• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.33 no.12
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• pp.1991-2001
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• 2009

This study provides basic information that is needed to build marketing strategies related to consumer brand-switching, through the investigation of consumer motivations for brand-switching, as determined by the types of fashion products. The study was implemented by a descriptive survey method using a questionnaire. The survey was conducted during the period of May $11^{th}$ through July $5^{th}$ 2008. A total of 184 completed responses were analyzed. All respondents were from the Seoul area and between the ages of 20 and 31. Factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficients, one-way ANOVA and Duncan test were employed for the analysis of data. Significant differences were found in brand-switching motives according to the types of fashion products. For clothing, shift behavior occurred more often in conjunction with the attributes of the products itself, such as design, color, price, size, and fiber content. In general, clothes more than shoes, were likely subject to brand-switching most often on the basis of situational factors. On the other hand, for shoes, more brand-switching activities occurred because of non-product attributes, such as discounts, coupons, desire for a change, and wearing of friends. In light of the results, there is a need to differentiate brand related marketing strategies with respect to clothing and shoes. For clothing, efforts focusing on the improvement of the product attributes will be more effective in minimizing brand-switching. There is also a need to improve instructions for increasing the product understanding of salespersons as well as the ability to give advice in accordance with personal consumer characteristics. With regard to shoes, greater efforts should be given to promotional activities, and the desire of consumers for a change in order to prevent brand-switching of customers.

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.5 s.67
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• pp.203-212
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• 2006

With interests and participation in the costumeplay that mimics characters appeared on carton or animation in recent days, the costumeplay becomes one of cultural phenomena. Using a qualitative research method, this study identified costumeplayers' costume consumption pattern and explored its meanings from the perspective of consumption culture. Indeed, this study intended to help for understanding costumeplayer group as a consumer, and to provide basic knowledge about new market analysis related to fashion design and marketing. The results from the analyzing participant observation and in-depth interviews data are as follows: first, costumeplayers usually begin costumeplay by friends' invitations or by themselves and then continue on participating. Through the costumeplay, participants have benefits such as fun, departure from the daily life, and social interaction. Second, participants acquire costumes through purchase, rent, producing or combination of daily wear, but both purchase and rent account high. Third, the meanings of consumption culture in costumeplay include consumption behavior repeating possession and disposal. Also, costumeplayers concerns efficiency when purchasing or renting the costumes, and internet is a place where information search, comparison, and actual purchasing are occurred. Based on the results, fashion design and marketing implication, limitation of this study and further research ideas were suggested.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.547-561
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• 2020

Purpose: This study was conducted to segment the delivery food market and to develop customized products and services. Methods: This study analyzed 636 responses collected from customers who ordered delivery food. Statistical analyses were conducted using the SPSS program (ver. 25.0) for frequency analysis, χ²-test, one-way analysis of variance, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. Results: Four factors were extracted by exploratory factor analysis (safety-orientation, convenience-orientation, taste-orientation, and economy-orientation) to explain the consumers' food-related lifestyles. The results of cluster analysis indicated that the 'low-interest group', 'convenience and economy-oriented group', and 'gourmet and economy-oriented group' should be regarded as the target segments. Characteristic analysis of each cluster showed that lowinterest group had higher rates of married (67.1%) and living with family (85.4%) than other clusters. The convenience and the economy-oriented group had higher rates of living alone (28.9%) than others. The gourmet and the economy-oriented group had a higher percentage of unmarried (62.0%) than the others. In addition, the average age of convenience and economy-oriented group (32.3 years) and gourmet and economy-oriented group (32.5 years) were significantly lower than the safety seeker (40.0 years) (p < 0.001). Difference analysis of the consumption practice according to the cluster, revealed significant differences in the order frequency (p < 0.001), main day to order (p < 0.05), source of information about delivery food (p < 0.001), order method (p < 0.001), and co-consumer (p < 0.01). In addition, the convenience and the economy-oriented group had significantly higher overall satisfaction than the others (p < 0.001). Conclusion: These findings suggest that customer segmentation based on a food-related lifestyle can be used to build a successful marketing strategy. Therefore, restaurant managers and delivery platform operators should consider developing products and services according to the segmentation to maximize customer satisfaction.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.133-144
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• 2014

As the Internet and smartphones prevail, this study investigated the purchasing factors of a new beauty marketing method, the social commerce, and verified the relationship of such purchasing factors to consumer satisfaction and repurchasing intentions. In order to verify the validity of purchasing factors, five sub-factors, such as service, price, interaction, convenience, and interest were classified, while consumer satisfaction and repurchasing intentions are grouped into one factor, using data about 20-39 years old. According to results of this study, purchasing factors in the beauty service markets through social commerce that had effects on the consumer satisfaction were price, service, convenience, and interest, but no relationship was found with interaction. We can predict that consumers buy not based on community activities among buyers or purchasing comments of others, but rather his/her own subjective thoughts and opinions about the services. As the result of repurchasing intention according to purchasing factors, affecting sub-factors were price, service, and convenience. Repurchasing intention is an positive response that reflects satisfactions. Since low price, satisfaction on the service, and convenience for busy modern people should be met, repurchasing intentions are not affected by interest, but rather systematic and professional service. Also, higher satisfaction on service raises repurchasing intention. In this study, it is clear that not only purchasing factors through social-commerce effect the satisfaction and the repurchasing intention, but also consumer satisfaction mediates partly purchasing factors and the repurchasing intention. And as sub-factors of purchasing factors, price, service, or convenience are more important to the consumer satisfaction than community or replies activities. Thus differentiated and professional customer service, the establishment and enhancement of trendy marketing should improve long term repurchasing intentions. This will lead to the increasing revenue of personal-shop and the developments of beauty markets, so strengthening product sourcing and promotion suitable for mobile shoppers are essential.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.249-269
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• 2020

Recently, as the online market has matured, it is facing many problems to prevent the growth. The most common problem is the homogenization of online products, which fails to increase the number of customers any more. Moreover, although the portion of the online market has increased significantly, it now becomes essential to expand offline for further development. In response, many online firms have recently sought to expand their businesses and marketing channels by securing offline spaces that can complement the limitations of online platforms, on top of their existing advantages of online channels. Based on their competitive advantage in terms of analyzing large volumes of customer data utilizing information technologies (e.g., big data and artificial intelligence), they are reinforcing their offline influence as well through this online for offline (O4O) business model. On the other hand, most of the existing research has primarily focused on online to offline (O2O) business model, and there is still a lack of research on O4O business models, which have been actively attempted in various industrial fields in recent years. Since a few of O4O-related studies have been conducted only in an experience marketing setting following a case study method, it is critical to conduct an empirical study on O4O selection attributes and their impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, focusing on China's representative O4O business model, 'Fresh Hema,' this study attempts to identify some key selection attributes specialized for O4O services from the customers' viewpoint and examine the impact of these attributes on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) with 300 O4O (Fresh Hema) experienced customers, reveal that, out of seven O4O selection attributes, four (mobile app quality, mobile payment, product quality, and store facilities) have an impact on customer satisfaction, which also leads to customer loyalty (reuse intention, recommendation intention, and brand attachment). This study would help managers in an O4O area well adapt to rapidly changing customer needs and provide them with some guidelines for enhancing both customer satisfaction and loyalty by allocating more resources to more significant selection attributes, rather than less significant ones.

• The Journal of Small Business Innovation
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.35-46
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• 2017

The purpose of this study is to obtain the implications for establishing a marketing strategy for retailers by analyzing whether the consumer's preference for products (food) is influenced by on-line, off-line, and omni-channel preferences. The research model consisted of the effects of consumers' food selection characteristics on business preference and omni channel preference. The results of analysis based on 477 questionnaires are summarized as follows. First, food purchasing characteristics that utilize the seven characteristics of (1) freshness of food, (2) taste, (3) quality and safety, (4) tasting, (5) food function and information, (6) country of origin, and (7) brand loyalty, has various effects on types of business preference, omni-channel preference. The adopted hypotheses were selected in order of brand loyalty (5 times), freshness (3 times), tasting (3 times), and origin (1 time). The selective attributes on foods are: (1) what kind of brand, (2) how good the freshness is, (3) tasting. (4) The country of origin is to be compressed. Actually consumers seem to utilize only the core selective factors that are appropriate to the characteristics of the distribution channel rather than all of them in the shopping of the food, and there is three characteristics on Convenience Store and only one or two factors in the other types of business. Second, in the analysis of the omni-channel preference analysis, food selection characteristics has been shown to have a limited effect, which is attributed to the fact that the consumer has not yet understood the concept of omni channel. Third, the results of this study suggest that there is a need to reflect the selection characteristics of foods that have diverse influences by business type in the marketing strategies. Because consumers make reasonable consumption to use both on-line and off-line simultaneously, consumers who use Omni Channel focus on quality and safety of food, identify products through tasting, pursue brands that can trust anywhere. Customers who pursue rationality will have a high preference for using Omni Channel. Product choice characteristic has significant effect on omni-channel preference. For a few years, omni-channel strategy of retailers meets with a difficulty. This study make a first attempt to study omni-channel preference changing retailing paradigm.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.61-101
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• 2014

This study investigates when and how disagreements in online customer ratings prompt more favorable product evaluations. Among the three metrics of volume, valence, and variance that feature in the research on online customer ratings, volume and valence have exhibited consistently positive patterns in their effects on product sales or evaluations (e.g., Dellarocas, Zhang, and Awad 2007; Liu 2006). Ratings variance, or the degree of disagreement among reviewers, however, has shown rather mixed results, with some studies reporting positive effects on product sales (e.g., Clement, Proppe, and Rott 2007) while others finding negative effects on product evaluations (e.g., Zhu and Zhang 2010). This study aims to resolve these contradictory findings by introducing preference heterogeneity as a possible moderator and causal attribution as a mediator to account for the moderating effect. The main proposition of this study is that when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high, a disagreement in ratings is attributed more to reviewers' different preferences than to unreliable product quality, which in turn prompts better quality evaluations of a product. Because disagreements mostly result from differences in reviewers' tastes or the low reliability of a product's quality (Mizerski 1982; Sen and Lerman 2007), a greater level of attribution to reviewer tastes can mitigate the negative effect of disagreement on product evaluations. Specifically, if consumers infer that reviewers' heterogeneous preferences result in subjectively different experiences and thereby highly diverse ratings, they would not disregard the overall quality of a product. However, if consumers infer that reviewers' preferences are quite homogeneous and thus the low reliability of the product quality contributes to such disagreements, they would discount the overall product quality. Therefore, consumers would respond more favorably to disagreements in ratings when preference heterogeneity is perceived as high rather than low. This study furthermore extends this prediction to the various levels of average ratings. The heuristicsystematic processing model so far indicates that the engagement in effortful systematic processing occurs only when sufficient motivation is present (Hann et al. 2007; Maheswaran and Chaiken 1991; Martin and Davies 1998). One of the key factors affecting this motivation is the aspiration level of the decision maker. Only under conditions that meet or exceed his aspiration level does he tend to engage in systematic processing (Patzelt and Shepherd 2008; Stephanous and Sage 1987). Therefore, systematic causal attribution processing regarding ratings variance is likely more activated when the average rating is high enough to meet the aspiration level than when it is too low to meet it. Considering that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity occurs through the mediation of causal attribution, this greater activation of causal attribution in high versus low average ratings would lead to more pronounced interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity in high versus low average ratings. Overall, this study proposes that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high as compared to when it is low. Two laboratory studies lend support to these predictions. Study 1 reveals that participants exposed to a high-preference heterogeneity book title (i.e., a novel) attributed disagreement in ratings more to reviewers' tastes, and thereby more favorably evaluated books with such ratings, compared to those exposed to a low-preference heterogeneity title (i.e., an English listening practice book). Study 2 then extended these findings to the various levels of average ratings and found that this greater preference for disagreement options under high preference heterogeneity is more pronounced when the average rating is high compared to when it is low. This study makes an important theoretical contribution to the online customer ratings literature by showing that preference heterogeneity serves as a key moderator of the effect of ratings variance on product evaluations and that causal attribution acts as a mediator of this moderation effect. A more comprehensive picture of the interplay among ratings variance, preference heterogeneity, and average ratings is also provided by revealing that the interaction between ratings variance and preference heterogeneity varies as a function of the average rating. In addition, this work provides some significant managerial implications for marketers in terms of how they manage word of mouth. Because a lack of consensus creates some uncertainty and anxiety over the given information, consumers experience a psychological burden regarding their choice of a product when ratings show disagreement. The results of this study offer a way to address this problem. By explicitly clarifying that there are many more differences in tastes among reviewers than expected, marketers can allow consumers to speculate that differing tastes of reviewers rather than an uncertain or poor product quality contribute to such conflicts in ratings. Thus, when fierce disagreements are observed in the WOM arena, marketers are advised to communicate to consumers that diverse, rather than uniform, tastes govern reviews and evaluations of products.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.117-139
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• 2013

Research on purchase intention had showed remarkable progress in contributing to the theory of consumer behavior. Despite the popularity of academic discussions on various issues influencing purchase intention, the mediating role of brand recall and brand attitude on purchase intention, in particular advergames, has not yet been well explored, especially in developing economies such as Malaysia. Furthermore, the influence of self-brand congruity, entertainment and brand placement acceptance as antecedents to brand recall and brand attitude are expected to add value to the brand recall, brand attitude and purchase intention relationships. This paper aims to investigate the impact of the mediating role of brand recall and brand attitude on purchase intention in advergames among Malaysian gamers. The antecedents towards brand recall and brand attitude are also examined to measure their influence on purchase intention. A total of 350 Malaysian gamers were interviewed through online survey in this study. The results showed that brand recall and brand attitude mediate the relationship between self-brand congruity, entertainment and brand placement acceptance with purchase intention. Also, entertainment and brand placement acceptance were found to have a significant relationship with brand recall. As expected, brand recall and brand attitude showed a positive relationship with consumer purchase intention in advergames. It was found that self-brand congruity has a significant influence on brand attitude and purchase intention. When users see the brand which matches with them, they tend to act positively toward the brand exposed in the game. This is consistent with Escalas and Bettman (2005) who suggested that the greater the congruity, the more positive the consumer's attitude toward the brand in question. This leads to game usage and purchase (Davis and Lang, 2013). In the advergaming context, the entertainment value in advergames is very important to determine the level of enjoyment and pleasure experienced by gamers during game-playing. Therefore, the more entertaining the ads, the more it will be remembered and the greater the positive behavior of the consumer towards the advergames - this ultimately stimulates their intention to purchase the brand. This study shows the effect of brand placement on brand recall and brand attitude and also purchase intention. Brand placements might not work in games due to the interactivity involved in game-playing as people could be distracted from noticing the brand placements (Yang et al., 2006). However, the significant influence of brand placements found in this study may provide major promise for advertisers. Game players may or may not explicitly remember the brands they see in the games, but these placements may influence their brand recall and brand attitude and could therefore influence later decisions (Yang et al., 2006). In this study, it was found that self-brand congruity was not significantly related with brand recall. The reason for this could be attributed to the fact that this study examined gamers who are highly involved in the interactive medium of games which force them to focus on game play rather than advertisements; the level of recognition to remember the brand exposed in the game is low and contributes to the "mismatch" between the gamers and the said brand. The present study contributes to the existing literature of the antecedents of brand recall and brand attitude in advergames. This study contributes to the role of brand recall and brand attitude as mediators in purchase behavior theory. Academically, the relationship between brand recall and brand attitude is well known in advergaming research, but their impact as important mediators on purchase intention add new understanding in the interactive communication literature. Their mediating role may provide new insights on how they facilitate the effects of self-brand congruity, entertainment and brand placement on purchase intention. Besides that, the studies on the influence of self-brand congruity on brand recall and brand attitude and also consumer intention to purchase had not well-investigated in advergames. This study contributes to fill those gaps in advergames literature. For practitioners, this study could suggest the use of illustrative or demonstrative placements of new products to help customers remember new brands, and the use of associative placements for existing products to increase consumers' purchase intention (Ho et al., 2011). To advertisers, this study may provide useful information to improve their current advertising strategies in games, for instance, by considering game players' congruity, entertainment value and brand placement factors.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.53-81
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• 2012

Constructing attractive bundle offers depends on more than an understanding of the distribution of consumer preferences. Consumers are also sensitive to the framing of price information in a bundle offer. In classical economic theory, consumers' utility should not change as long as the total price paid stays same. However, even when total prices are identical, consumers' preferences toward a bundle product could be different depending on the format of price presentation and the locus of price discount. A weighted additive model predicts that the impact of a price discount on the overall evaluation of the bundle will be greater when the discount is assigned to the more important product in the bundle(Yadav 1995). Meanwhile, a reference dependent model asserts that it is better to assign a price discount to a tie-in component that has a negative valuation at its current offer price than to a focal product that has a positive valuation at its current offer price(Janiszewski and Cunha 2004). This paper has expanded previous research regarding price discount presentation format, investigating the reasons for mixed results of prior research and presenting new mechanisms for price discount framing effect. Prior research has hypothesized that bundling is used to sell a tie-in component with an offer price above the consumer's reference price plus a focal product of the same offer price with reference price(e.g., Janiszewski and Cunha 2004). However, this study suggests that bundling strategy can be used for increasing product's attractiveness through the synergy between components even when offer prices of bundle components are the same with reference prices. In this context, this study employed various realistic bundle sets with same price between offer price and reference price in the experiment. Hamilton and Srivastava(2008) demonstrated that when evaluating different partitions of the same total price, consumers prefer partitions in which the price of the high-benefit component is higher. This study determined that their mechanism can be applied to price discount presentation formats. This study hypothesized that price discount framing effect depends not on the negative perception of tie-in component with offer price above reference price but rather on the consumers' perceived consumption benefit in bundle product. This research also hypothesized that preference for low-benefit discount mechanism is that perceived consumption benefit reduces price sensitivity. Furthermore, this study investigated how consumers' concern for quality in a price discount--a factor not considered in previous research--influences price discount framing. Yadav(1995)'s experiment used only one magazine bundle of relatively low quality uncertainty and could not show the influence of perceived uncertainty of quality. This study assumed that as perceived uncertainty of quality increases, the price sensitivity mechanism for assigning the discount to low-benefit will increase. Further, this research investigated the moderating effect of uncertainty of quality in price discount framing. The results of the experiment showed that when evaluating different partitions of the same total price and the same amount of discounts, the partition that discounts in the price of low benefit component is preferred to the partition that decreases the price of high benefit component. This implies that price discount framing effect depends on the perceived consumption benefit. The results also demonstrated that consumers are more price sensitive to low benefit component and less price sensitive to high benefit component. Furthermore, the results showed that the influence of price discount presentation format on the evaluation of bundle product varies with the perceived uncertainty of quality in high consumption benefit. As perceived uncertainty of quality gradually increases, the preference for discounts in the price of low consumption benefit decreases. Besides, the results demonstrate that as perceived uncertainty of quality gradually increases, the effect of price sensitivity in consumption benefit also increases. This paper integrated prior research by using a new mechanism of perceived consumption benefit and moderating effect of perceived quality uncertainty, thus providing a clearer explanation for price discount framing effect.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.49-67
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• 2015

Recently, emerging the notion of big data and social media has led us to enter data's big bang. Social networking services are widely used by people around the world, and they have become a part of major communication tools for all ages. Over the last decade, as online social networking sites become increasingly popular, companies tend to focus on advanced social media analysis for their marketing strategies. In addition to social media analysis, companies are mainly concerned about propagating of negative opinions on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as e-commerce sites. The effect of online word of mouth (WOM) such as product rating, product review, and product recommendations is very influential, and negative opinions have significant impact on product sales. This trend has increased researchers' attention to a natural language processing, such as a sentiment analysis. A sentiment analysis, also refers to as an opinion mining, is a process of identifying the polarity of subjective information and has been applied to various research and practical fields. However, there are obstacles lies when Korean language (Hangul) is used in a natural language processing because it is an agglutinative language with rich morphology pose problems. Therefore, there is a lack of Korean natural language processing resources such as a sentiment lexicon, and this has resulted in significant limitations for researchers and practitioners who are considering sentiment analysis. Our study builds a Korean sentiment lexicon with collective intelligence, and provides API (Application Programming Interface) service to open and share a sentiment lexicon data with the public (www.openhangul.com). For the pre-processing, we have created a Korean lexicon database with over 517,178 words and classified them into sentiment and non-sentiment words. In order to classify them, we first identified stop words which often quite likely to play a negative role in sentiment analysis and excluded them from our sentiment scoring. In general, sentiment words are nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs as they have sentimental expressions such as positive, neutral, and negative. On the other hands, non-sentiment words are interjection, determiner, numeral, postposition, etc. as they generally have no sentimental expressions. To build a reliable sentiment lexicon, we have adopted a concept of collective intelligence as a model for crowdsourcing. In addition, a concept of folksonomy has been implemented in the process of taxonomy to help collective intelligence. In order to make up for an inherent weakness of folksonomy, we have adopted a majority rule by building a voting system. Participants, as voters were offered three voting options to choose from positivity, negativity, and neutrality, and the voting have been conducted on one of the largest social networking sites for college students in Korea. More than 35,000 votes have been made by college students in Korea, and we keep this voting system open by maintaining the project as a perpetual study. Besides, any change in the sentiment score of words can be an important observation because it enables us to keep track of temporal changes in Korean language as a natural language. Lastly, our study offers a RESTful, JSON based API service through a web platform to make easier support for users such as researchers, companies, and developers. Finally, our study makes important contributions to both research and practice. In terms of research, our Korean sentiment lexicon plays an important role as a resource for Korean natural language processing. In terms of practice, practitioners such as managers and marketers can implement sentiment analysis effectively by using Korean sentiment lexicon we built. Moreover, our study sheds new light on the value of folksonomy by combining collective intelligence, and we also expect to give a new direction and a new start to the development of Korean natural language processing.