• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.25-53
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• 2011

This study probes the effect of loyalty program on the customer retention based on the real transaction data(n=2,892) acquired from education service industry. We try to figure out the outcomes of reward program through more than 1 year-long data gathered and analyzed according to quasi-experimental design(i.e., before and after design). We adopt this kinds of research scheme in regard that previous studies measured the effect of loyalty program by dividing the customers into two group(i.e., members vs. non-members) after the firms or stores had started the program. We believe that it might not avoid the self-selection bias. The research questions of this study could be explained such as: First, most research said that the loyalty programs could increase the customer loyalty and contribute to the sustainable growth of company. But there are little confirmation that this promotional tool could be justified in terms of financial perspective. Thus, we are interested in both the retention rate and financial outcomes caused by the introduction of loyalty programs. Second, reward programs target mainly current customer. Especially CRM(customer relationship management) said that it is more profitable for company to build positive relationship with current customer instead of pursuing new customer. And it claims that reward program is excellent means to achieve this goal. For this purpose, we check in this study whether there is a interaction effect between loyalty program and customer type in retaining customer. Third, it is said that dis-satisfied customers are more likely to leave the company than satisfied customers. While, Bolton, Kannan and Bramlett(2000) claimed that reward program could contribute to minimize the effect of negative service by building emotional link with customer, it is not empirically confirmed. This point of view explained that the loyalty programs might work as exit barrier to current customer. Thus, this study tries to identify whether there is a interaction effect between loyalty program and service experience in keeping customer. To achieve this purpose, this study adopt both Kaplan-Meier survival analysis and Cox proportional hazard model. The research outcomes show that the average retention period is 179 days before introducing loyalty program but it is increased to 227 days after reward is given to the customers. Since this difference is statistically significant, it could be said that H1 is supported. In addition, the contribution margin coming from increased transaction period is bigger than the cost for administering loyalty programs. To address other research questions, we probe the interaction effect between loyalty program and other factors(i.e., customer type and service experience) affecting it. The analysis of Cox proportional hazard model said that the current customer is more likely to engage in building relationship with company compared to new customer. In addition, retention rate of satisfied customer is significantly increased in relation to dis-satisfied customer. Interestingly, the transaction period of dis-satisfied customer is notably increased after introducing loyalty programs. Thus, it could be said that H2, H3, and H4 are also supported. In summary, we found that the loyalty programs have values as a promotional tool in forming positive relationship with customer and building exit barrier.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.209-233
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• 2016

Internet companies that utilize social network have increased in number. The introduction of diverse social media services facilitated innovative changes in e-business. Social network service (SNS), which is a domain of social media, is a web-based service designed to strengthen human relations in the Internet and build new social relations. The remarkable growth of social network services and the profit generation and perception of this service are the new growth engines of this digital age. Given this development, many global IT companies views SNS as the most powerful form of social media. Thus, they invest efforts to develop business models using SNS.2) This study verifies the impact of privacy exposure in SNS as a result of privacy invasion. This study examines the purpose of using the SNS and user's awareness of the significance of personal information, which are key factors that affect self-disclosure of personal information. This study utilizes theory of reasoned action (TRA) to provide a theoretical platform that describes the specific behavior and emotional response of individuals. This study presents a research model that considers negative attitude (negatude). In this model, self-disclosure in SNS is considered a TRA. TRA is a subjective norm, a behavioral intention, and a key variable of exposure behavior. A survey was conducted on college students at Y university in Seoul to empirically verify the research model. The students have experiences in using SNS. A total of 198 samples were collected. Path analysis was applied to analyze the relations of factors. The results of path analysis show the statistically insignificant impact of privacy invasion on negatude, subjective norm, behavioral intention, and exposure behavior. The impact of unrecognized privacy invasion was also considered insignificant. The impacts of intention to use SNS on negatude, subjective norm, behavioral intention, and exposure behavior was significant. A significant impact was also found for the significance of personal information on subjective norm, behavioral intention, and exposure behavior, whereas the impact on negatude was insignificant. The impact of subjective norm on behavioral intention was significant. Lastly, the impact of behavioral intention on exposure behavior was insignificant. These findings are significant because the study examined the process of self-disclosure by integrating psychological and social factors based on theoretical discussion.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.247-269
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• 2007

In recent years, one of the major reasons for the fierce competition amongst firms is that they strive to increase their own market shares and customer acquisition rate in the same market with similar and apparently undifferentiated products in terms of quality and perceived benefit. Because of this change in recent marketing environment, the differentiated after-sales service and diversified promotion strategies have become more important to gain competitive advantage. Price promotion is the favorite strategy that most retailers use to achieve short-term sales increase, induce consumer's brand switch, in troduce new product into market, and so forth. However, if marketers apply or copy an identical price promotion strategy without considering the characteristic differences in product and consumer preference, it will cause serious problems because discounted price itself could make people skeptical about product quality, and the changes of perceived value might appear differently depending on other factors such as consumer involvement or brand attitude. Previous studies showed that price promotion would certainly increase sales, and the discounted price compared to regular price would enhance the consumer's perceived values. On the other hand, discounted price itself could make people depreciate or skeptical about product quality, and reduce the consumers' positivity bias because consumers might be unsure whether the current price promotion is the retailer's best price offer. Moreover, we cannot say that discounted price absolutely enhances the consumer's perceived values regardless of product category and purchase situations. That is, the factors that affect consumers' value perceptions and buying behavior are so diverse in reality that the results of studies on the same dependent variable come out differently depending on what variable was used or how experiment conditions were designed. Majority of previous researches on the effect of price-comparison advertising have used consumers' buying behavior as dependent variable. In order to figure out consumers' buying behavior theoretically, analysis of value perceptions which influence buying intentions is needed. In addition, they did not combined the independent variables such as brand loyalty and price discount rate together. For this reason, this paper tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception. And we provided with theoretical and managerial implications that marketers need to consider such variables as product attributes, brand loyalty, and consumer involvement at the same time, and then establish a differentiated pricing strategy case by case in order to enhance consumer's perceived values properl. Three research concepts were used in our study and each concept based on past researches was defined. The perceived acquisition value in this study was defined as the perceived net gains associated with the products or services acquired. That is, the perceived acquisition value of the product will be positively influenced by the benefits buyers believe they are getting by acquiring and using the product, and negatively influenced by the money given up to acquire the product. And the perceived transaction value was defined as the perception of psychological satisfaction or pleasure obtained from taking advantage of the financial terms of the price deal. Lastly, the brand loyalty was defined as favorable attitude towards a purchased product. Thus, a consumer loyal to a brand has an emotional attachment to the brand or firm. Repeat purchasers continue to buy the same brand even though they do not have an emotional attachment to it. We assumed that if the degree of brand loyalty is high, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value will increase when higher discount rate is provided. But we found that there are no significant differences in values between two different discount rates as a result of empirical analysis. It means that price reduction did not affect consumer's brand choice significantly because the perceived sacrifice decreased only a little, and customers are satisfied with product's benefits when brand loyalty is high. From the result, we confirmed that consumers with high degree of brand loyalty to a specific product are less sensitive to price change. Thus, using price promotion strategy to merely expect sale increase is not recommendable. Instead of discounting price, marketers need to strengthen consumers' brand loyalty and maintain the skimming strategy. On the contrary, when the degree of brand loyalty is low, the perceived acquisition value and the perceived transaction value decreased significantly when higher discount rate is provided. Generally brands that are considered inferior might be able to draw attention away from the quality of the product by making consumers focus more on the sacrifice component of price. But considering the fact that consumers with low degree of brand loyalty are known to be unsatisfied with product's benefits and have relatively negative brand attitude, bigger price reduction offered in experiment condition of this paper made consumers depreciate product's quality and benefit more and more, and consumer's psychological perceived sacrifice increased while perceived values decreased accordingly. We infer that, in the case of inferior brand, a drastic price-cut or frequent price promotion may increase consumers' uncertainty about overall components of product. Therefore, it appears that reinforcing the augmented product such as after-sale service, delivery and giving credit which is one of the levels consisting of product would be more effective in reality. This will be better rather than competing with product that holds high brand loyalty by reducing sale price. Although this study tried to examine the moderating effect of brand loyalty on relationship between the different levels of discounting rate and buyers' value perception, there are several limitations. This study was conducted in controlled conditions where the high involvement product and two different levels of discount rate were applied. Given the presence of low involvement product, when both pieces of information are available, it is likely that the results we have reported here may have been different. Thus, this research results explain only the specific situation. Second, the sample selected in this study was university students in their twenties, so we cannot say that the results are firmly effective to all generations. Future research that manipulates the level of discount along with the consumer involvement might lead to a more robust understanding of the effects various discount rate. And, we used a cellular phone as a product stimulus, so it would be very interesting to analyze the result when the product stimulus is an intangible product such as service. It could be also valuable to analyze whether the change of perceived value affects consumers' final buying behavior positively or negatively.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.1-25
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• 2020

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) task that analyzes the sentiments consumers or the public feel about an arbitrary object from written texts. Furthermore, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained analysis of the sentiments towards each aspect of an object. Since having a more practical value in terms of business, ABSA is drawing attention from both academic and industrial organizations. When there is a review that says "The restaurant is expensive but the food is really fantastic", for example, the general SA evaluates the overall sentiment towards the 'restaurant' as 'positive', while ABSA identifies the restaurant's aspect 'price' as 'negative' and 'food' aspect as 'positive'. Thus, ABSA enables a more specific and effective marketing strategy. In order to perform ABSA, it is necessary to identify what are the aspect terms or aspect categories included in the text, and judge the sentiments towards them. Accordingly, there exist four main areas in ABSA; aspect term extraction, aspect category detection, Aspect Term Sentiment Classification (ATSC), and Aspect Category Sentiment Classification (ACSC). It is usually conducted by extracting aspect terms and then performing ATSC to analyze sentiments for the given aspect terms, or by extracting aspect categories and then performing ACSC to analyze sentiments for the given aspect category. Here, an aspect category is expressed in one or more aspect terms, or indirectly inferred by other words. In the preceding example sentence, 'price' and 'food' are both aspect categories, and the aspect category 'food' is expressed by the aspect term 'food' included in the review. If the review sentence includes 'pasta', 'steak', or 'grilled chicken special', these can all be aspect terms for the aspect category 'food'. As such, an aspect category referred to by one or more specific aspect terms is called an explicit aspect. On the other hand, the aspect category like 'price', which does not have any specific aspect terms but can be indirectly guessed with an emotional word 'expensive,' is called an implicit aspect. So far, the 'aspect category' has been used to avoid confusion about 'aspect term'. From now on, we will consider 'aspect category' and 'aspect' as the same concept and use the word 'aspect' more for convenience. And one thing to note is that ATSC analyzes the sentiment towards given aspect terms, so it deals only with explicit aspects, and ACSC treats not only explicit aspects but also implicit aspects. This study seeks to find answers to the following issues ignored in the previous studies when applying the BERT pre-trained language model to ACSC and derives superior ACSC models. First, is it more effective to reflect the output vector of tokens for aspect categories than to use only the final output vector of [CLS] token as a classification vector? Second, is there any performance difference between QA (Question Answering) and NLI (Natural Language Inference) types in the sentence-pair configuration of input data? Third, is there any performance difference according to the order of sentence including aspect category in the QA or NLI type sentence-pair configuration of input data? To achieve these research objectives, we implemented 12 ACSC models and conducted experiments on 4 English benchmark datasets. As a result, ACSC models that provide performance beyond the existing studies without expanding the training dataset were derived. In addition, it was found that it is more effective to reflect the output vector of the aspect category token than to use only the output vector for the [CLS] token as a classification vector. It was also found that QA type input generally provides better performance than NLI, and the order of the sentence with the aspect category in QA type is irrelevant with performance. There may be some differences depending on the characteristics of the dataset, but when using NLI type sentence-pair input, placing the sentence containing the aspect category second seems to provide better performance. The new methodology for designing the ACSC model used in this study could be similarly applied to other studies such as ATSC.

• Sim-seong Yeon-gu
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.1-49
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• 2013

This article started with 'encounter'. Both authors met around the middle of February and discussed the subject for the inhospital conference presentation scheduled at the break of June. Having conversation like "Movies similar to fairytales heard from childhood are standing out conspicuously among commercial films which are attracting audiences and receiving fervent response these days. This phenomenon is marvelous and mysterious." together, and sharing this and that, the conversation turned naturally to 'Bram Stoker's Dracula', 'Series of Twilight', and 'Warm Bodies', both authors found out the fact that we saw these movies in common with propound impression. Feeling our hearts beating high, bit of fear and hesitation followed simultaneously at the moment when both of us encountered the idea to choose subject of conference presentation related to this and expressed one in words. While preparing for the conference, presenting to others, and having discussion with the audience, our hearts have been filled with Presentation was finished after active discussion beyond fixed hour and it also brought audience (among those present) to show strong emotional response both positively and negatively. At first, we just had a thought to put aside the content of presentation, but we felt lack of something else, lingering in our minds. We finally decided to accomplish our work into an article leading to submission, based on the advice and recommendation from one of the audience. This article is a small 'creative writing' born by sharing both authors' passion and enthusiasm. In the first part of this article, we have introduced the dream of 31-year-old woman's which led to the 'creative writing' and spotlighted her personal life, before and after the dream. In the second part, we have examined the consequence (way of realization) and meaning of creative impulse shown from or experienced from personal unconsciousness (dream, fantasy) together. Creative impulse shown from the individual appeared to bring creative transformation of individual personality through the process of 'introversion'. Otherwise it also appeared to be delivered as a masterpiece through 'creative writing' or from the process of 'extroversion'. Sometimes both consequences happened at once. We tried to examine and interpret the dream of 31-year-old woman's, which was introduced in the first part of this article, that is to say, the dream of 'Stephenie Meyer's, the author of the 'love between vampire boy and ordinary human girl' themed novel 'Twilight Series', in a psychoanalytic perspective. In the third part, highlighting individual dreams and three different movies 'Bram Stoker's Dracula', 'Twilight Series', and 'Warm Bodies', we found the transformation of symbol 'Man of Darkness, vampire' seen in each individual dreams and in some specific popular arts, such as novels and movies, receiving fervent response from people. We also found love between this symbol and humane woman, bearing fruit together with very impressive change shown in the attitude of 'Man of Darkness' (vampire)'s conscious ego and mutual relationship pattern. We contemplated this phenomenon, the reason why these events happen, and what kind of association presents among these events, individual, and this era and discussed the effects on individuals and this era, at present. 'Creative impulse', originated in the deep structure of human mind is realized as a 'transformation of individual personality' or masterpiece through artistic creation. If it has a chance to make a match with this era, shared by a lot of contemporary people, it also appears to bring positive effect as healing and salvation to each individual or to each era. From this article, we mainly highlighted positive and healing aspects of individual 'creative impulse'. We hope to deal with the negative consequences and their reason coming from 'creative impulse', if the occasion arises, in the future with a new article.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.49-71
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• 2010

Franchise businesses in South Korea have contributed to economic growth and job creation, and its growth potential remains very high. However, despite such virtues, domestic franchise businesses face many problems such as the instability of franchisor's business structure and weak financial conditions. To solve these problems, the government enacted legislation and strengthened franchise related laws. However, the strengthening of laws regulating franchisors had many side effects that interrupted the development of the franchise business. For example, legal regulations regarding franchisors have had the effect of suppressing the franchisor's leadership activities (e.g. activities such as the ability to advocate the franchisor's policies and strategies to the franchisees, in order to facilitate change and innovation). One of the main goals of the franchise business is to build cooperation between the franchisor and the franchisee for their combined success. However, franchisees can refuse to follow the franchisor's strategies because of the current state of franchise-related law and government policy. The purpose of this study to explore the effects of franchisor's leadership style on franchisee's commitment in a franchise system. We classified leadership styles according to the path-goal theory (House & Mitchell, 1974), and it was hypothesized and tested that the four leadership styles proposed by the path-goal theory (i.e. directive, supportive, participative and achievement-oriented leadership) have different effects on franchisee's commitment. Another purpose of this study to explore the how the level of franchisee's self-efficacy influences both the franchisor's leadership style and franchisee's commitment in a franchise system. Results of the present study are expected to provide important theoretical and practical implications as to the role of franchisor's leadership style, as restricted by government regulations and the franchisee's self-efficacy, which could be needed to improve the quality of the long-term relationship between the franchisor and franchisee. Quoted by Northouse(2007), one problem regarding the investigation of leadership is that there are almost as many different definitions of leadership as there are people who have tried to define it. But despite the multitude of ways in which leadership has been conceptualized, the following components can be identified as central to the phenomenon: (a) leadership is a process, (b) leadership involves influence, (c) leadership occurs in a group context, and (d) leadership involves goal attainment. Based on these components, in this study leadership is defined as a process whereby franchisor's influences a group of franchisee' to achieve a common goal. Focusing on this definition, the path-goal theory is about how leaders motivate subordinates to accomplish designated goals. Drawing heavily from research on what motivates employees, path-goal theory first appeared in the leadership literature in the early 1970s in the works of Evans (1970), House (1971), House and Dessler (1974), and House and Mitchell (1974). The stated goal of this leadership theory is to enhance employee performance and employee satisfaction by focusing on employee motivation. In brief, path-goal theory is designed to explain how leaders can help subordinates along the path to their goals by selecting specific behaviors that are best suited to subordinates' needs and to the situation in which subordinates are working (Northouse, 2007). House & Mitchell(1974) predicted that although many different leadership behaviors could have been selected to be a part of path-goal theory, this approach has so far examined directive, supportive, participative, and achievement-oriented leadership behaviors. And they suggested that leaders may exhibit any or all of these four styles with various subordinates and in different situations. However, due to restrictive government regulations, franchisors are not in a position to change their leadership style to suit their circumstances. In addition, quoted by Northouse(2007), ssubordinate characteristics determine how a leader's behavior is interpreted by subordinates in a given work context. Many researchers have focused on subordinates' needs for affiliation, preferences for structure, desires for control, and self-perceived level of task ability. In this study, we have focused on the self-perceived level of task ability, namely, the franchisee's self-efficacy. According to Bandura (1977), self-efficacy is chiefly defined as the personal attitude of one's ability to accomplish concrete tasks. Therefore, it is not an indicator of one's actual abilities, but an opinion of the extent of how one can use that ability. Thus, the judgment of maintain franchisee's commitment depends on the situation (e.g., government regulation and policy and leadership style of franchisor) and how it affects one's ability to mobilize resources to deal with the task, so even if people possess the same ability, there may be differences in self-efficacy. Figure 1 illustrates the model investigated in this study. In this model, it was hypothesized that leadership styles would affect the franchisee's commitment, and self-efficacy would moderate the relationship between leadership style and franchisee's commitment. Theoretically, quoted by Northouse(2007), the path-goal approach suggests that leaders need to choose a leadership style that best fits the needs of subordinates and the work they are doing. According to House & Mitchell (1974), the theory predicts that a directive style of leadership is best in situations in which subordinates are dogmatic and authoritarian, the task demands are ambiguous, and the organizational rule and procedures are unclear. In these situations, franchisor's directive leadership complements the work by providing guidance and psychological structure for franchisees. For work that is structured, unsatisfying, or frustrating, path-goal theory suggests that leaders should use a supportive style. Franchisor's Supportive leadership offers a sense of human touch for franchisees engaged in mundane, mechanized activity. Franchisor's participative leadership is considered best when a task is ambiguous because participation gives greater clarity to how certain paths lead to certain goals; it helps subordinates learn what actions leads to what outcome. Furthermore, House & Mitchell(1974) predicts that achievement-oriented leadership is most effective in settings in which subordinates are required to perform ambiguous tasks. Marsh and O'Neill (1984) tested the idea that organizational members' anger and decline in performance is caused by deficiencies in their level of effort and found that self-efficacy promotes accomplishment, decreases stress and negative consequences like depression and emotional instability. Based on the extant empirical findings and theoretical reasoning, we posit positive and strong relationships between the franchisor's leadership styles and the franchisee's commitment. Furthermore, the level of franchisee's self-efficacy was thought to maintain their commitment. The questionnaires sent to participants consisted of the following measures; leadership style was assessed using a 20 item 7-point likert scale developed by Indvik (1985), self-efficacy was assessed using a 24 item 6-point likert scale developed by Bandura (1977), and commitment was assessed using a 6 item 5-point likert scale developed by Morgan & Hunt (1994). Questionnaires were distributed to Korean optical franchisees in Seoul. It took about 20 days to complete the data collection. A total number of 140 questionnaires were returned and complete data were available from 137 respondents. Results of multiple regression analyses testing the relationships between the each of the four styles of leadership shown by the franchisor as independent variables and franchisee's commitment as the dependent variable showed that the relationship between supportive leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.13, p<.001),and the relationship between participative leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.07, p<.001)were significant. However, when participants divided into high and low self-efficacy groups, results of multiple regression analyses showed that only the relationship between achievement-oriented leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.14, p<.001) was significant in the high self-efficacy group. In the low self-efficacy group, the relationship between supportive leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.17, p<.001),and the relationship between participative leadership style and commitment ($\beta$=.10, p<.001) were significant. The study focused on the franchisee's self-efficacy in order to explore the possibility that regulation, originally intended to protect the franchisee, may not be the most effective method to maintain the relationships in a franchise business. The key results of the data analysis regarding the moderating role of self-efficacy between leadership behavior style as proposed by path-goal and commitment theory were as follows. First, this study proposed that franchisor should apply the appropriate type of leadership behavior to strengthen the franchisees commitment because the results demonstrated that supportive and participative leadership styles by the franchisors have a positive influence on the franchisee's level of commitment. Second, it is desirable for franchisor to validate the franchisee's efforts, since the franchisee's characteristics such as self-efficacy had a substantial, positive effect on the franchisee's commitment as well as being a meaningful moderator between leadership and commitment. Third, the results as a whole imply that the government should provide institutional support, namely to put the franchisor in a position to clearly identify the characteristics of their franchisees and provide reasonable means to administer the franchisees to achieve the company's goal.