• Journal of Korea Technology Innovation Society
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.73-97
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• 2007

R&D into future technologies should be conducted in conjunction with technological innovation strategies that are linked to corporate survival within a framework of information and knowledge-based competitiveness. As such, future technology strategies should be ensured through open R&D organizations. The development of future technologies should not be conducted simply on the basis of future forecasts, but should take into account customer needs in advance and reflect them in the development of the future technologies or services. This research aims to select as segmentation variables the customers' attitude towards accepting future telecommunication technologies and their value orientation in their everyday life, as these factors wilt have the greatest effect on the demand for future telecommunication services and thus segment the future telecom service market. Likewise, such research seeks to segment the market from the stage of technology R&D activities and employ the results to formulate technology development strategies. Based on the customer attitude towards accepting new technologies, two groups were induced, and a hierarchical customer segmentation model was provided to conduct secondary segmentation of the two groups on the basis of their respective customer value orientation. A survey was conducted in June 2006 on 800 consumers aged 15 to 69, residing in Seoul and five other major South Korean cities, through one-on-one interviews. The samples were divided into two sub-groups according to their level of acceptance of new technology; a sub-group demonstrating a high level of technology acceptance (39.4%) and another sub-group with a comparatively lower level of technology acceptance (60.6%). These two sub-groups were further divided each into 5 smaller sub-groups (10 total smaller sub-groups) through two rounds of segmentation. The ten sub-groups were then analyzed in their detailed characteristics, including general demographic characteristics, usage patterns in existing telecom services such as mobile service, broadband internet and wireless internet and the status of ownership of a computing or information device and the desire or intention to purchase one. Through these steps, we were able to statistically prove that each of these 10 sub-groups responded to telecom services as independent markets. We found that each segmented group responds as an independent individual market. Through correspondence analysis, the target segmentation groups were positioned in such a way as to facilitate the entry of future telecommunication services into the market, as well as their diffusion and transferability.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.15-26
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• 2010

Due to the globalization across various industries and cultural trade among many countries, oriental concepts have been attracting world’s attentions. In fashion industry, one's traditional culture is often developed as fashion theme for designers' creation and became strong strategies to stand out among competitors. Because of the increase of preferences for oriental images, opportunities abound to introduce traditional fashion goods and expand culture based business to global fashion markets. However, global fashion brands that include Korean traditional culture are yet to be developed. In order to develop a global fashion brand with Korean taste, it is very important for native citizen to accept their own culture in domestic apparel market prior to expansion into foreign market. Loungewear is evaluated to be appropriate for adopting Korean traditional details into clothing since this wardrobe category embraces various purposes which will easily lead to natural adaptation and wide spread use. Also, this market is seeing an increased demand for multipurpose wardrobes and fashionable underwear (Park et al. 2009). Despite rapid growth in the loungewear market, specific studies of loungewear is rare; and among research on developing modernized-traditional clothing, fashion items and brands do not always include the loungewear category. Therefore, this study investigated the Korean loungewear market and studied consumer evaluation toward loungewear with Korean traditional fashion design elements. Relationship among antecedents of purchase intention for Korean traditional fashion design elements were analyzed and compared between lifestyle groups for consumer targeting purposes. Product quality, retail service quality, perceived value, and preference on loungewear with Korean traditional design elements were chosen as antecedents of purchase intention and a structural equation model was designed to examine their relationship as well as their influence on purchase intention. Product quality and retail service quality among marketing mixes were employed as factors affecting preference and perceived value of loungewear with Korean traditional fashion design elements. Also effects of preference and perceived value on purchase intention were examined through the same model. A total of 357 self-administered questionnaires were completed by female consumers via web survey system. A questionnaire was developed to measure samples' lifestyle, product and retail service quality as purchasing criteria, perceived value, preference and purchase intention of loungewear with Korean traditional fashion design elements. Also, loungewear purchasing and usage behavior were asked as well in order to examine Korean loungewear market status. Data was analyzed through descriptive analysis, factor analysis, cluster analysis, ANOVA and structural equation model was tested via AMOS 7.0. As for the result of Korean loungewear market status investigation, loungewear was purchased by most of the consumers in our sample. Loungewear is currently recognized as clothes that are worn at home and consumers are showing comparably low involvement toward loungewear. Most of consumers in this study purchase loungewear only two to three times a year and they spend less than US$10. A total of 12 items and four factors of loungewear consumer lifestyle were found: traditional value oriented lifestyle, brand-affected lifestyle, pursuit of leisure lifestyle, and health oriented lifestyle. Drawing on lifestyle factors, loungewear consumers were classified into two groups; Well-being and Conservative. Relationships among constructs of purchasing behavior related to loungewear with Korean traditional fashion design elements were estimated. Preference and perceived value of loungewear were affected by both product quality and retail service quality. This study proved that high qualities in product and retail service develop positive preference toward loungewear. Perceived value and preference of loungewear positively influenced purchase intention. The results indicated that high preference and perceived value of loungewear with Korean traditional fashion design elements strengthen purchase intention and proved importance of developing preference and elevate perceived value in order to make sales. In a model comparison between two lifestyle groups: Well-being and Conservative lifestyle groups, results showed that product quality and retail service quality had positive influences on both preference and perceived value in case of Well-being group. However, for Conservative group, only retail service quality had a positive effect on preference and its influence to purchase intention. Since Well-being group showed more significant influence on purchase intention, loungewear brands with Korean traditional fashion design elements may want to focus on characteristics of Well-being group. However, Conservative group's relationship between preference and purchase intention of loungewear with Korean traditional fashion design elements was stronger, so that loungewear brands with Korean traditional fashion design elements should focus on creating conservative consumers' positive preference toward loungewear. The results offered information on Korean loungewear consumers' lifestyle and provided useful information for fashion brands that are planning to enter Korean loungewear market, particularly targeting female consumers similar to the sample of the present study. This study offers strategic and marketing insight for loungewear brands and also for fashion brands that are planning to create highly value-added fashion brands with Korean traditional fashion design elements. Considering different types of lifestyle groups that are associated with loungewear or traditional fashion goods, brand managers and marketers can use the results of this paper as a reference to positioning, targeting and marketing strategy buildings.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.33-58
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• 2008

Previous research has presupposed that the evaluation of consumer who received any recovery after experiencing product failure should be better than the evaluation of consumer who did not receive any recovery. The major purposes of this article are to examine impacts of product defect failures rather than service failures, and to explore effects of recovery on postrecovery product attitudes. First, this article deals with the occurrence of severe and unsevere failure and corresponding service recovery toward tangible products rather than intangible services. Contrary to intangible services, purchase and usage are separable for tangible products. This difference makes it clear that executing an recovery strategy toward tangible products is not plausible right after consumers find out product failures. The consumers may think about backgrounds and causes for the unpleasant events during the time gap between product failure and recovery. The deliberation may dilutes positive effects of recovery efforts. The recovery strategies which are provided to consumers experiencing product failures can be classified into three types. A recovery strategy can be implemented to provide consumers with a new product replacing the old defective product, a complimentary product for free, a discount at the time of the failure incident, or a coupon that can be used on the next visit. This strategy is defined as "a rewarding effort." Meanwhile a product failure may arise in exchange for its benefit. Then the product provider can suggest a detail explanation that the defect is hard to escape since it relates highly to the specific advantage to the product. The strategy may be called as "a strengthening effort." Another possible strategy is to recover negative attitude toward own brand by giving prominence to the disadvantages of a competing brand rather than the advantages of its own brand. The strategy is reflected as "a weakening effort." This paper emphasizes that, in order to confirm its effectiveness, a recovery strategy should be compared to being nothing done in response to the product failure. So the three types of recovery efforts is discussed in comparison to the situation involving no recovery effort. The strengthening strategy is to claim high relatedness of the product failure with another advantage, and expects the two-sidedness to ease consumers' complaints. The weakening strategy is to emphasize non-aversiveness of product failure, even if consumers choose another competitive brand. The two strategies can be effective in restoring to the original state, by providing plausible motives to accept the condition of product failure or by informing consumers of non-responsibility in the failure case. However the two may be less effective strategies than the rewarding strategy, since it tries to take care of the rehabilitation needs of consumers. Especially, the relative effect between the strengthening effort and the weakening effort may differ in terms of the severity of the product failure. A consumer who realizes a highly severe failure is likely to attach importance to the property which caused the failure. This implies that the strengthening effort would be less effective under the condition of high product severity. Meanwhile, the failing property is not diagnostic information in the condition of low failure severity. Consumers would not pay attention to non-diagnostic information, and with which they are not likely to change their attitudes. This implies that the strengthening effort would be more effective under the condition of low product severity. A 2 (product failure severity: high or low) X 4 (recovery strategies: rewarding, strengthening, weakening, or doing nothing) between-subjects design was employed. The particular levels of product failure severity and the types of recovery strategies were determined after a series of expert interviews. The dependent variable was product attitude after the recovery effort was provided. Subjects were 284 consumers who had an experience of cosmetics. Subjects were first given a product failure scenario and were asked to rate the comprehensibility of the failure scenario, the probability of raising complaints against the failure, and the subjective severity of the failure. After a recovery scenario was presented, its comprehensibility and overall evaluation were measured. The subjects assigned to the condition of no recovery effort were exposed to a short news article on the cosmetic industry. Next, subjects answered filler questions: 42 items of the need for cognitive closure and 16 items of need-to-evaluate. In the succeeding page a subject's product attitude was measured on an five-item, six-point scale, and a subject's repurchase intention on an three-item, six-point scale. After demographic variables of age and sex were asked, ten items of the subject's objective knowledge was checked. The results showed that the subjects formed more favorable evaluations after receiving rewarding efforts than after receiving either strengthening or weakening efforts. This is consistent with Hoffman, Kelley, and Rotalsky (1995) in that a tangible service recovery could be more effective that intangible efforts. Strengthening and weakening efforts also were effective compared to no recovery effort. So we found that generally any recovery increased products attitudes. The results hint us that a recovery strategy such as strengthening or weakening efforts, although it does not contain a specific reward, may have an effect on consumers experiencing severe unsatisfaction and strong complaint. Meanwhile, strengthening and weakening efforts were not expected to increase product attitudes under the condition of low severity of product failure. We can conclude that only a physical recovery effort may be recognized favorably as a firm's willingness to recover its fault by consumers experiencing low involvements. Results of the present experiment are explained in terms of the attribution theory. This article has a limitation that it utilized fictitious scenarios. Future research deserves to test a realistic effect of recovery for actual consumers. Recovery involves a direct, firsthand experience of ex-users. Recovery does not apply to non-users. The experience of receiving recovery efforts can be relatively more salient and accessible for the ex-users than for non-users. A recovery effort might be more likely to improve product attitude for the ex-users than for non-users. Also the present experiment did not include consumers who did not have an experience of the products and who did not perceive the occurrence of product failure. For the non-users and the ignorant consumers, the recovery efforts might lead to decreased product attitude and purchase intention. This is because the recovery trials may give an opportunity for them to notice the product failure.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.173-198
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• 2020

For a long time, many studies have been conducted on predicting the success of campaigns for customers in academia, and prediction models applying various techniques are still being studied. Recently, as campaign channels have been expanded in various ways due to the rapid revitalization of online, various types of campaigns are being carried out by companies at a level that cannot be compared to the past. However, customers tend to perceive it as spam as the fatigue of campaigns due to duplicate exposure increases. Also, from a corporate standpoint, there is a problem that the effectiveness of the campaign itself is decreasing, such as increasing the cost of investing in the campaign, which leads to the low actual campaign success rate. Accordingly, various studies are ongoing to improve the effectiveness of the campaign in practice. This campaign system has the ultimate purpose to increase the success rate of various campaigns by collecting and analyzing various data related to customers and using them for campaigns. In particular, recent attempts to make various predictions related to the response of campaigns using machine learning have been made. It is very important to select appropriate features due to the various features of campaign data. If all of the input data are used in the process of classifying a large amount of data, it takes a lot of learning time as the classification class expands, so the minimum input data set must be extracted and used from the entire data. In addition, when a trained model is generated by using too many features, prediction accuracy may be degraded due to overfitting or correlation between features. Therefore, in order to improve accuracy, a feature selection technique that removes features close to noise should be applied, and feature selection is a necessary process in order to analyze a high-dimensional data set. Among the greedy algorithms, SFS (Sequential Forward Selection), SBS (Sequential Backward Selection), SFFS (Sequential Floating Forward Selection), etc. are widely used as traditional feature selection techniques. It is also true that if there are many risks and many features, there is a limitation in that the performance for classification prediction is poor and it takes a lot of learning time. Therefore, in this study, we propose an improved feature selection algorithm to enhance the effectiveness of the existing campaign. The purpose of this study is to improve the existing SFFS sequential method in the process of searching for feature subsets that are the basis for improving machine learning model performance using statistical characteristics of the data to be processed in the campaign system. Through this, features that have a lot of influence on performance are first derived, features that have a negative effect are removed, and then the sequential method is applied to increase the efficiency for search performance and to apply an improved algorithm to enable generalized prediction. Through this, it was confirmed that the proposed model showed better search and prediction performance than the traditional greed algorithm. Compared with the original data set, greed algorithm, genetic algorithm (GA), and recursive feature elimination (RFE), the campaign success prediction was higher. In addition, when performing campaign success prediction, the improved feature selection algorithm was found to be helpful in analyzing and interpreting the prediction results by providing the importance of the derived features. This is important features such as age, customer rating, and sales, which were previously known statistically. Unlike the previous campaign planners, features such as the combined product name, average 3-month data consumption rate, and the last 3-month wireless data usage were unexpectedly selected as important features for the campaign response, which they rarely used to select campaign targets. It was confirmed that base attributes can also be very important features depending on the type of campaign. Through this, it is possible to analyze and understand the important characteristics of each campaign type.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.219-230
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• 2010

Digital content makes big changes to our daily lives while bringing opportunities and challenges for companies. Creative firms integrate pictures, texts, videos, audios, and data by digitalization to develop new products or services and create digital experiences to promote their brands. Most articles on digital content contribute to the basic concept or development of marketing it in literature. Actually, compared with traditional value chains for common products or services, the digital content industry seems to have more potential value. Because quite a bit of digital content is free to the consumer, price is not necessarily perceived as an indicator of the quality or value of information (Rowley 2008). It becomes evident that a current theme in digital content is the issue of "value," and research on customers' perceived value of digital content is a necessity. This article argues that experiential value has an advantage in customers' evaluations of digital content. Two different but related contributions to the understanding of "value" of digital content are made here. First, based on the comparison of digital content with products and services, the article proposes two key characteristics that make experiential strategy available for digital content: intangibility and near-zero reproduction cost. On top of that, based on the discussion of the gap between company's idealized value and customer's perceived value, this article emphasizes that digital content prices and pricing of digital content is different from products and services. As a result of intangibility, prices may not reflect customer value. Moreover, the cost of digital content in the development stage may be very high while reproduction costs shrink dramatically. Moreover, because of the value gap mentioned before, the pricing polices vary for different digital contents. For example, flat price policy is generally used for movies and music (Magiera 2001; Netherby 2002), while for continuous demand, digital content such as online games and anti-virus programs involves a more complicated matter of utility and competitive price levels. Digital content companies have to explore various kinds of strategies to overcome this gap. Rethinking marketing solutions such as advertisements, images, and word-of-mouth and their effect on customers' perceived value becomes essential. China's digital content industry is becoming more and more globalized and drawing special attention from different countries and regions that have respective competitive advantages. The 2008-2009 Annual Report on the Development of China's Digital Content Industry (CCIDConsulting 2009) indicates that, with the driven power of domestic demand and governmental policy support, the country's digital content industry maintained a fast growth of some 30 percent in 2008, obviously indicating the initial stage of industry expansion. In China, anti-virus programs and other software programs which need to be updated use a quarter-based pricing policy. Customers can download a trial version for free and use it for six months or a year. If they want to use it longer, continuous payment is needed. They examine the excellence of the digital content during this trial period and decide whether to pay for continued usage. For China’s music and movie industries, as a result of initial development, experiential strategy has not been much applied, even though firms in other countries find the trial experience and explore important strategies(such as customers listening to music for several seconds for free before downloading it). For the above reasons, anti-virus program may be a representative for digital content industry in China and an exploratory study of the advantage of experiential value in customer's perceived value of digital content is done in the anti-virus market of China. In order to enhance the reliability of the survey data, this study focused on people who were experienced users of anti-virus programs. The empirical results revealed that experiential value has a positive effect on customers' perceived value of digital content. In other words, because digital content is intangible and the reproduction costs are nearly zero, customers' evaluations are based heavily on their experience. Moreover, image and word-of-mouth do not have a positive effect on perceived value, only on experiential value. That is to say, a digital content value chain is different from that of a general product or service. Experiential value has a notable advantage and mediates the effect of image and word-of-mouth on perceived value. The results of this study help provide an understanding of why free digital content downloads exist in developing countries. Customers can perceive the value of digital content only by using and experiencing it. This is also why such governments support the development of digital content. Other developing countries whose digital content business is also in the beginning stage can make use of the suggestions here. Moreover, based on the advantage of experiential strategy, companies should make more of an effort to invest in customers' experience. As a result of the characteristics and value gap of digital content, customers perceive more value in the intangible digital content only by experiencing what they really want. Moreover, because of the near-zero reproduction costs, companies can perhaps use experiential strategy to enhance customer understanding of digital content.

• Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases
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• v.66 no.3
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• pp.192-197
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• 2009

Background: Despite the benefits of home oxygen therapy in patients suffering chronic respiratory failure, previous reports in Korea revealed lower compliance to oxygen therapy and a shorter time for oxygen use than expected. However, these papers were published before oxygen therapy was covered by the national insurance system. Therefore, this study examined whether there were some changes in compliance, using time and other clinical features of home oxygen therapy after insurance coverage. Methods: This study reviewed the medical records of patients prescribed home oxygen therapy in our hospital from November 1, 2006 to September 31, 2008. The patients were interviewed either in person or by telephone to obtain information related to oxygen therapy. Results: During study period, a total 105 patients started home oxygen therapy. The mean age was 69 and 60 (57%) were male. The mean oxygen partial pressure in the arterial blood was 54.5 mmHg and oxygen saturation was 86.3%. Primary diseases that caused hypoxemia were COPD (n=64), lung cancer (n=14), Tb destroyed lung (n=12) and others. After oxygen therapy, more than 50% of patients experienced relief of their subjective dyspnea. The mean daily use of oxygen was 9.8${\pm}$7.3 hours and oxygen was not used during activity outside of their home (mean time, 5.4${\pm}$3.7 hours). Twenty four patients (36%) stopped using oxygen voluntarily 7${\pm}$4.7 months after being prescribed oxygen and showed a less severe pulmonary and right heart function. The causes of stopping were subjective symptom relief (n=11), inconvenience (n=6) and others (7). Conclusion: The prescription of home oxygen has increased since national insurance started to cover home oxygen therapy. However, the mean time for using oxygen is still shorter than expected. During activity of outside their home, patients could not use oxygen due to the absence of portable oxygen. Overall, continuous education to change the misunderstandings about oxygen therapy, more economic support from national insurance and coverage for portable oxygen are needed to extend the oxygen use time and maintain oxygen usage.