• Title/Summary/Keyword: Information customer value

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Feasibility of Deep Learning Algorithms for Binary Classification Problems (이진 분류문제에서의 딥러닝 알고리즘의 활용 가능성 평가)

  • Kim, Kitae;Lee, Bomi;Kim, Jong Woo
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.1
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    • pp.95-108
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    • 2017
  • Recently, AlphaGo which is Bakuk (Go) artificial intelligence program by Google DeepMind, had a huge victory against Lee Sedol. Many people thought that machines would not be able to win a man in Go games because the number of paths to make a one move is more than the number of atoms in the universe unlike chess, but the result was the opposite to what people predicted. After the match, artificial intelligence technology was focused as a core technology of the fourth industrial revolution and attracted attentions from various application domains. Especially, deep learning technique have been attracted as a core artificial intelligence technology used in the AlphaGo algorithm. The deep learning technique is already being applied to many problems. Especially, it shows good performance in image recognition field. In addition, it shows good performance in high dimensional data area such as voice, image and natural language, which was difficult to get good performance using existing machine learning techniques. However, in contrast, it is difficult to find deep leaning researches on traditional business data and structured data analysis. In this study, we tried to find out whether the deep learning techniques have been studied so far can be used not only for the recognition of high dimensional data but also for the binary classification problem of traditional business data analysis such as customer churn analysis, marketing response prediction, and default prediction. And we compare the performance of the deep learning techniques with that of traditional artificial neural network models. The experimental data in the paper is the telemarketing response data of a bank in Portugal. It has input variables such as age, occupation, loan status, and the number of previous telemarketing and has a binary target variable that records whether the customer intends to open an account or not. In this study, to evaluate the possibility of utilization of deep learning algorithms and techniques in binary classification problem, we compared the performance of various models using CNN, LSTM algorithm and dropout, which are widely used algorithms and techniques in deep learning, with that of MLP models which is a traditional artificial neural network model. However, since all the network design alternatives can not be tested due to the nature of the artificial neural network, the experiment was conducted based on restricted settings on the number of hidden layers, the number of neurons in the hidden layer, the number of output data (filters), and the application conditions of the dropout technique. The F1 Score was used to evaluate the performance of models to show how well the models work to classify the interesting class instead of the overall accuracy. The detail methods for applying each deep learning technique in the experiment is as follows. The CNN algorithm is a method that reads adjacent values from a specific value and recognizes the features, but it does not matter how close the distance of each business data field is because each field is usually independent. In this experiment, we set the filter size of the CNN algorithm as the number of fields to learn the whole characteristics of the data at once, and added a hidden layer to make decision based on the additional features. For the model having two LSTM layers, the input direction of the second layer is put in reversed position with first layer in order to reduce the influence from the position of each field. In the case of the dropout technique, we set the neurons to disappear with a probability of 0.5 for each hidden layer. The experimental results show that the predicted model with the highest F1 score was the CNN model using the dropout technique, and the next best model was the MLP model with two hidden layers using the dropout technique. In this study, we were able to get some findings as the experiment had proceeded. First, models using dropout techniques have a slightly more conservative prediction than those without dropout techniques, and it generally shows better performance in classification. Second, CNN models show better classification performance than MLP models. This is interesting because it has shown good performance in binary classification problems which it rarely have been applied to, as well as in the fields where it's effectiveness has been proven. Third, the LSTM algorithm seems to be unsuitable for binary classification problems because the training time is too long compared to the performance improvement. From these results, we can confirm that some of the deep learning algorithms can be applied to solve business binary classification problems.

Optimal Exploration-Exploitation Strategies in Reinforcement Learning for Online Banner Advertising: The Impact of Word-of-Mouth Effects (온라인 배너 광고 강화학습의 최적 탐색-활용 전략: 구전효과의 영향)

  • Bumsoo Kim;Gun Jea Yu;Joonkyum Lee
    • Journal of Service Research and Studies
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    • v.14 no.2
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    • pp.1-17
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    • 2024
  • One of the most important decisions for managers in the online banner advertising industry, is to choose the best banner alternative for exposure to customers. Since it is difficult to know the click probability of each banner alternative in advance, managers must experiment with multiple alternatives, estimate the click probability of each alternative based on customer clicks, and find the optimal alternative. In this reinforcement learning process, the main decision problem is to find the optimal balance between the level of exploitation strategy that utilizes the accumulated estimated click probability information and exploration strategy that tries new alternatives to find potentially better options. In this study we analyze the impact of word-of-mouth effects and the number of alternatives on the optimal exploration-exploitation strategies. More specifically, we focus on the word-of-mouth effect, where the click-through rate of the banner increases as customers promote the related product to those around them after clicking the exposed banner, and add it to the overall reinforcement learning process. We analyze our problem by employing the Multi-Armed Bandit model, and the analysis results show that the larger the word-of-mouth effect and the fewer the number of banner alternatives, the higher the optimal exploration level of advertising reinforcement learning. We find that as the probability of customers clicking on the banner increases due to the word-of-mouth effect, the value of the previously accumulated estimated click-through rate knowledge decreases, and therefore the value of exploring new alternatives increases. Additionally, when the number of advertising alternatives is small, a larger increase in the optimal exploration level was observed as the magnitude of the word-of-mouth effect increased. This study provides meaningful academic and managerial implications at a time when online word-of-mouth and its impact on society and business is becoming more important.

Sentiment Analysis of Movie Review Using Integrated CNN-LSTM Mode (CNN-LSTM 조합모델을 이용한 영화리뷰 감성분석)

  • Park, Ho-yeon;Kim, Kyoung-jae
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.4
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    • pp.141-154
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    • 2019
  • Rapid growth of internet technology and social media is progressing. Data mining technology has evolved to enable unstructured document representations in a variety of applications. Sentiment analysis is an important technology that can distinguish poor or high-quality content through text data of products, and it has proliferated during text mining. Sentiment analysis mainly analyzes people's opinions in text data by assigning predefined data categories as positive and negative. This has been studied in various directions in terms of accuracy from simple rule-based to dictionary-based approaches using predefined labels. In fact, sentiment analysis is one of the most active researches in natural language processing and is widely studied in text mining. When real online reviews aren't available for others, it's not only easy to openly collect information, but it also affects your business. In marketing, real-world information from customers is gathered on websites, not surveys. Depending on whether the website's posts are positive or negative, the customer response is reflected in the sales and tries to identify the information. However, many reviews on a website are not always good, and difficult to identify. The earlier studies in this research area used the reviews data of the Amazon.com shopping mal, but the research data used in the recent studies uses the data for stock market trends, blogs, news articles, weather forecasts, IMDB, and facebook etc. However, the lack of accuracy is recognized because sentiment calculations are changed according to the subject, paragraph, sentiment lexicon direction, and sentence strength. This study aims to classify the polarity analysis of sentiment analysis into positive and negative categories and increase the prediction accuracy of the polarity analysis using the pretrained IMDB review data set. First, the text classification algorithm related to sentiment analysis adopts the popular machine learning algorithms such as NB (naive bayes), SVM (support vector machines), XGboost, RF (random forests), and Gradient Boost as comparative models. Second, deep learning has demonstrated discriminative features that can extract complex features of data. Representative algorithms are CNN (convolution neural networks), RNN (recurrent neural networks), LSTM (long-short term memory). CNN can be used similarly to BoW when processing a sentence in vector format, but does not consider sequential data attributes. RNN can handle well in order because it takes into account the time information of the data, but there is a long-term dependency on memory. To solve the problem of long-term dependence, LSTM is used. For the comparison, CNN and LSTM were chosen as simple deep learning models. In addition to classical machine learning algorithms, CNN, LSTM, and the integrated models were analyzed. Although there are many parameters for the algorithms, we examined the relationship between numerical value and precision to find the optimal combination. And, we tried to figure out how the models work well for sentiment analysis and how these models work. This study proposes integrated CNN and LSTM algorithms to extract the positive and negative features of text analysis. The reasons for mixing these two algorithms are as follows. CNN can extract features for the classification automatically by applying convolution layer and massively parallel processing. LSTM is not capable of highly parallel processing. Like faucets, the LSTM has input, output, and forget gates that can be moved and controlled at a desired time. These gates have the advantage of placing memory blocks on hidden nodes. The memory block of the LSTM may not store all the data, but it can solve the CNN's long-term dependency problem. Furthermore, when LSTM is used in CNN's pooling layer, it has an end-to-end structure, so that spatial and temporal features can be designed simultaneously. In combination with CNN-LSTM, 90.33% accuracy was measured. This is slower than CNN, but faster than LSTM. The presented model was more accurate than other models. In addition, each word embedding layer can be improved when training the kernel step by step. CNN-LSTM can improve the weakness of each model, and there is an advantage of improving the learning by layer using the end-to-end structure of LSTM. Based on these reasons, this study tries to enhance the classification accuracy of movie reviews using the integrated CNN-LSTM model.

A Study on Improving Scheme and An Investigation into the Actual Condition about Components of Physical Distribution System (물류시스템 구성요인에 관한 실태분석과 개선방안에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Kyeong-Cho
    • Journal of Distribution Science
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    • v.7 no.4
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    • pp.47-56
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    • 2009
  • The purpose of this study is to present an alternative improving the efficient and reasonable of the physical distribution system management is influenced by many factors. Therefore, the study depends on the documentary method and survey method to achieve the purpose of this study. The major components of a physical distribution system are refers to as elements, include warehouse·storage system, transportation system, inventory system, physical distribution information system. The factors used in this study are ① factor of product(quality·A/S·added value of product·adaption of product·technical competitive power to other enterprises), ② factor of market(market channel·kinds of customer·physical distribution share), ③ factor of warehouse·storage(warehouse design·size·direction·storage ability·warehouse quality), ④ factor of transportation(promptness·reliability·responsibility·kinds of transportation·cooperation united transportation system·national transportation network), ⑤ factor of packaging (packaging design·material·educating program·pollution degree measure program), ⑥ factor of inventory(ordinary inventory criterion·consistence for inventories record), ⑦ factor of unloaded(unloaded machine·having machine ratio), ⑧ factor of information system (physical distribution quantity analysis·usable computer part), ⑨ factor of physical distribution cost(sales ratio to product) ⑩ factor of physical distribution system(physical distribution center etc). The implication of this study can be summarized as follows: ① In firms that have not adopted a systems integrative approach, physical distribution is a fragmented and often uncoordinated set of activities spread throughout various functions with function having its own set of priorities and measurements. ② The physical distribution is recognized as more an important strategic factor than a simple cost reduction factor, ③ It can be used a strategic competition tool to enterprise.

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A Study on the Continuous Usage Intention Factors of O2O Service (O2O 서비스의 지속사용의도에 미치는 영향요인 연구)

  • Sung Yong Jung;Jin Soo Kim
    • Information Systems Review
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    • v.20 no.4
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    • pp.1-23
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    • 2018
  • A smart phone has been widely spread around world and makes people enjoy online shopping in any time and any place. Recently it also changes the distribution environment. O2O (Online-to-Offline) service becomes new normal due to its convenience of ease shopping of product and services. O2O service market shows steady and steep growth, It is reported that, however, 80% of the businesses has been discontinued within the first year because of unstable business models, customer dissatisfaction and distrust of service. Therefore, it is very important research issue to find out influential factors promoting continuous usage intention of O2O service. Previous study shows that it only considers online characteristics and lack of analysis about offline characteristics and social impact factors. The purpose of this paper is to find out continuous usage intention factors of O2O services by literature review, case analysis, and empirical test. A comprehensive research model and related hypothesis are developed and tested by using a structural equation, Survey was carried out among users who have used O2O service including payment service for at least once. Finally 611 samples are selected out of total 813 surveys. The result shows that the model is theoretically proved and 12 out of 17 hypotheses are accepted. The contribution of this paper is that it provides a new theoretical research model about continuous usage intention factors as well as practical guidelines about promoting continuous usage and growth strategies of O2O service.

Motives for Writing After-Purchase Consumer Reviews in Online Stores and Classification of Online Store Shoppers (인터넷 점포에서의 구매후기 작성 동기 및 점포 고객 유형화)

  • Hong, Hee-Sook;Ryu, Sung-Min
    • Journal of Distribution Research
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    • v.17 no.3
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    • pp.25-57
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    • 2012
  • This study identified motives for writing apparel product reviews in online stores, and determined what motives increase the behavior of writing reviews. It also classified store customers based on the type of writing motives, and clarified the characteristics of internet purchase behavior and of a demographic profile. Data were collected from 252 females aged 20s' and 30s' who have experience of reading and writing reviews on online shopping. The five types of writing motives were altruistic information sharing, remedying of a grievance and vengeance, economic incentives, helping new product development, and the expression of satisfaction feelings. Among five motives, altruistic information sharing, economic incentives, and helping new product development stimulate writing reviews. Store customers who write reviews were classified into three groups based on their writing motive types: Other consumer advocates(29.8%), self-interested shoppers(40.5%) and shoppers with moderate motives(29.8%). There were significant differences among three groups in writing behavior (the frequency of writing reviews, writing intent of reviews, duration of writing reviews, and frequency of online shopping) and age. Based on results, managerial implications were suggested. Long Abstract : The purpose of present study is to identify the types of writing motives on online shopping, and to clarify the motives affecting the behavior of writing reviews. This study also classifies online shoppers based on the motive types, and identifies the characteristics of the classified groups in terms of writing behavior, frequency of online shopping, and demographics. Use and Gratification Theory was adopted in this study. Qualitative research (focus group interview) and quantitative research were used. Korean women(20 to 39 years old) who reported experience with purchasing clothing online, and reading and writing reviews were selected as samples(n=252). Most of the respondents were relatively young (20-34yrs., 86.1%,), single (61.1%), employed(61.1%) and residents living in big cities(50.9%). About 69.8% of respondents read and 40.5% write apparel reviews frequently or very frequently. 24.6% of the respondents indicated an "average" in their writing frequency. Based on the qualitative result of focus group interviews and previous studies on motives for online community activities, measurement items of motives for writing after-purchase reviews were developed. All items were used a five-point Likert scale with endpoints 1 (strongly disagree) and 5 (strongly agree). The degree of writing behavior was measured by items concerning experience of writing reviews, frequency of writing reviews, amount of writing reviews, and intention of writing reviews. A five-point scale(strongly disagree-strongly agree) was employed. SPSS 18.0 was used for exploratory factor analysis, K-means cluster analysis, one-way ANOVA(Scheffe test) and ${\chi}^2$-test. Confirmatory factor analysis and path model analysis were conducted by AMOS 18.0. By conducting principal components factor analysis (varimax rotation, extracting factors with eigenvalues above 1.0) on the measurement items, five factors were identified: Altruistic information sharing, remedying of a grievance and vengeance, economic incentives, helping new product development, and expression of satisfaction feelings(see Table 1). The measurement model including these final items was analyzed by confirmatory factor analysis. The measurement model had good fit indices(GFI=.918, AGFI=.884, RMR=.070, RMSEA=.054, TLI=.941) except for the probability value associated with the ${\chi}^2$ test(${\chi}^2$=189.078, df=109, p=.00). Convergent validities of all variables were confirmed using composite reliability. All SMC values were found to be lower than AVEs confirming discriminant validity. The path model's goodness-of-fit was greater than the recommended limits based on several indices(GFI=.905, AGFI=.872, RMR=.070, RMSEA=.052, TLI=.935; ${\chi}^2$=260.433, df=155, p=.00). Table 2 shows that motives of altruistic information sharing, economic incentives and helping new product development significantly increased the degree of writing product reviews of online shopping. In particular, the effect of altruistic information sharing and pursuit of economic incentives on the behavior of writing reviews were larger than the effect of helping new product development. As shown in table 3, online store shoppers were classified into three groups: Other consumer advocates (29.8%), self-interested shoppers (40.5%), and moderate shoppers (29.8%). There were significant differences among the three groups in the degree of writing reviews (experience of writing reviews, frequency of writing reviews, amount of writing reviews, intention of writing reviews, and duration of writing reviews, frequency of online shopping) and age. For five aspects of writing behavior, the group of other consumer advocates who is mainly comprised of 20s had higher scores than the other two groups. There were not any significant differences between self-interested group and moderate group regarding writing behavior and demographics.

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A Study about Development of Environment Printing Technology and $CO_2$ (환경 인쇄 기술의 발전과 인쇄물의 $CO_2$ 발생량에 관한 연구)

  • Lee, Mun-Hag
    • Journal of the Korean Graphic Arts Communication Society
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    • v.30 no.3
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    • pp.89-114
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    • 2012
  • For as to world, the concern about the environment problem is enhanced than any other time in the past because of being 21 century. And the environment problem is highlighted as the world-wide issue. The time of the environment problem intimidates the alive of the mankind and presence of an earth over the time. It becomes the essentiality not being selection in the personal living or the economical viewpoint now to prepare for the climatic modification. As to the company management, the green growth period which it excludes the environment management considering an environment, cannot carry on the company the continued management comes. That is, in the change center of the management paradigm, there is the environment management. Nearly, the greenhouse gas which the publication industry is the environmental toxic material like all industries is generated. The greenhouse gas is ejected in the process of running the manufacturing process and print shop of the various kinds material used as the raw material of the book. Particularly, the tree felling for getting the material of the paper is known to reach the direct influence on the global warming. This study does according to an object it considers and organizes the environment parameter based on this kind of fact as to the publication industry. And it is determined as the reference which is used as the basic materials preparing the case that carbon exhaust right transaction(CAP and TRADE) drawing are enforced in all industries and is sustainable the management of the publication industry and reduces the environmental risk among the company many risk management elements and plans and enforces the publication related policy that there is a value. In the printing publication industry, this study tried to inquire into elements discharging the environmental pollutant or the greenhouse gas. Additionally, in the printed publication production process, it tried to inquire into the effort for an environment-friendly and necessity at the printing paper and the printers ink, regarded as the element discharging the greenhouse gas all kinds of the printing materials, operation of the print shop and all kinds of the machines and recycle process, and etc. These considerations make these industrial field employees aware of the significance about a conservation and environmental protection. They try to give a help in the subsequent study producing quantitatively each environmental parameter emission of green house gas. This makes the calculation of the relative $CO_2$ output reproached ultimately possible. Meanwhile, in a sense, many research protects and improving an environment in connection with the contents of research at the printing publication industrial field is in progress. There will be the voluntary human face that it has to protect an environment but this can not do by the outside factor according to all kinds of environment related law and regulation. Anyway, because of acting on company management as the factor of oppression, the increase of this environment-related correspondence cost could know that the research that the environment loading relates with a procurement and development, environment management system introduction, quality control standard, including, normalizing including a material, and etc. through the part of the effort to reduce the cost low was actively in progress. As to the green growth era, as follows, this paper prescribed the subject and alternative of the print publication industry. It is surrounded by the firstly new digital environment and the generation of the subject. And secondly the printing industry is caused by the point of time when the green growth leaves by the topic which is largest in the global industry and it increases. The printing publication industry has to prepare the bridgehead for the environment-friendly green growth as the alternative for this resolution with first. The support blown in each industry becomes the obligation not being selection. Prestek in which the print publishing was exposed to spend many energies and which is known as the practice of the sustainable print publishing insisted that it mentioned importance of the green printing through the white pages in 2008 and a company had to be the green growth comprised through the environment-friendly activity. The core management for the sustainable printing publication industry presented from Presstack white pages is compacted to 4 words that it is a remove, reduce, recover, and recycle. Second, positively the digital printing(POD) system should be utilized. In the worldwide print out market, the digital printing area stops at the level of 10% or so but the change over and growth of the market of an analog-to-digital will increase rapidly in the future. As to the CEO Jeff Hayes of the Infoland, the offset print referred to that it of the traditional method got old and infirm with the minor phase of the new printing application like the customer to be wanted publication and the print of the digital method led the market. In conclusion, print publishers have to grasp well the market flow in the situation where a digitalization cannot be generalized and a support cannot avoid. And it keeps pace with the flow of the digital age and the recognition about the effort for the development and environment problem have to be raised. Particularly, the active green strategy is employed for the active green strategy.

The Relationship among Country of Origin, Brand Equity and Brand Loyalty: Comparison among USA, China and Korea (원산지효과, 상표자산 및 상표충성 간의 관계에 관한 연구: 미국, 중국, 한국의 비교분석)

  • Ko, Eun-Ju;Kim, Kyung-Hoon;Kim, Sook-Hyun;Li, Guo-Feng;Zou, Peng;Zhang, Hao
    • Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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    • v.19 no.1
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    • pp.47-58
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    • 2009
  • The marketing environment has become competitive to an extent that requires firms to target their products at markets that span national boundaries. However, competitive clout cannot be achieved in global consumer markets unless firms thoroughly understand and adequately respond to the core values and needs of those consumers. Brand equity is one of the most important assets to a company. Especially in sportswear markets, brand equity is the crucial value added to a product by its brand name. Factors such as country of origin also influence customer's attitude towards brand equity. Therefore, this paper discusses the relationship between country of origin effect and brand equity, and how they influence consumers' loyalty for respective brands. This paper focused on the sports shoes market, because it is an increasing area of opportunity for world manufacturers. The objectives of this study were the following. (1) Test the effect of country of origin on brand equity. (2) Test how brand equity influences consumers' brand loyalty. (3) Find whether there are differences in the effects of country of origin and brand equity among the three countries. (4) Find whether there are differences in the effects of country of origin and brand equity among the different lifestyles. Based on the review of literature results, the hypotheses are concluded as the following: H1-a: Country image has positive influence on country of origin. H1-b: Product perception has positive influence on country of origin. H2-a: Perceived quality has positive effect on brand equity. H2-b: Perceived price has positive effect on brand equity. H3: Country of origin has positive effect on brand equity. H4: Brand equity has a positive impact on brand loyalty. Research model was constructed (see Fig. 1). After data analysis, the following results were concluded: sports shoes purchase behavior showed significant differences among Korean, Chinese, and American consumers for favorite brand, purchased brand, purchased place, information usage, and favorite sports games. The results of this study also extend the research of the relationship among country of origin, brand equity and brand loyalty to the sports shoes market. Brand equity was proven to have a significant relationship with brand loyalty for all countries. The factors which can influence brand equity are different for different countries. The third finding of this paper is that we identified different three lifestyles, adventurer, follower, and laggard, for Korean, Chinese and American consumers. Without the nationality boundary, seeing the emergence of a new group of consumers who have similar preferences and buy similar brands is more important. All of the consumers consider brand equity to keep their brand loyalty. Perceived price is the only factor which can influence brand equity for adventurers; brand is more important for them. The laggards were not influenced by any factor. All of the factors expect perceived price are important for the followers. Marketing managers should consider brand equity when introducing their brand into a new market. Also localization is the basic strategy that all the sports shoes companies should understand. But as a global brand, understanding the same characteristics for each country is more important to build global strategy.

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A Study on Women's Casino Security Employees (여성 카지노 시큐리티 종사원에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Hyeong-seok
    • Korean Security Journal
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    • no.62
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    • pp.135-158
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    • 2020
  • In casinos, security personnel who manage the safety of customers and employees play a very important role. In particular, there is a high percentage of female employees in casinos, and because the ratio of female and male employees is similar, the probability of female customers or female employees experiencing accidents may be similar to or higher than that of males. Women's security agents who handle women's case accidents can provide female customers and employees with a security service that only women can do. However, most of the agents doing security work at casinos are male, and the proportion of women is very low. Therefore, this research is about employees who are currently working as women in casinos and conducted qualitative research to find out about various experiences they experienced while working in the casino. A total of five study participants were interviewed three times to analyze and categorize the data collected. The first question is the professor's recommendation, his personal information search and his acquaintance's recommendation. The second question, the factors behind the necessary skills at work, are various athletic skills, good physical conditions and foreign language skills. In the third question, the satisfaction factors of the task are the scarcity value of the work, the satisfaction of the pay, the suitability of the individual and the expectation of the future, and the unsatisfactory factors of the work are the risk of the work, the stress on the customer, the discrimination against the sex, the gaze around, the tiredness of the shift work. In the fourth question, factors on the need for female casino security agents are providing differentiated services to female customers, protecting female employees and providing opportunities for women in related majors. The results of this study were interviewed by an expert of more than 20 years in the casino security business, and female casino security agents said that since it is a necessary requirement, they should seek a direction for development through institutional and cognitive improvement.

A study on the improvement of distribution system by overseas agricultural investment (해외농업투자에 따른 유통체계 개선방안에 관한 연구)

  • Sun, Il-Suck;Lee, Dong-Ok
    • Journal of Distribution Science
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    • v.8 no.3
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    • pp.17-26
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    • 2010
  • Recently concerns have been raised due to the unbalanced supply of crops: the price of crops has been unstable and at one point the price went up so high that the word Agflation(agriculture+ inflation) was coined. Korea, in particular, is a small-sized country and needs to secure the stable supply of crops by investing in the produce importation at a national level. Investment in foreign produce importation is becoming more important as a measure for sufficient supply of crops, limited supply of domestic crops, weakened farming conditions worldwide, as well as recent changes in the use of crops due to the development of bio-fuels, influence of carbon emission on crops, the price increase in crops, and influx of foreign hot money. However, there are many problems with investing in foreign produce importation: lack of support from the government; lack of farming information and technology; difficulty in securing the capital; no immediate pay-off from the investment and insufficient management. Although foreign produce is originally more price-competitive than domestic produce, it loses its competiveness in the process of importation (due to high tariffs) and poor distribution system, which makes it difficult to sell in Korea. Therefore, investment in foreign produce importation is being questioned for feasibility; to make it possible, foreign produce must maintain the price-competitiveness. Especially, harvest of agricultural products depends on natural and geographical conditions of each country and those products have indigenous properties, so distribution system according to import and export of agricultural products should be treated more carefully than that of other industries. Distribution costs are differentiated into each item and include cost of sorting and wrapping, cost of wrapping materials, cost of domestic transport, cost of international transport and cost of clearing customs for import and export. So transporting and storing agricultural products generates considerable costs compared with other products. Also, due to upgrade of dietary life, needs for stability, taste and visible quality toward food including agricultural products are being raised and wrong way of storage causes decomposition of food and loss of freshness, making the storage more difficult than that in room temperature, so storage and transport in distribution of agricultural products needs specialty. In addition, because lack of specialty in distribution and circulation such as storage and wrapping does not solve limit factors in distance, the distribution and circulation has been limited to a form of import and export within short-distant region. Therefore, need for distribution out-sourcing which can satisfy specialty in managing distribution and circulation and it is needed to establish more effective distribution system. However, existing distribution system of agricultural products is exposed to various problems including problems in distribution channel, making distribution and strategy for distribution and those problems are as follows. First, in case of investment in overseas agricultural industry, stable supply of the products is difficult because areas of production are dispersed widely and influenced by outer factors due to including overseas distribution channels. Also, at the aspect of quality, standardization of products is difficult, distribution system is quite complicated and unreasonable due to long distribution channels according to international trade and financial and institutional support is not enough. Especially, there are quite a lot of ineffective factors including multi level distribution process, dramatic gap between production cost and customer's cost, lack of physical distribution facilities and difficulties in storage and transport due to lack of wrapping containers. Besides, because import and export of agricultural products has been manages under the company's own distribution according to transaction contract between manufacturers and exporting company, efficiency is low due to excessive investment in fixed costs and lack of specialty in dealing with agricultural products causes fall of value of products, showing the limit to lose price-competitiveness. Especially, because lack of specialty in distribution and circulation such as storage and wrapping does not solve limit factors in distance, the distribution and circulation has been limited to a form of import and export within short-distant region. Therefore, need for distribution out-sourcing which can satisfy specialty in managing distribution and circulation and it is needed to establish more effective distribution system. Second, among tangible and intangible services which promote the efficiency of the whole distribution, a function building distribution environment which includes distribution information, system for standard and inspection, distribution finance, system for diversification of risks, education and training, distribution administration and tax system is wanted. In general, such a function building distribution environment is difficult to be changed and supplement innovatively because its effect compared with investment does not appear immediately despite of its necessity. Especially, in case of distribution of agricultural products, as a function of collecting and distributing is performed individually through various channels, the importance of distribution information and standardization is getting more focus due to the problem of repetition of work and lack of specialty. Also, efficient management of distribution is quite difficult due to lack of professionals in distribution, so support to professional education is needed. Third, though effort to keep self-sufficiency ratio of staple food, rice is regarded as important at the government level, level of dependency on overseas of others crops is high. Therefore, plan for stable securing food resources aside from staple food is also necessary. Especially, governmental organizations of agricultural products distribution in Korea are production-centered and have unreasonable structure whose function at the aspect of distribution and consumption is quite insufficient. And development of new distribution channels which can deal with changes in distribution environment and they do not achieve actual results of strategy for distribution due to non-positive strategy for price distribution. That is, it implies the possibility that base for supply will become vulnerable because it does not mediate appropriate interests on total distribution channels such as manufacturers, wholesale dealers and vendors by emphasizing consumer protection excessively in the distribution of agricultural products. Therefore, this study examined fundamental concept and actual situation for our investment to overseas agriculture, drew necessities, considerations, problems, etc. of overseas agricultural investment and suggested improvements at the level of distribution for price competitiveness of agricultural products cultivated in overseas under five aspects; government's indirect support, distribution's modernization and distribution information function's strengthening, government's political support for distribution facility, transportation route, load and unloading works' improvement, price competitiveness' securing, professional manpower's cultivation by education and training, etc. Here are some suggestions for foreign produce importation. First, the government should conduct a survey on the current distribution channels and analyze the situation to establish a measure for long-term development plans. By providing each agricultural area with a guideline for planning appropriate production of crops, the government can help farmers be ready for importation, and prevent them from producing same crops all at the same time. Government can sign an MOU with the foreign government and promote the importation so that the development of agricultural resources can be stable and steady. Second, the government can establish a strategy for an effective distribution system by providing farmers and agriculture-related workers with the distribution information such as price, production, demand, market structure and location, feature of each crop, and etc. In order for such distribution system to become feasible, the government needs to reconstruct the current distribution system, designate a public organization for providing distribution information and set the criteria for level of produce quality, trade units, and package units. Third, the government should provide financial support and a policy to seek an efficient distribution channel for foreign produce to be delivered fresh: the government should expand distribution facilities (for selecting, packaging, storing, and processing) and transportation vehicles while modernizing old facilities. There should be another policy to improve the efficiency of unloading, and to lower the cost of distribution. Fourth, it is necessary to enact a new law covering exceptional cases for importing produce in order to maintain the price competitiveness; currently the high tariffs is keeping the imported produce from being distributed domestically. However, the new adjustment should be made carefully within the WTO regulations since it can create a problem from giving preferential tariffs. The government can also simplify the distribution channels in order to reduce the cost in the distribution process. Fifth, the government should educate distributors to raise the efficiency and to modernize the distribution system. It is necessary to develop human resources by educating people regarding the foreign agricultural environment, the produce quality, management skills, and by introducing some successful cases in advanced countries.

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