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

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

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.105-130
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• 2008

Consumers of e-learning market differ from those of other markets in that they are replaced in a specific time scale. For example, e-learning contents aimed at highschool senior students cannot be consumed by a specific consumer over the designated period of time. Hence e-learning service providers need to attract new groups of students every year. Due to lack of information on products designed for continuously emerging consumers, the consumers face difficulties in making rational decisions in a short time period. Increased uncertainty of product purchase leads customers to herding behaviors to obtain information of the product from others and imitate them. Taking into consideration of these features of e-learning market, this study will focus on the online herding behavior in purchasing e-learning contents. There is no definite concept for e-learning. However, it is being discussed in a wide range of perspectives from educational engineering to management to e-business etc. Based upon the existing studies, we identify two main view-points regarding e-learning. The first defines e-learning as a concept that includes existing terminologies, such as CBT (Computer Based Training), WBT (Web Based Training), and IBT (Internet Based Training). In this view, e-learning utilizes IT in order to support professors and a part of or entire education systems. In the second perspective, e-learning is defined as the usage of Internet technology to deliver diverse intelligence and achievement enhancing solutions. In other words, only the educations that are done through the Internet and network can be classified as e-learning. We take the second definition of e-learning for our working definition. The main goal of this study is to investigate what factors affect consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents and to identify the differential impact of the factors between consumers with purchase experience and those without the experience. To accomplish the goal of this study, it focuses on herding behavior and perceived usefulness as antecedents to behavioral intention. The proposed research model in the study extends the Technology Acceptance Model by adding herding behavior and usability to take into account the unique characteristics of e-learning content market and e-learning systems use, respectively. The current study also includes consumer experience with e-learning content purchase because the previous experience is believed to affect purchasing intention when consumers buy experience goods or services. Previous studies on e-learning did not consider the characteristics of e-learning contents market and the differential impact of consumer experience on the relationship between the antecedents and behavioral intention, which is the target of this study. This study employs a survey method to empirically test the proposed research model. A survey questionnaire was developed and distributed to 629 informants. 528 responses were collected, which consist of potential customer group (n = 133) and experienced customer group (n = 395). The data were analyzed using PLS method, a structural equation modeling method. Overall, both herding behavior and perceived usefulness influence consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents. In detail, in the case of potential customer group, herding behavior has stronger effect on purchase intention than does perceived usefulness. However, in the case of shopping-experienced customer group, perceived usefulness has stronger effect than does herding behavior. In sum, the results of the analysis show that with regard to purchasing experience, perceived usefulness and herding behavior had differential effects upon the purchase of e-learning contents. As a follow-up analysis, the interaction effects of the number of purchase transaction and herding behavior/perceived usefulness on purchase intention were investigated. The results show that there are no interaction effects. This study contributes to the literature in a couple of ways. From a theoretical perspective, this study examined and showed evidence that the characteristics of e-learning market such as continuous renewal of consumers and thus high uncertainty and individual experiences are important factors to be considered when the purchase intention of e-learning content is studied. This study can be used as a basis for future studies on e-learning success. From a practical perspective, this study provides several important implications on what types of marketing strategies e-learning companies need to build. The bottom lines of these strategies include target group attraction, word-of-mouth management, enhancement of web site usability quality, etc. The limitations of this study are also discussed for future studies.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.63-82
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• 2016

Individuals gather information online to resolve problems in their daily lives and make various decisions about the purchase of products or services. With the revolutionary development of information technology, Web 2.0 has allowed more people to easily generate and use online reviews such that the volume of information is rapidly increasing, and the usefulness and significance of analyzing the unstructured data have also increased. This paper presents an analysis on the lexical features of expert product reviews to determine their influence on consumers' purchasing decisions. The focus was on how unstructured data can be organized and used in diverse contexts through text mining. In addition, diverse lexical features of expert reviews of contents provided by a third-party review site were extracted and defined. Expert reviews are defined as evaluations by people who have expert knowledge about specific products or services in newspapers or magazines; this type of review is also called a critic review. Consumers who purchased products before the widespread use of the Internet were able to access expert reviews through newspapers or magazines; thus, they were not able to access many of them. Recently, however, major media also now provide online services so that people can more easily and affordably access expert reviews compared to the past. The reason why diverse reviews from experts in several fields are important is that there is an information asymmetry where some information is not shared among consumers and sellers. The information asymmetry can be resolved with information provided by third parties with expertise to consumers. Then, consumers can read expert reviews and make purchasing decisions by considering the abundant information on products or services. Therefore, expert reviews play an important role in consumers' purchasing decisions and the performance of companies across diverse industries. If the influence of qualitative data such as reviews or assessment after the purchase of products can be separately identified from the quantitative data resources, such as the actual quality of products or price, it is possible to identify which aspects of product reviews hamper or promote product sales. Previous studies have focused on the characteristics of the experts themselves, such as the expertise and credibility of sources regarding expert reviews; however, these studies did not suggest the influence of the linguistic features of experts' product reviews on consumers' overall evaluation. However, this study focused on experts' recommendations and evaluations to reveal the lexical features of expert reviews and whether such features influence consumers' overall evaluations and purchasing decisions. Real expert product reviews were analyzed based on the suggested methodology, and five lexical features of expert reviews were ultimately determined. Specifically, the "review depth" (i.e., degree of detail of the expert's product analysis), and "lack of assurance" (i.e., degree of confidence that the expert has in the evaluation) have statistically significant effects on consumers' product evaluations. In contrast, the "positive polarity" (i.e., the degree of positivity of an expert's evaluations) has an insignificant effect, while the "negative polarity" (i.e., the degree of negativity of an expert's evaluations) has a significant negative effect on consumers' product evaluations. Finally, the "social orientation" (i.e., the degree of how many social expressions experts include in their reviews) does not have a significant effect on consumers' product evaluations. In summary, the lexical properties of the product reviews were defined according to each relevant factor. Then, the influence of each linguistic factor of expert reviews on the consumers' final evaluations was tested. In addition, a test was performed on whether each linguistic factor influencing consumers' product evaluations differs depending on the lexical features. The results of these analyses should provide guidelines on how individuals process massive volumes of unstructured data depending on lexical features in various contexts and how companies can use this mechanism from their perspective. This paper provides several theoretical and practical contributions, such as the proposal of a new methodology and its application to real data.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.59-80
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• 2008

Recently, e-sports are growing with potentiality as a new industry with conspicuous profit model. But studies that dealing with e-sports are not enough. Hence, proposes of this paper are both to establish basic model that is for the design of e-sport marketing strategy and to contribute toward future studies which are related to e-sports. Recently, the researches to explain sports-sponsorship through the identification theory have been discovered. Many researches say that somewhat proper identification is a requirement for most sponsors to improve the their images which is essential to sponsorship activity. Consequently, the research for sponsorship associated with identification in the e-sports, not in the physical sports is the core sector of this study. We extracted the variables from online's major characteristics and existing sport sponsorship researches. First, because e-sports mean the tournaments or leagues in the use of online game, the main event of the game is likely to call it online game. Online media's attributes are distinguished from those of offline. Especially, interactivity, anonymity, and expandibility as a e-sport game attributes are able to be mentioned. So, these inherent online attributes are examined on the relationship with flow. Second, in physical sports games, Fisher(1998) revealed that team similarity and team attractivity were positively related to team identification. Wann(1996) said that the result of former game influenced the evaluation of the next game, then in turn has an effect on the identification of team supporters. Considering these results in the e-sports side, e-sports gamer' attractivity, similarity, and match result seem to be important precedent variables of the identification with a gamer. So, these e-sport gamer attributes are examined on the relationship with both flow and identification with a gamer. Csikszentmihalyi(1988) defined the term flow as feeling status for him to be making current positive experience optimally. Hoffman and Novak(1996) also said that if a user experienced the flow he would visit a website without any reward. Therefore flow might be positively associated with user's identification with a gamer. And, Swanson(2003) disclosed that team identification influenced the positive results of sponsorship, which included attitude toward sponsors, sponsor patronage, and satisfaction with sponsors. That is, identification with a gamer expect to be connected with corporation identification significantly. According to the above, we can design the following research model. All variables used in this study(interactivity, anonymity, expandibility, attractivity, similarity, match result, flow, identification with a gamer, and identification with a sponsor) definitely were defined operationally underlying precedent researches. Sample collection was carried out to the person who has an experience to have enjoyed e-sports during June 2006. Much portion of samples is men because much more men than women enjoy e-sports in general. Two-step approach was used to test the hypotheses. First, confirmatory factor analysis was committed to guarantee the validity and reliability of variables. The results showed that all variables had not only intensive and discriminant validity, but also reliability. Then, research model was examined with fully structural equation using LISREL 8.3 version. The fitness of the suggested model mostly was at the acceptable level. Shortly speaking about the results, first of all, in e-sports game attributes, only interactivity which is called a basic feature in online situation affected flow positively. Secondly, in e-sports gamer's attributes, similarity with a gamer and match result influenced flow positively, but there was no significant effect in the relationship between the attractivity of a gamer and flow. And as expected, similarity had an effect on identification with a gamer significantly. But unexpectedly attractivity and match result did not influence identification with a gamer significantly. Just the same as the fact verified in the many precedent researches, flow greatly influenced identification with a gamer, and identification with a gamer continually had an influence on the identification with a sponsor significantly. There are some implications in these results. If the sponsor of e-sports supports the pro-game player who absolutely should have the superior ability to others and is similar to the user enjoying e-sports, many amateur gamers will feel much of the flow and identification with a pro-gamer, and then after all, feel the identification with a sponsor. Such identification with a sponsor leads people enjoying e-sports to have purchasing intention for products produced by the sponsor and to make a positive word-of-mouth for those products or the sponsor. For the future studies, we recommend a few ideas. Based on the results of this study, it is necessary to find new variables relating to the e-sports, which is not mentioned in this study. For this work to be possible, qualitative research seems to be needed to consider the inherent e-sport attributes. Finally, to generalize the results related to e-sports, a wide range of generations not a specific generation should be researched.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.1-20
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• 2022

Researchers are making contradictory claims through the concept of superstars and long tails about how the development of IT technology affects demand distribution. Unlike previous studies that focused on changes in demand from a macro point of view, this study explored whether the relationship between a company's marketing activities and consumer response differs depending on the product location (i.e., superstar vs. long tail) from a micro point of view. Based on the marketing mix framework, hypotheses were developed based on the relevant literature. In the case of empirical analysis, 2,835 daily data from 63 Korean films were tested using the quantile regression method. As a result of the analysis, it was found that the influence of marketing mix factors on sales varies depending on the location of the product. Specifically, the appeal breadth of the film and the effect of owned media are enhanced in superstar products, and the effect of acquisition media in long-tail products is enhanced and the negative effects of competition are mitigated. Unlike previous studies that focused on macroscopic changes in demand distribution, this study suggested marketing activities suitable for practitioners through microscopic analysis.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.29-50
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• 2019

Social media is divided into Owned Media, operated by companies according to information sources, and Earned Media, which third parties produce contents. Social media research developing the logic that brand-related content in social media increases awareness of potential customers and positively changes brand attitudes, resulting in increased sales and business performance. However, there are limitations in previous researches that can not fully explain the difference of media synergy effect according to the information source of social media. it is very important for the consumer to integrate media management because consumers are more likely to choose appropriate media information for the information needed at each decision making stage. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of eWOM of review site and social media (owned media and earned media) on movie sales. To do this, we collected 3,589 review data from films released in 2017. The results of the study showed that eWOM of review site, social media (owned media and earned media) had a positive effect on movie sales. However, it was found that the effect of moderating eWOM of review site was different between the owned media and the earend media.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.177-195
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• 2020

The social consciousness on fake reviews has triggered researchers to suggest ways to cope with them by analyzing contents of fake reviews or finding ways to discover them by means of structural characteristics of them. This research tried to collect data from blog posts in Naver and detect habitual patterns users use unconsciously by variables extracted from blogs and blog posts by a machine learning model and wanted to use the technique in predicting fake reviews. Data analysis showed that there was a very high relationship between the number of all the posts registered in the blog of the writer of the related writing and the date when it was registered. And, it was found that, as model to detect advertising reviews, Random Forest is the most suitable. If a review is predicted to be an advertising one by the model suggested in this research, it is very likely that it is fake review, and that it violates the guidelines on investigation into markings and advertising regarding recommendation and guarantee in the Law of Marking and Advertising. The fact that, instead of using analysis of morphemes in contents of writings, this research adopts behavior analysis of the writer, and, based on such an approach, collects characteristic data of blogs and blog posts not by manual works, but by automated system, and discerns whether a certain writing is advertising or not is expected to have positive effects on improving efficiency and effectiveness in detecting fake reviews.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.65-82
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• 2020

Start-ups often use crowdfunding platforms such as Wadiz to get financing from corporate investors and general public. These platforms include functions to increase participant activity through the number of comments, interest and online word-of-mouth. This study aims to elucidate how these functions related to a participant activity exhibit mediating effects on a success of crowdfunding and an achievement rate of targeted investment amount. To this end, the individual variables such as progress period, target amount, venture company, experience of attracting investment, possession of intellectual property rights, a career of the representative and an award experience of the representative were classified into the project characteristics, the company characteristics and the representative characteristics through not only previous studies but also interviews with investment professionals and platform operators. Afterwards, this study went through an empirical verification process using a structural equation model that has both crowdfunding performance and participant activity, which is the independent and mediating factors of three perspectives, as well as the dependent variables. In other words, this study analyzes how the characteristics of three perspectives affect the participant activity and how the participant activity had the mediating effects on the crowdfunding performance. In addition, it derives how the analysis results mentioned above vary according to business types (internet services, culture/art, manufacturing/distribution) and investment styles (stock type and bond type). It is expected that this study will help not only in deriving the factors affecting the performance of an investment type crowdfunding but also in preparing the measures to increase a participant activity.

• The Korean Journal of Franchise Management
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.1-15
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• 2022

Purpose: In the restaurant sector, it has been known that consumers' positive perception of brands influences their positive WOM intention, and information sources play an important role in increasing credibility by enhancing consumer awareness and developing differentiated brands. This study examines the effects of information sources (e.g., advertisement, WOM, SNS) on trust (cognitive and affective) and, WOM and eWOM intention in the restaurant context. In the model, cognitive and affective trust play mediating roles in the relationships between information sources (e.g., advertisement, WOM, SNS) WOM and eWOM intention. Research design, data, and methodology: Research models and hypotheses were developed according to the research direction. The survey questionnaire items were developed and used appropriately according to the contents of this paper based on prior studies. All constructs were measured with multiple items developed and validated in prior studies. A total of 502 responses were collected from an online survey. The research model was evaluated using SmartPLS 4.0. Frequency analysis was performed to understand the demographic characteristics of the survey respondents. The reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were assessed using measurement model analysis. The proposed model was verified using the structural equation model. Results: Advertisement, WOM, and SNS information sources all had a positive effect on affective trust, whereas only WOM had a significant effect on cognitive trust. In addition, affective trust had a positive effect on cognitive trust and eWOM intention but did not affect WOM intention. Finally, cognitive trust was found to have a positive effect on both WOM intention and eWOM intention. Conclusions: This study redefines the concept of where restaurant service companies should focus when providing consumers with information about their products and services. As a result, the conceptual framework of positive word of mouth intention to increase new customer visits to the restaurant brand has been expanded. In addition, this study not only presents an information source management strategy for restaurant brands, but also presents practical implications for resource allocation guidelines for customer management in the restaurant sector.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.195-227
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• 2011

There is no doubt that distribution channels and services greatly satisfy consumers' desires. Lots of products and services, stimulate consumers to purchase products to relieve their depressed feeling/stress temporarily, leading them gradually to a shopping addiction. Shopping addiction generates lots of problems, damaging not only consumers themselves but also other consumers and the entire society. Therefore, the purposes of this study were 1) to examine psychological factors that affected addictive shopping orientation of consumers, 2) to explore the effects addictive shopping orientation on the post-purchase emotions(positive emotion/negative emotion), 3) to examine the effect of post-purchase emotions on post-purchase behaviors (repurchasing/refund and exchange/negative word of mouth). 4) the study explored the differences in terms of effects of addictive shopping orientations on post-purchase emotions and behaviors, depending on the retailing channel (online and off line). The study performed a questionnaire survey for female adults older than 18 years old, living Seoul and Pusan areas. By using 404 copies for questionnaires, factor analysis, reliability analysis, and Amos 7.0 were used for the data analysis. It was found that psychological variables, self-esteem, compensatory buying and impulsiveness, had significant effects on addictive shopping orientations. Addictive shopping orientations affect both positive and negative post-purchase emotions in case of off-line shopping. Negative post-purchase emotions have higher impact on the postpurchase behaviors than positive post-purchase emotions.