• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.157-194
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• 2008

The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers. The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability. In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it. In this study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels; characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things. And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to-consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of products such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and make some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher than at other community sites. It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities. Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences: consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users. As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that shows close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consumers do not want to spend money to buy content and etc. In this sense, marketers of community websites must know consumers' affect toward online community site is not a last goal and important factor to influnece consumers' purchase. Third, building good content environment can be a really important marketing tool to create a competitive advantage in cyberspace. For example, Cyworld, Korea's number one community site shows distinctive superiority in the consumer evaluations of content characteristics such as content superiority, site vividness, and customerization. Particularly, comsumer evaluation about customerization was remarkably higher than the other sites. In this point, we can conclude that providing comsumers with good, unique and highly customized content will be urgent and important task directly and indirectly impacting to self congruency, consumer experience, c-to-c interactivity, and various loyalty factors of online community. By creating enjoyable, useful, and unique online community environments, online community portals such as Daum, Naver, and Cyworld are able to build customer loyalty to a degree that many of today's online marketer can only dream of these loyalty, in turn, generates strong economic returns. Another way to build good online community site is to provide consumers with an interactive, fun, experience-oriented or experiential Web site. Elements that can make a dot.com's Web site experiential include graphics, 3-D images, animation, video and audio capabilities. In addition, chat rooms and real-time customer service applications (which link site visitors directly to other visitors, or with company support personnel, respectively) are also being used to make web sites more interactive. Researchers note that online communities are increasingly incorporating such applications in their Web sites, in order to make consumers' online shopping experience more similar to that of an offline store. That is, if consumers are able to experience sensory stimulation (e.g. via 3-D images and audio sound), interact with other consumers (e.g., via chat rooms), and interact with sales or support people (e.g. via a real-time chat interface or e-mail), then they are likely to have a more positive dot.com experience, and develop a more positive image toward the online company itself). Analysts caution, however, that, while high quality graphics, animation and the like may create a fun experience for consumers, when heavily used, they can slow site navigation, resulting in frustrated consumers, who may never return to a site. Consequently, some analysts suggest that, at least with current technology, the rule-of-thumb is that less is more. That is, while graphics etc. can draw consumers to a site, they should be kept to a minimum, so as not to impact negatively on consumers' overall site experience.

• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.27
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• pp.171-200
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• 2016

This paper will analyze the filial piety based ethics of Daesoonjinrihoe (大巡眞理會) and the traditional filial piety of Confucianism (儒敎), Buddhism (佛敎) and Taoism (道敎) through comparing and contrasting their unique systems. The traditional Korean ethics regarding filial piety are in great need of reformation as the relationship between the parents and children should not be vertical or unilateral but parallel and reciprocal. However, there have not been sufficient in-depth studies on this specific ideology and alternative approaches. Regarding this prospect, one representative Korean indigenous new religion, Daesoonjinrihoe has emerged and directly engages in the collision between traditionalism and modernity. The modernity of Daesoonjinrihoe, enables the observation of how the filial piety based ethics have developed within a system of doctrine and thereby provides an exemplary model of traditional filial piety reimagined in accordance with modern sensibilities. A brief summary of comparative findings is as follows: First, Daesoonjinrihoe and Confucianism have taken serving parents with respect as an ethic within filial piety, but Confucianism engenders this ideal through the unilateral and unconditional sacrifice of younger people based on patriarchal feudalism whereas Daesoonjinrihoe has rejected such unilateral sacrifice and instead promotes mutual beneficience between parents and children. This difference occurs, in part, due to the filial piety of Confucianism rising in the midst of the feudal order whereas the ideology of Daesoonjinrihoe contains ideals such as "the reciprocation of favor for mutual beneficence (報恩相生)" and "respect for humanity (人尊)," both of which serve as key principles of the new religious world as envisioned by Daesoonjinrihoe. Second, filial piety in Buddhism and Taoism tends to be passive and inactive and is often expressed by praying for happiness and longevity for one's parents while they are alive and later praying for the heavenly rebirth of one's parents after they die. The filial piety of Daesoonjinrihoe also partially contains such ideas, however; they are extended much further and arrive upon novel and profound expressions. The spectrum of the filial piety in Daesoonjinrihoe expands to the extent children perform actions to resolve their parent's sins and pave a new road for their parents. This filial piety requires a cultivation practice from both parents and children. This system of dual cultivation was established because the world-view of Daesoonjinrihoe enables both parents and children to enjoy happiness and wealth both of which are achieved through the completion of religious objectives following cultivation practice. Third, Confucianism and Daesoonjinrihoe hold memorial services for ancestors with sincerity as an expression of filial piety. Filial piety in the Confucian context excludes ideas from Shamanism and thereby memorial services are held for impersonal entities, however; in the Daesoonjinrihoe context, memorial services are held for personal-entities. Accordingly, holding a memorial service for ancestors with sincerity has a greater sense of realism in Daesoonjinrihoe than it does in Confucianism. Fourth, while Confucianism and Daesoonjinrihoe both aim to requite the grace received from ancestors, the contents of grace and reciprocation of favors (報恩) are viewed differently. In Confucianism, since the ancestors existed previously and bestowed the gift of life to their children and indirectly, all of their descendents. Therefore, memorial services for ancestors are held to convey gratitude and filial piety. However, in Daesoonjinrihoe, ancestors not only bestowed the gift of earthly life to their descendents, in the spirit realm, ancestral spirits also spend sixty years accumulating the merit necessary to imbue each of their descendents with spiritual insight. Consequently, filial piety is expressed through memorial services as well as spiritual cultivation. Fifth, in Confucianism, achieving the fame and prestige indicative of success in the mundane world can be an act of filial piety as it would bring pride to one's ancestors, but in Daesoonjinrihoe, succeeding in religious objectives through spiritual cultivation is considered to be a higher form of filial piety. Sixth, Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism all observe filial piety as system of familial ethics based in morality. This is likewise true of Daesoonjinrihoe, however; Daesoonjinrihoe confers greater importance on filial piety as an essential form of ethics for religious redemption. This is due to the Daesoon interpretation that the absence of filial piety was the direct cause which led to the sickened state of the world and its collapse. Forgetting the grace of parents who have given the gift of life or the grace of ancestral spirits who have accumulated merit on behalf of their descendents are acts of ingratitude which are unacceptable during the period of Reordering of the Universe. Judging from these findings, Daesoonjinrihoe embraces parts of traditional filial piety as it exists in Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, but it does so on the ground of its own unique culture. Through re-interpretation and re-creation, ideas regarding filial piety are being further developed. Namely, filial piety in Daesoonjinrihoe is regulations founded upon the reciprocation of favors for mutual beneficence and respect for humanity. Therefore, it is understood as a concept wherein one's own cultivation practice is performed in order to reach religious objectives, the perfection of personal character, and spiritual insight. This requires that even recipents of filial piety (i.e., parents) perform certain cultivation practices to enjoy happiness and wealth. Additionally, filial piety in Daesoonjinrihoe manifests a reinforced religious character and also serves as a system ethics which is soteriologically essential for salvation during the period known as the Reordering of the Universe.