• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.1-25
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• 2010

Motion pictures are so typical experience goods that consumers tend to look for more credible information. Hence, movie audiences consider movie viewers' reviews more important than the information provided by the film distributor. Recently many portal sites allow consumers to post their reviews and opinions so that other people check the number of consumer reviews and scores before going to the theater. There are a few previous researches studying the electronic word of mouth(eWOM) effect in the movie industry. They found that the volume of eWOM influenced the revenue of the movie significantly but the valence of eWOM did not affect it much (Liu 2006). The goal of our research is also to investigate the eWOM effects in general. But our research is different from the previous studies in several aspects. First, we study the eWOM effect in Korean movie industry. In other words, we would like to check whether we can generalize the results of the previous research across countries. The similar econometric models are applied to Korean movie data that include 746,282 consumer reviews on 439 movies. Our results show that both the valence(RATING) and the volume(LNMSG) of the eWOM influence weekly movie revenues. This result is different from the previous research findings that the volume only influences the revenue. We conjectured that the difference of self construal between Asian and American culture may explain this difference (Kitayama 1991). Asians including Koreans have more interdependent self construal than American, so that they are easily affected by other people's thought and suggestion. Hence, the valence of the eWOM affects Koreans' choice of the movie. Second, we find the critical defect of the previous eWOM models and, hence, attempt to correct it. The previous eWOM model assumes that the volume of eWOM (LNMSG) is an independent variable affecting the movie revenue (LNREV). However, the revenue can influence the volume of the eWOM. We think that treating the volume of eWOM as an independent variable a priori is too restrictive. In order to remedy this problem, we employed a simultaneous equation in which the movie revenue and the volume of the eWOM can affect each other. That is, our eWOM model assumes that the revenue (LNREV) and the volume of eWOM (LNMSG) have endogenous relationship where they influence each other. The results from this simultaneous equation model showed that the movie revenue and the eWOM volume interact each other. The movie revenue influences the eWOM volume for the entire 8 weeks. The reverse effect is more complex. Both the volume and the valence of eWOM affect the revenue in the first week, but only the volume affect the revenue for the rest of the weeks. In the first week, consumers may be curious about the movie and look for various kinds of information they can trust, so that they use the both the quantity and quality of consumer reviews. But from the second week, the quality of the eWOM only affects the movie revenue, implying that the review ratings are more important than the number of reviews. Third, our results show that the ratings by professional critics (CRATING) had negative effect to the weekly movie revenue (LNREV). Professional critics often give low ratings to the blockbuster movies that do not have much cinematic quality. Experienced audiences who watch the movie for fun do not trust the professionals' ratings and, hence, tend to go for the low-rated movies by them. In summary, applied to the Korean movie ratings data and employing a simultaneous model, our results are different from the previous eWOM studies: 1) Koreans (or Asians) care about the others' evaluation quality more than quantity, 2) The volume of eWOM is not the cause but the result of the revenue, 3) Professional reviews can give the negative effect to the movie revenue.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.65-83
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• 2017

Word-of-mouth (WOM), the communication between consumers offline, has transformed to include electronic word-of-mouth(eWOM), which has grown in its influence due to the advancements in communication technology. Despite the fact that many researchers have studied the impact of WOM and eWOM on the performance of movies in the movie industry, there still exists much controversy. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship of eWOM's volume and valence with the box office revenue for 2 years in Korean movies industry. The results show that the volume of eWOM, which is expected to related to awareness diffusion, is more important than the valence in the early stage of movie release. And in the later stage, the valence of eWOM which is expected to related to persuasion effect influences the box office revenue. In addition, the relationship of the volume and valence on box office revenue in both early and later stage can be increased through the interaction with the star power which raises the familiarity or the movie genre which causes the high arousal.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.581-590
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• 2014

This study investigates the impact of tweets on box office revenue. Specifically, the study focuses on the times when tweets were written by examining the impact of pre- and post-consumption tweets on box office revenue; an examination that is based on Expectation Confirmation Theory. The study also investigates the impact of intention tweets versus subjective tweets and the impact of negative tweets on box office revenue. Targeting 120 movies released in the US between February and August 2012, this study collected tweet information on a daily basis from two weeks before the opening until the closing and box office revenue information. The results indicate that the disconfirmation that occurs in relation to the total number of pre-consumption tweets for a movie has a negative impact on box office revenue. This premise suggests that the formation of higher expectations of a movie does not always result in positive results in situations where tweets on perceived movie quality after watching spread rapidly. This study also reveals that intention tweets have stronger effects on box office revenue than subjective tweets.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.49-65
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• 2014

Word of Mouth (WOM) is a behavior used by consumers to transfer or communicate their product or service experience to other consumers. Due to the popularity of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and online communities, electronic WOM (e-WOM) has become important to the success of products or services. As a result, most enterprises pay close attention to e-WOM for their products or services. This is especially important for movies, as these are experiential products. This paper aims to identify the network factors of an online movie community that impact box office revenue using social network analysis. In addition to traditional WOM factors (volume and valence of WOM), network centrality measures of the online community are included as influential factors in box office revenue. Based on previous research results, we develop five hypotheses on the relationships between potential influential factors (WOM volume, WOM valence, degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality) and box office revenue. The first hypothesis is that the accumulated volume of WOM in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The second hypothesis is that the accumulated valence of WOM in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The third hypothesis is that the average of degree centralities of reviewers in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The fourth hypothesis is that the average of betweenness centralities of reviewers in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. The fifth hypothesis is that the average of betweenness centralities of reviewers in online product communities is positively related to the total revenue of movies. To verify our research model, we collect movie review data from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which is a representative online movie community, and movie revenue data from the Box-Office-Mojo website. The movies in this analysis include weekly top-10 movies from September 1, 2012, to September 1, 2013, with in total. We collect movie metadata such as screening periods and user ratings; and community data in IMDb including reviewer identification, review content, review times, responder identification, reply content, reply times, and reply relationships. For the same period, the revenue data from Box-Office-Mojo is collected on a weekly basis. Movie community networks are constructed based on reply relationships between reviewers. Using a social network analysis tool, NodeXL, we calculate the averages of three centralities including degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality for each movie. Correlation analysis of focal variables and the dependent variable (final revenue) shows that three centrality measures are highly correlated, prompting us to perform multiple regressions separately with each centrality measure. Consistent with previous research results, our regression analysis results show that the volume and valence of WOM are positively related to the final box office revenue of movies. Moreover, the averages of betweenness centralities from initial community networks impact the final movie revenues. However, both of the averages of degree centralities and closeness centralities do not influence final movie performance. Based on the regression results, three hypotheses, 1, 2, and 4, are accepted, and two hypotheses, 3 and 5, are rejected. This study tries to link the network structure of e-WOM on online product communities with the product's performance. Based on the analysis of a real online movie community, the results show that online community network structures can work as a predictor of movie performance. The results show that the betweenness centralities of the reviewer community are critical for the prediction of movie performance. However, degree centralities and closeness centralities do not influence movie performance. As future research topics, similar analyses are required for other product categories such as electronic goods and online content to generalize the study results.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.157-171
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• 2014

As electronic word of mouth plays an important role in purchase behavior among consumers, the number of studies on the impact of electronic word of mouth is rapidly increasing. Nevertheless, it is difficult to discover comparative studies on the mass media which had a great impact on consumer's purchase behavior before the impact of electronic word of mouth becomes greater versus the social media where electronic words of mouth are created and distributed. It is considered that it seems to be necessary to find an appropriate mutual supplement point between the media designed for a successful marketing by comparing and analyzing the existing mass media versus the social media, major media for electronic word of mouth. Therefore, this study aims to compare and analyze the impact of comments on movie revenue in the representative forms of mass media such as online news and social media blogs. In particular, this study also considers an appropriate media for promoting movies by period by comparing and analyzing the two media before and after film release. For analysis, this study collects the information on the number of comments on online news and blogs in 70 Korean movies released in 2011 and 2012 from five weeks before film release to eight weeks after film release on a daily basis via Naver. This study also collects the information on the movie revenue using the statistical data of movie industry from Korean Film Commission. As a result of empirical data analysis, it is found that the two media showed no difference in movie revenue before film release, but after film release, the impact of blogs was more significant than that of online news.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.113-134
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• 2014

Since a movie is an experience goods, purchase can be decided upon preliminary information and evaluation. There are ongoing researches on what impact online reviews might have on movie revenues. Whereas research in the past was focused on the effect of online reviews. The influence of online reviews appears to be significant in products like a movie because it is difficult to evaluate the feature prior to "consuming" the product. Since an online review is regarded to be objective, consumers find it more trustworthy. Contrary to prior research focused on movie review ratings and volume, we focus moves on movie features related specific reviews. This research proposes a predictive model for movie revenue generation. We decided 15 criteria to classify movie features collected from online reviews through the online review mining and made up feature keyword list each criterion. In addition, we performed data preprocessing and dimensional reduction for data mining through factor analysis. We suggest the movie revenue predictive model is tested using discriminant analysis. Following the discriminant analysis, we found that online review factors can be used to predict movie popularity and revenue stream. We also expect using this predictive model, marketers and strategic decision makers can allocate their resources in more parsimonious fashion.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.43-55
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• 2013

Since movies are experience goods, consumers are easily influenced by other consumers' behavior. For moviegoers, box office rank is the most credible and easily accessible information. Many studies have found that the relationship between a movie's box office rank and its revenue departs from the Pareto distribution, and this phenomenon has been named "increasing returns to information." The primary objective of the current research is to apply the empirical model proposed by De Vany and Walls (1996) to the Korean movie market in order to examine whether the same phenomenon prevails in the Korean movie market. The other purpose of the present study is to provide managers with useful implications about the release timing of a movie by finding different curvatures that depend upon seasonality. The empirical test on the Korean movie market shows similar results as prior studies conducted on the U.S., Hong Kong, and U.K. movie markets. The phenomenon of increasing returns is generated by information transmission among consumers, which makes some movies become blockbusters and others bombs. The proposed model can also be interpreted in such a way that a change in the rank has a nonlinear effect on the movie's performance. If a movie climbs up the chart, it would be rewarded more than its proportion. On the other hand, if a movie falls down in the ranks, its performance would drop rapidly. The research result also indicates that the phenomenon of increasing returns occurs differently depending on when the movies are released. Since the tendency of the increasing returns to information is stronger during the peak seasons, movie marketers should decide upon the release timing of a movie based on its competitiveness. If a movie has substantial potential to incur positive word-of-mouth, it would be more reasonable to release the movie during the peak season to enjoy increasing returns. Otherwise, a movie should be released during the low season to minimize the risk of being dropped from the chart.

• The Journal of Bigdata
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.185-194
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• 2019

In the 100-year history of Korean films, Korean films have grown to more than 100 million viewers every year since 2012, and their total sales are estimated at 1 trillion. It is assumed that the influence on the popularity of Korean movies is related to 2012, when 60% of smartphone penetration rate and 30 million subscribers exceeded. As a result, before and after 2012, changes in movie boxing factor variables were needed, and the prediction model trained as a new independent variable was applied to actual data.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.187-198
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• 2020

With the development of technology and the creation of an entertainment environment for leisure, various marketing strategies are being used in the film industry. Among them, the use of the credit cookie of ending credits was very effective in producing the series. The ending credit is the time it takes to show the names of the people who made the movie, which is meaningless to the audience. There is a cost to produce a ending credit but It wasn't made because no revenue was generated. The credit cookie was inserted into this ending credit area, which brought new pleasure to the audience. Most of them were epilogue images showing the story behind the movie, NG images showing the NG situation during film production, and In videos mentioned in the movie but not shown in the movie itself. As various ideas about credit cookie were connected with marketing, a series movie and a spin-off foretelling the derivative works after the screening work were produced and have a new meaning. As a result, the time of ending credits, which had no commercial value, became the methodology of the most powerful promotional strategy. Looking at the difference between live-action film and animation in producing such credit cookie, unlike live-action films that edit the remaining parts after shooting, the NG video of the animation has a lot of time and money to produce. So, it hasn't try very well, and it seems to have been actively produced when moving from 2D animation to 3D animation. This is because 3D animation, which has already been modeled, can create new NG scenes by simply adding animating based on the layout of the created scene. Since it is possible to produce an episode movie at a low cost and time, and to use the scenes of the movie after the production, it will be necessary to strategically produce credit cookie for promotion in animation.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.133-145
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• 2015

Motion picture industry in Korea has been growing constantly and aroused various kinds of research attention. Particularly, the introduction of official box-office database service brought quantitative studies. However, approaches based on diffusion models have been rarely found with domestic film markets. In addition to the fundamental statistical review on Korea and US film markets, we applied a diffusion model to daily box-office revenue. Unlike conventional preference of Gamma distribution on the film markets, estimation results proved that BMIC can also explain the trend of daily revenue successfully. The comparison with BMIC showed that there is a distinctive difference in diffusion patterns of Korea and US film markets. Generally, word-of-mouth effect appeared more significant in Korea.