive marketing, GS Home Shopping due to its stability-driven management strategies falls behind CJ again in the ratio of operation income to sales in spite of its favorable management environment including its large capital. Companies in the Group B were established in the same year of 2001. NS Home Shopping was the first in the Group B to shift its loss to profit. Woori Home Shopping has continued to post operating loss for three consecutive years and finally was sold to Lotte Group in 2007, but since then, has registered a continuing increase in net income on sales. Third of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to sales cost is as following. Since home shopping falls into sales business, its cost of sales is much lower than that of other types of business such as manufacturing industry. Since 2002 in gross costs including cost of sales, SG&A expense, and non-operating expense, cost of sales turned out to have remarkably decreased. Group B has also posted a notable decline in the same sector since 2002. Fourth of all, the result of the trend analysis on the ratio of gross cost to SG&A expense is as following. Due to its unique characteristics, the home shopping industry usually posts ahigh ratio of SG&A expense. However, more than 80% of SG&A expense means the result of lax management and at the same time, a sharp lower net income on sales than other industries. Last but not least, the result of the trend analysis on ROI is as following. As for CJ Home Shopping, the curve of ROI looks similar to that of its investment on fixed assets. As it turned out, the company's ratio of fixed assets to operating income skyrocketed in 2004 and 2005. As far as GS Home Shopping is concerned, its fixed assets are not as much as that of CJ Home Shopping. Consequently, competition in the home shopping industry, at the moment, is among CJ, GS, Hyundai, NS and Woori Home Shoppings, and all of them need to more thoroughly manage their costs. In order for the late-comers of Group B and other home shopping companies to advance further, the current lax management should be reformed particularly on their SG&A expense sector. Provided that the total sales volume in the Internet shopping sector is projected to grow over 20 trillion won by the year 2010, it is concluded that all the participants in the home shopping industry should put strategies on efficient management on costs and expenses as their top priority rather than increase revenues, if they hope to grow even further after 2007.

• The Korean Journal of Air & Space Law and Policy
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.169-197
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to present a reasonable and concrete standard for the Korean aviation insurance compulsory subscription system. Through this, we aim to improve the current revision of laws and regulations, and ultimately create an environment in which the safety and property of the Korean people who use aircraft with appropriate aviation insurance can be secured. In particular, by reviewing the aviation business law and its new laws and regulations enacted in 2017, the legislative improvement direction of aviation insurance will be proposed. In order to maintain the continuous growth of the air transportation industry and to make amicable compensation for the victims, considering the characteristics of the total accident, instantness, and giganticness of air accidents in which a lot of people and property are lost in the event of an accident, adequate insurance coverage is essential. In this respect, the compulsory insurance to amend the principle of freedom of contract, which is the great principle of the modern judicial system, will be persuasive. However, in comparison with foreign legislation, the legal provisions on Korea's obligation to comply with aviation insurance need to be revised around the following issues: First, it is reasonable to enforce the regulation of the mandatory aviation insurance by legislation from the Congress not by administrative regulations. Because it will force the monetary obligations of the individual such as common air carriers. Second, our law regulations respond to various kinds of air damages by using the phrase "limit of liability stipulated in international conventions". However, as we have seen in the text, the range of compensation are various according to the use of legal instruments in international conventions such as the Montreal Convention, which governs the compensation of passengers for damages to passengers today. Third, in countries with narrow territories, such as Korea, there are big differences in flying time and insurable risk between domestic and international transportation. Therefore, it is necessary to divide domestic transportation and international transportation even in the obligation to join the insurance. This dual discipline has the advantage for rookies in air carrier market who mainly start their business from domestic service. Fourth, according to Korean law, the regulations of automobile loss insurance is applicable to the aviation mandatory insurance of unmanned aerial vehicle accident which is lack of persuasion. In the future, it will be appropriate to discipline insurance for unmanned aerial vehicles with unlimited potential for development from a long-term perspective.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.57-77
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• 2013

Social media has become one of the most popular media in web and mobile application. In 2011, social networks and blogs are still the top destination of online users, according to a study from Nielsen Company. In their studies, nearly 4 in 5active users visit social network and blog. Social Networks and Blogs sites rule Americans' Internet time, accounting to 23 percent of time spent online. Facebook is the main social network that the U.S internet users spend time more than the other social network services such as Yahoo, Google, AOL Media Network, Twitter, Linked In and so on. In recent trend, most of the companies promote their products in the Facebook by creating the "Facebook Page" that refers to specific product. The "Like" option allows user to subscribed and received updates their interested on from the page. The film makers which produce a lot of films around the world also take part to market and promote their films by exploiting the advantages of using the "Facebook Page". In addition, a great number of streaming service providers allows users to subscribe their service to watch and enjoy movies and TV program. They can instantly watch movies and TV program over the internet to PCs, Macs and TVs. Netflix alone as the world's leading subscription service have more than 30 million streaming members in the United States, Latin America, the United Kingdom and the Nordics. As the matter of facts, a million of movies and TV program with different of genres are offered to the subscriber. In contrast, users need spend a lot time to find the right movies which are related to their interest genre. Recent years there are many researchers who have been propose a method to improve prediction the rating or preference that would give the most related items such as books, music or movies to the garget user or the group of users that have the same interest in the particular items. One of the most popular methods to build recommendation system is traditional Collaborative Filtering (CF). The method compute the similarity of the target user and other users, which then are cluster in the same interest on items according which items that users have been rated. The method then predicts other items from the same group of users to recommend to a group of users. Moreover, There are many items that need to study for suggesting to users such as books, music, movies, news, videos and so on. However, in this paper we only focus on movie as item to recommend to users. In addition, there are many challenges for CF task. Firstly, the "sparsity problem"; it occurs when user information preference is not enough. The recommendation accuracies result is lower compared to the neighbor who composed with a large amount of ratings. The second problem is "cold-start problem"; it occurs whenever new users or items are added into the system, which each has norating or a few rating. For instance, no personalized predictions can be made for a new user without any ratings on the record. In this research we propose a clustering method according to the users' genre interest extracted from social network service (SNS) and user's movies rating information system to solve the "cold-start problem." Our proposed method will clusters the target user together with the other users by combining the user genre interest and the rating information. It is important to realize a huge amount of interesting and useful user's information from Facebook Graph, we can extract information from the "Facebook Page" which "Like" by them. Moreover, we use the Internet Movie Database(IMDb) as the main dataset. The IMDbis online databases that consist of a large amount of information related to movies, TV programs and including actors. This dataset not only used to provide movie information in our Movie Rating Systems, but also as resources to provide movie genre information which extracted from the "Facebook Page". Formerly, the user must login with their Facebook account to login to the Movie Rating System, at the same time our system will collect the genre interest from the "Facebook Page". We conduct many experiments with other methods to see how our method performs and we also compare to the other methods. First, we compared our proposed method in the case of the normal recommendation to see how our system improves the recommendation result. Then we experiment method in case of cold-start problem. Our experiment show that our method is outperform than the other methods. In these two cases of our experimentation, we see that our proposed method produces better result in case both cases.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.409-437
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to present the specific ways of successful localization by analyzing the success and failures case for localization within the framework of the strategic models through a theoretical background and strategic models of localization. The strategic models of localization are divided by management aspects such as the localization of product and sourcing, the localization of human resources, the localization of marketing, the localization of R&D, harmony with a local community and delegation of authority between headquarters and local subsidiaries. The results, by comparing and analyzing the success and failures case for localization of individual companies operating in India, indicate that in terms of localization of product and sourcing, there are successful companies which procure a components locally and produce a suitable model which local consumers prefer and the failed companies which can not meet local consumers' needs. In case of localization of human resources, most companies recognize the importance of this portion and make use of superior human resource aggressively through a related education. In case of localization of marketing, It is found that the successful companies perform pre-market research & management and build a effective marketing skills & after service network and select local business partner which has a technical skills and carry out a business activities, customer support, complaint handling with their own organization. In terms of localization of R&D, the successful major companies establish and operate R&D center to promote a suitable model for local customers. In part of harmony with a local community, it shows that companies which made a successful localization understand the cultural environment and contribute to the community through CSR. In aspect of delegation of authority between headquarters and local subsidiaries, it is found that most of Korean companies are very weak for this part. there is a tendency to be determined by the head office rather than local subsidiaries. Implication of this thesis is that Korean enterprises in India should carry forward localization of products and components, foster of local human resource who recognize management and system of company and take part in voluntary market strategy decision, wholly owned subsidiary, establishment and operation of R & D center, understanding of local culture and system, corporate social responsibility, autonomy in management.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.39-69
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• 2012

With the advent of communication technologies including electronic collaborative tools and conferencing systems provided over the Internet, virtual collaboration is becoming increasingly common in organizations. Virtual collaboration refers to an environment in which the people working together are interdependent in their tasks, share responsibility for outcomes, are geographically dispersed, and rely on mediated rather than face-to face, communication to produce an outcome. Research suggests that new sets of individual skill, knowledge, and ability (SKAs) are required to perform effectively in today's virtualized workplace, which is labeled as individual virtual competence. It is also argued that use of online social networking sites may influence not only individuals' daily lives but also their capability to manage their work-related relationships in organizations, which in turn leads to better performance. The existing research regarding (1) the relationship between virtual competence and task performance and (2) the relationship between online networking and task performance has been conducted based on different theoretical perspectives so that little is known about how online social networking and virtual competence interplay to predict individuals' task performance. To fill this gap, this study raises the following research questions: (1) What is the individual virtual competence required for better adjustment to the virtual collaboration environment? (2) How does online networking via diverse social network service sites influence individuals' task performance in organizations? (3) How do the joint effects of individual virtual competence and online networking influence task performance? To address these research questions, we first draw on the prior literature and derive four dimensions of individual virtual competence that are related with an individual's self-concept, knowledge and ability. Computer self-efficacy is defined as the extent to which an individual beliefs in his or her ability to use computer technology broadly. Remotework self-efficacy is defined as the extent to which an individual beliefs in his or her ability to work and perform joint tasks with others in virtual settings. Virtual media skill is defined as the degree of confidence of individuals to function in their work role without face-to-face interactions. Virtual social skill is an individual's skill level in using technologies to communicate in virtual settings to their full potential. It should be noted that the concept of virtual social skill is different from the self-efficacy and captures an individual's cognition-based ability to build social relationships with others in virtual settings. Next, we discuss how online networking influences both individual virtual competence and task performance based on the social network theory and the social learning theory. We argue that online networking may enhance individuals' capability in expanding their social networks with low costs. We also argue that online networking may enable individuals to learn the necessary skills regarding how they use technological functions, communicate with others, and share information and make social relations using the technical functions provided by electronic media, consequently increasing individual virtual competence. To examine the relationships among online networking, virtual competence, and task performance, we developed research models (the mediation, interaction, and additive models, respectively) by integrating the social network theory and the social learning theory. Using data from 112 employees of a virtualized company, we tested the proposed research models. The results of analysis partly support the mediation model in that online social networking positively influences individuals' computer self-efficacy, virtual social skill, and virtual media skill, which are key predictors of individuals' task performance. Furthermore, the results of the analysis partly support the interaction model in that the level of remotework self-efficacy moderates the relationship between online social networking and task performance. The results paint a picture of people adjusting to virtual collaboration that constrains and enables their task performance. This study contributes to research and practice. First, we suggest a shift of research focus to the individual level when examining virtual phenomena and theorize that online social networking can enhance individual virtual competence in some aspects. Second, we replicate and advance the prior competence literature by linking each component of virtual competence and objective task performance. The results of this study provide useful insights into how human resource responsibilities assess employees' weakness and strength when they organize virtualized groups or projects. Furthermore, it provides managers with insights into the kinds of development or training programs that they can engage in with their employees to advance their ability to undertake virtual work.

• Korean Chemical Engineering Research
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• v.55 no.3
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• pp.322-331
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• 2017

District heating was first introduced in Korea in 1985. As the service life of the underground thermal piping network has increased for more than 30 years, the maintenance of the underground thermal pipe has become an important issue. A variety of complex technologies are required for periodic inspection and operation management for the maintenance of the aged thermal piping network. Especially, it is required to develop a model that can be used for decision making in order to derive optimal maintenance and replacement point from the economic viewpoint in the field. In this study, the analysis was carried out based on the repair history and accident data at the operation of the thermal pipe network of five districts in the Korea District Heating Corporation. A failure probability model was developed by introducing statistical techniques of qualitative analysis and binomial logistic regression analysis. As a result of qualitative analysis of maintenance history and accident data, the most important cause of pipeline damage was construction erosion, corrosion of pipe and bad material accounted for about 82%. In the statistical model analysis, by setting the separation point of the classification to 0.25, the accuracy of the thermal pipe breakage and non-breakage classification improved to 73.5%. In order to establish the failure probability model, the fitness of the model was verified through the Hosmer and Lemeshow test, the independent test of the independent variables, and the Chi-Square test of the model. According to the results of analysis of the risk of thermal pipe network damage, the highest probability of failure was analyzed as the thermal pipeline constructed by the F construction company in the reducer pipe of less than 250mm, which is more than 10 years on the Seoul area motorway in winter. The results of this study can be used to prioritize maintenance, preventive inspection, and replacement of thermal piping systems. In addition, it will be possible to reduce the frequency of thermal pipeline damage and to use it more aggressively to manage thermal piping network by establishing and coping with accident prevention plan in advance such as inspection and maintenance.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.99 no.3
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• pp.380-390
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• 2010

This research was conducted to investigate the consciousness of demander on National Forest Management System and to seek for solution to activate it by measuring the variables such as the extent of goal achievement on the system, the extent of importance on function of national forest, benefit for participation of the system, and the extent of importance on the system as well as the extent of demander recognition and intention of participation on the system like, Cooperative Forest Program and People's Forest Program. The target of this investigation is to categorize consumers of National Forest Management System (NFMS) into four types such as environmental organization that do not participate in the system, environmental organization that participate in the team, company to publish a white paper on environmental and local government. As a result, the intention of participation was showed in C Type (62.7%), among fields that respondents interested in participation were tree planting and forest tending (56.2%). However, the rest of the participants were reluctant participate in the NFMS due to more benefit (72.2%) of corporate social responsibility from other fields than those from the field utilizing forestry. If only, diverse facilities related to national forest and active supporting policy are provided by Korea Forest Service, social participation using forest resources would be considered. Although 61% among A Type recognized NFMS in advance, the prime reason for not utilizing are the problems with reserving place for participates in and the inconvenience to participate in on-site. Type D shows slightly high interest in People's Forest Program (3.69). Also, it shows high interest in Forest Recreation (4.15) and Forest Reports (3.90). Particularly, it indicates that GyeongGi-Do and GangWon-Do local government prefers Forest Experience, and Cheolla, ChungCheong and GyeongSang local government prefer Forest Reports. Based on the above study, we finally suggest that legal alignment of the system, and the provision of incentive for inducement of voluntary participation by Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and establishment of new exclusive nongovernmental organization be able to operate the system as the solution to activate NFMS in terms of the consumer.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.8
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• pp.150-162
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• 2021

Companies have recently become increasingly interested in corporate entrepreneurship to establish a core employment policy in order to secure and maintain core employees and to foster an innovation-oriented organizational culture. Therefore, The purpose of this study is to empirically analyze the causal relationship between core employment policies and the team leader's the perceived internal process organizational competency and job satisfaction, and to investigate whether corporate entrepreneurship has a moderation effect. Non-financial service industries including ICT companies were subject of the study and human capital corporate panel(HCCP) was utilized. The samples were 367 team leaders from 79 domestic companies. This study also applied Multi-Level Analysis(HLM), which simultaneously analyzes variables at both the individual level and the organizational level in order to improve the accuracy of the study. According to the result of the study analysis, core employment policies have a positive(+) impact on the perceived internal process organizational competency and job satisfaction. In addition, the moderation effect of corporate entrepreneurship was verified during the process when core employment policies influence the two outcome variables. corporate entrepreneurship was found to have a moderation effect that strengthens the influence on job satisfaction, but the moderation effect on the perceived internal process organizational competency was not statistically significant. These results confirm that organizational cultural factors such as corporate entrepreneurship are important influence variables in the process of influencing individual-level variables such as core employment policies. Academically, It suggests that in order to enhance the effectiveness of company strategies in respect of human resource management such as core employment policies, it is important to foster a cultural environment that suits the industry and characteristics of the organization. In addition, it suggested that companies in need of new innovation need to utilize corporate entrepreneurship.

• Korean small business review
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.73-88
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• 2009

This study examines the characteristics of 24 Korean hidden champions such as key success factors, core competences, strategic problems, and desirable future directions. The study categorized them into 8 types with Danny Miller's four trajectories and top manager's decision making style(rationality and passion). Danny Miller argued in his book, Icarus paradox, that outstanding firms will extend their orientations until they reach dangerous extremes and their momentum will result in common trajectories of decline. He suggested four very common success types: Craftsmen, Builders, Pioneers, Salesmen. He also suggested common trajectories of decline:Focusing(from Craftsmen to Tinkers), Venturing(from Builders to Imperialists), Inventing(from Pioneers to Escapists), Decoupling(from Salesmen to Drifts). In Korea, successful startups appear to possess three kinds of drive: Technology-drive, Vision-drive, Market-drive. Successful technology-driven firms tend to grow as craftsmen or pioneers. Successful vision-driven and market-driven ones tend to grow as builders and salesmen respectively. Korean top managers or founders seem to have two kinds of decision making style: Passion-based and Rationality-bases. Passion-based(passionate) entrepreneurs are biased towards action or proactiveness in competing and getting things done. Rationality- based ones tend to emphasis the effort devoted to scanning and analysing information to better understand a company's threats, opportunities and options. Consequently this study suggested 4*2 types of Korean hidden champions: (1) passionate craftsmen, (2) rational craftsmen, (3) passionate builders, (4) rational builders, (5) passionate pioneers, (6) rational pioneers, (7) passionate salesmen, (8) rational salesmen. These 8 type firms showed different success stories and appeared to possess different trajectories of decline. These hidden champions have acquired competitive advantage within domestic or globally niche markets in spite of the weak market power and lack of internal resources. They have maintained their sustainable competitiveness by utilizing three types of growth strategy; (1) penetrating into the global market, (2) exploring new service market, (3) occupying the domestic market. According to the types of growth strategy, these firms showed different financial outcomes and possessed different issues for maintaining their competitiveness. This study found that Korean hidden champions were facing serious challenges from the transforming economic structure these days and possessed the decline potential from their success momentum or self-complacence. It argues that they need to take a new growth engine not to decline in the turbulent environment. It also discusses how firms overcome the economic crisis and find a new business area in promising industries for the future. It summarized the recent policy of Korean government called as "Green Growth" and discussed how small firms utilize such benefits and supports from the government. Other implications for firm strategies and governmental policies were discussed.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.157-194
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• 2008

The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers. The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability. In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it. In this study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels; characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things. And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to-consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of products such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and make some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher than at other community sites. It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities. Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences: consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users. As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that shows close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consumers do not want to spend money to buy content and etc. In this sense, marketers of community websites must know consumers' affect toward online community site is not a last goal and important factor to influnece consumers' purchase. Third, building good content environment can be a really important marketing tool to create a competitive advantage in cyberspace. For example, Cyworld, Korea's number one community site shows distinctive superiority in the consumer evaluations of content characteristics such as content superiority, site vividness, and customerization. Particularly, comsumer evaluation about customerization was remarkably higher than the other sites. In this point, we can conclude that providing comsumers with good, unique and highly customized content will be urgent and important task directly and indirectly impacting to self congruency, consumer experience, c-to-c interactivity, and various loyalty factors of online community. By creating enjoyable, useful, and unique online community environments, online community portals such as Daum, Naver, and Cyworld are able to build customer loyalty to a degree that many of today's online marketer can only dream of these loyalty, in turn, generates strong economic returns. Another way to build good online community site is to provide consumers with an interactive, fun, experience-oriented or experiential Web site. Elements that can make a dot.com's Web site experiential include graphics, 3-D images, animation, video and audio capabilities. In addition, chat rooms and real-time customer service applications (which link site visitors directly to other visitors, or with company support personnel, respectively) are also being used to make web sites more interactive. Researchers note that online communities are increasingly incorporating such applications in their Web sites, in order to make consumers' online shopping experience more similar to that of an offline store. That is, if consumers are able to experience sensory stimulation (e.g. via 3-D images and audio sound), interact with other consumers (e.g., via chat rooms), and interact with sales or support people (e.g. via a real-time chat interface or e-mail), then they are likely to have a more positive dot.com experience, and develop a more positive image toward the online company itself). Analysts caution, however, that, while high quality graphics, animation and the like may create a fun experience for consumers, when heavily used, they can slow site navigation, resulting in frustrated consumers, who may never return to a site. Consequently, some analysts suggest that, at least with current technology, the rule-of-thumb is that less is more. That is, while graphics etc. can draw consumers to a site, they should be kept to a minimum, so as not to impact negatively on consumers' overall site experience.