• Journal of Distribution Research
• /
• v.16 no.1
• /
• pp.141-177
• /
• 2011

I. Research Objectives: Most of the previous studies on diffusion have concentrated on efficacy of WOM communication with the use of variables at individual level (Iacobucci 1996; Midgley et al. 1992). However, there is a paucity of studies which investigated network's structural properties as antecedents of WOM from the perspective of consumers' sociocultural propensities. Against this research backbone, this study attempted to link the network's structural properties and consumer' WOM behavior on cross-national basis. The major research objective of this study was to examine the relationship between network properties and WOM by comparing Korean and Chinese consumers. Specific objectives of this research are threefold; firstly, it sought to examine whether network properties (i.e., tie strength, centrality, range) affect WOM (WOM intention and quality of WOM). Secondly, it aimed to explore the moderating effects of cutural orientation (uncertainty avoidance and individuality) on the relationship between network properties and WOM. Thirdly, it substantiates the role of innovativeness as antecedents to both network properties and WOM. II. Research Hypotheses: Based on the above research objectives, the study put forth the following research hypotheses to validate. ${\cdot}$ H 1-1 : The Strength of tie between two counterparts within network will positively influence WOM effectivenes ${\cdot}$ H 1-2 : The network centrality will positively influence the WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 1-3 : The network range will positively influence the WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 2-1 : The consumer's uncertainty avoidance tendency will moderate the relationship between network properties and WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 2-2 : The consumer's individualism tendency will moderate the relationship between network properties and WOM effectiveness ${\cdot}$ H 3-1 : The consumer's innovativeness will positively influence the social network properties ${\cdot}$ H 3-2 : The consumer's innovativeness will positively influence WOM effectiveness III. Methodology: Through a pilot study and back-translation, two versions of questionnaire were prepared, one in Korean and the other in Chinese. The chinese data were collected from the chinese students enrolled in language schools in Suwon city in Korea, while Korean data were collected from students taking classes in a major university in Seoul. A total of 277 questionnaire were used for analysis of Korean data and 212 for Chinese data. The reason why Chinese students living in Korea rather than in China were selected was based on two factors: one was to neutralize the differences (ie, retail channel availability) that may arise from living in separate countries and the second was to minimize the difference in communication venues such as internet accessibility and cell phone usability. SPSS 12.0 and AMOS 7.0 were used for analysis. IV. Results: Prior to hypothesis verification, mean differences between the two countries in terms of major constructs were performed with the following result; As for network properties (tie strength, centrality and range), Koreans showed higher scores in all three constructs. For cultural orientation traits, Koreans scored higher only on uncertainty avoidance trait than Chinese. As a result of verifying the first research objective, confirming the relationship between network properties and WOM effectiveness, on Korean side, tie strength(Beta=.116; t=1.785) and centrality (Beta=.499; t=6.776) significantly influenced on WOM intention, and similar finding was obtained for Chinese side, with tie strength (Beta=.246; t=3.544) and centrality (Beta=.247; t=3.538) being significant. However, with regard to WOM argument quality, Korean data yielded only centrality (Beta=.82; t=7.600) having a significant impact on WOM, whereas China showed both tie strength(Beat=.142; t=2.052) and centrality(Beta=.348; t=5.031) being influential. To answer for the second research objective addressing the moderating role of cultural orientation, moderated regression anaylsis was performed and the result showed that uncertainty avoidance moderated between network range and WOM intention for both Korea and China, But for Korea, the uncertainty avoidance moderated between tie strength and WOM quality, while for China it moderated between network range and WOM intention. And innovativeness moderated between tie strength and WOM intention for Korea but it moderated between network range and WOM intention for China. As a result of analysing for third research objective, we found that for Korea, innovativeness positively influenced centrality only (Beta=.546; t=10.808), while for China it influenced both tie strength (Beta=.203; t=2.998) and centrality(Beta=.518; t=8.782). But for both countries alike, the innovativeness influenced positively on WOM (WOM intention and WOM quality). V. Implications: The study yields the two practical implications. Firstly, the result suggests that companies targeting multinational customers need to identify segments which are susceptible to the positive WOM and WOM information based on individual traits such as uncertainty avoidance and individualism and based on that, develop marketing communication strategy. Secondly, the companies need to divide the market on Roger's five innovation stages and based on this information, enforce marketing strategy which utilizes social networking tools such as public media and WOM. For instance, innovator and early adopters, if provided with new product information, will be able to capitalize upon the network advantages and thus add informational value to network operations using SNS or corporate blog.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.26 no.1
• /
• pp.23-45
• /
• 2020

Big data is creating in a wide variety of fields such as medical care, manufacturing, logistics, sales site, SNS, and the dataset characteristics are also diverse. In order to secure the competitiveness of companies, it is necessary to improve decision-making capacity using a classification algorithm. However, most of them do not have sufficient knowledge on what kind of classification algorithm is appropriate for a specific problem area. In other words, determining which classification algorithm is appropriate depending on the characteristics of the dataset was has been a task that required expertise and effort. This is because the relationship between the characteristics of datasets (called meta-features) and the performance of classification algorithms has not been fully understood. Moreover, there has been little research on meta-features reflecting the characteristics of multi-class. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to empirically analyze whether meta-features of multi-class datasets have a significant effect on the performance of classification algorithms. In this study, meta-features of multi-class datasets were identified into two factors, (the data structure and the data complexity,) and seven representative meta-features were selected. Among those, we included the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), originally a market concentration measurement index, in the meta-features to replace IR(Imbalanced Ratio). Also, we developed a new index called Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score into the meta-feature set. Among the UCI Machine Learning Repository data, six representative datasets (Balance Scale, PageBlocks, Car Evaluation, User Knowledge-Modeling, Wine Quality(red), Contraceptive Method Choice) were selected. The class of each dataset was classified by using the classification algorithms (KNN, Logistic Regression, Nave Bayes, Random Forest, and SVM) selected in the study. For each dataset, we applied 10-fold cross validation method. 10% to 100% oversampling method is applied for each fold and meta-features of the dataset is measured. The meta-features selected are HHI, Number of Classes, Number of Features, Entropy, Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score, Nonlinearity of Linear Classifier, Hub Score. F1-score was selected as the dependent variable. As a result, the results of this study showed that the six meta-features including Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score and HHI proposed in this study have a significant effect on the classification performance. (1) The meta-features HHI proposed in this study was significant in the classification performance. (2) The number of variables has a significant effect on the classification performance, unlike the number of classes, but it has a positive effect. (3) The number of classes has a negative effect on the performance of classification. (4) Entropy has a significant effect on the performance of classification. (5) The Reverse ReLU Silhouette Score also significantly affects the classification performance at a significant level of 0.01. (6) The nonlinearity of linear classifiers has a significant negative effect on classification performance. In addition, the results of the analysis by the classification algorithms were also consistent. In the regression analysis by classification algorithm, Naïve Bayes algorithm does not have a significant effect on the number of variables unlike other classification algorithms. This study has two theoretical contributions: (1) two new meta-features (HHI, Reverse ReLU Silhouette score) was proved to be significant. (2) The effects of data characteristics on the performance of classification were investigated using meta-features. The practical contribution points (1) can be utilized in the development of classification algorithm recommendation system according to the characteristics of datasets. (2) Many data scientists are often testing by adjusting the parameters of the algorithm to find the optimal algorithm for the situation because the characteristics of the data are different. In this process, excessive waste of resources occurs due to hardware, cost, time, and manpower. This study is expected to be useful for machine learning, data mining researchers, practitioners, and machine learning-based system developers. The composition of this study consists of introduction, related research, research model, experiment, conclusion and discussion.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.22 no.2
• /
• pp.57-79
• /
• 2016

It is a rising trend that the number of users using one of the social media channels, the Social Network Service, so called the SNS, is getting increased. As per to this social trend, more companies have interest in this networking platform and start to invest their funds in it. It has received much attention as a tool spreading and expanding the message that a company wants to deliver to its customers and has been recognized as an important channel in terms of the relationship marketing with them. The environment of media that is radically changing these days makes possible for companies to approach their customers in various ways. Particularly, the social network service, which has been developed rapidly, provides the environment that customers can freely talk about products. For companies, it also works as a channel that gives customized information to customers. To succeed in the online environment, companies need to not only build the relationship between companies and customers but focus on the relationship between customers as well. In response to the online environment with the continuous development of technology, companies have tirelessly made the novel marketing strategy. Especially, as the one-to-one marketing to customers become available, it is more important for companies to maintain the relationship marketing with their customers. Among many SNS, Facebook, which many companies use as a communication channel, provides a fan page service for each company that supports its business. Facebook fan page is the platform that the event, information and announcement can be shared with customers using texts, videos, and pictures. Companies open their own fan pages in order to inform their companies and businesses. Such page functions as the websites of companies and has a characteristic of their brand communities such as blogs as well. As Facebook has become the major communication medium with customers, companies recognize its importance as the effective marketing channel, but they still need to investigate their business performances by using Facebook. Although there are infinite potentials in Facebook fan page that even has a function as a community between users, which other platforms do not, it is incomplete to regard companies' Facebook fan pages as communities and analyze them. In this study, it explores the relationship among customers through the network of the Facebook fan page users. The previous studies on a company's Facebook fan page were focused on finding out the effective operational direction by analyzing the use state of the company. However, in this study, it draws out the structural variable of the network, which customer committment can be measured by applying the social network analysis methodology and investigates the influence of the structural characteristics of network on the business performance of companies in an empirical way. Through each company's Facebook fan page, the network of users who engaged in the communication with each company is exploited and it is the one-mode undirected binary network that respectively regards users and the relationship of them in terms of their marketing activities as the node and link. In this network, it draws out the structural variable of network that can explain the customer commitment, who pressed "like," made comments and shared the Facebook marketing message, of each company by calculating density, global clustering coefficient, mean geodesic distance, diameter. By exploiting companies' historical performance such as net income and Tobin's Q indicator as the result variables, this study investigates influence on companies' business performances. For this purpose, it collects the network data on the subjects of 54 companies among KOSPI-listed companies, which have posted more than 100 articles on their Facebook fan pages during the data collection period. Then it draws out the network indicator of each company. The indicator related to companies' performances is calculated, based on the posted value on DART website of the Financial Supervisory Service. From the academic perspective, this study suggests a new approach through the social network analysis methodology to researchers who attempt to study the business-purpose utilization of the social media channel. From the practical perspective, this study proposes the more substantive marketing performance measurements to companies performing marketing activities through the social media and it is expected that it will bring a foundation of establishing smart business strategies by using the network indicators.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
• /
• v.19 no.4
• /
• pp.231-249
• /
• 2014

We define $21^{st}$ century as an amalgamation of globalization and localization, or Glocalization. Additionally, due to the increasing supply of smart phones and wide usage of social networking services, the ability to utilize such global and regional information has increased a coperation's competitiveness in its market, and even the business models have evolved from the conventional "production and distribution" to E-commerce, through which either a direct or a non-direct transaction is possible. My hypothesis is that the ability to adapt to this trend is possible through transfer of learning, and consequently, this will have an impact on company's performance. Thus, this thesis analyzes the mid- to the long-term impact of such ability and environmental factors on the performance and technology innovation of Korean companies in China. Ultimately, this study intends to engender a basic foundation for a corporation's management strategy in China. Finally this research focuses on those Korean companies in China only and on the proof of influential factors' impact on technological innovation and technological innovation's impact on those corporations' future performances. Section I is an abstract and section II, the case examines the uniqueness and current status of Korean companies in China identifies the concept and the definition of influential factors such as education-orientation, technological innovation, and performance, and then scrutinizes each factors through a closer look at their past researches. Section III explains the thesis model, the survey's method and target, the thesis, variable factors, the content, and the method of analysis. In section IV, the thesis is proved based on the outcome of the survey. The result in Section V highlights the high comprehension of technological innovation: both education-orientation and technological innovation prove to have a positive (+) correlation with the performance. The vision on education orientation proves to have a positive (+) influence on technological innovation. The vision on education-orientation and technological innovation prove to have a positive (+) influence individually on company's performance.

• Information Systems Review
• /
• v.22 no.2
• /
• pp.137-166
• /
• 2020

While South Koreans overseas travelling rate has been increased every year, domestic travelling rate has been at a standstill for several years. The purpose of this study is to analyze domestic traveling styles of Koreans according to their generations in order to provide generation-specific traveling services. For this purpose, we categorized the survey respondents into four different generations, which are Millennium (age 19~34), X generation (35~54), Baby Boomer (55~64) and senior by following the criterions of the Korea National Tourism Organization. After then, we analyze factors related to travel preparation process, the actual traveling activities and satisfaction after the travel. In this study, 16,713 data collected by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism are used. The results of this study show that Korean people tends to acquire domestic traveling information from their own or acquaintances past experiences. Also, they do not prefer the organized trip for domestic travels, thus do not buy package products a lot. In addition, natural scenery, rich in cultural heritage, and convenient accommodation are the most important determinant factors affecting the overall travel satisfaction of level for all generations. The traveling characteristics for each generation are as follows. Millennium get traveling information from the internet a lot, and more specifically, they refer portal sites and social network services (SNS) in many cases. Also, they tend to travel in summer peak season to popular destinations and pursues active traveling experiences. Generation X has similar traveling patterns with Millennium, however they major transportation method is using their own car. Also, transportation convenience and satisfactory leisure activity are important factors affecting the overall satisfaction level to Generation X. On the other hand, Baby boomer generation has a greater emphasis on appreciation of nature, visiting famous restaurants, and relaxation, rather than actively participating experiencing programs. They travel evenly in summer and spring/fall season to many different areas instead of focusing on popular tourist spots. In addition, shopping and eating delicious food are the important factors affecting the overall satisfaction level for them. Lastly, Senior generation has similar characteristics with Baby boomer in many ways, however, they travel a lot on the same day using public transportations or car rental service. They prefer spring and autumn trips rather than summer peak season, and tend to buy packaged travel products a lot compared with other generations. If these different traveling characteristics of each generation are considered for organizing and customizing tourism services, it is expected that domestic tourism satisfaction level will be ultimately increased.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.49 no.4
• /
• pp.15-29
• /
• 2021

The study aims to grasp the perception and appraisal of urban park users through text analysis. This study used Google review data provided by Google Maps. Google Maps Review is an online review platform that provides information evaluating locations through social media and provides an understanding of locations from the perspective of general reviewers and regional guides who are registered as members of Google Maps. The study determined if the Google Maps Reviews were useful for extracting meaningful information about the user perceptions and appraisals for parks management plans. The study chose three urban parks in Seoul, South Korea; Seoul Forest, Boramae Park, and Olympic Park. Review data for each of these three parks were collected via web crawling using Python. Through text analysis, the keywords and network structure characteristics for each park were analyzed. The text was analyzed, as were park ratings, and the analysis compared the reviews of residents and foreign tourists. The common keywords found in the review comments for the three parks were "walking", "bicycle", "rest" and "picnic" for activities, "family", "child" and "dogs" for accompanying types, and "playground" and "walking trail" for park facilities. Looking at the characteristics of each park, Seoul Forest shows many outdoor activities based on nature, while the lack of parking spaces and congestion on weekends negatively impacted users. Boramae Park has the appearance of a city park, with various facilities providing numerous activities, but reviewers often cited the park's complexity and the negative aspects in terms of dog walking groups. At Olympic Park, large-scale complex facilities and cultural events were frequently mentioned, emphasizing its entertainment functions. Google Maps Review can function as useful data to identify parks' overall users' experiences and general feelings. Compared to data from other social media sites, Google Maps Review's data provides ratings and understanding factors, including user satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

• Asia Marketing Journal
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.65-96
• /
• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.