• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.39-52
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• 2016

Present study was performed to identify the effects of SNS WOM characteristics on attitude and purchase intention as perceived in restaurant participants and to confirm the moderating effect according to SNS receivers' characteristics on formulated model. Survey method was employed to consumers who are using SNS to find restaurant foods through convenience sampling method in Seoul area. A total of 250 surveys were distributed and 230 were used for analysis, after excluding missing and unusual data. The results from this study are as follows. First, vividness of SNS WOM characteristics had a greater effect on attitude of restaurant food than timeliness, but the consensus and neutrality of SNS WOM characteristics have no significant effect on attitude of restaurant food. Second, SNS receivers characteristics found to moderate the relationships between vividness and timeliness of SNS WOM characteristics and attitude. However, SNS receivers characteristics did not have a moderating role relationships between consensus and neutrality of SNS WOM characteristics and attitude. Third, attitude of restaurant food had a significant effect on purchase intention.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.8
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• pp.99-106
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• 2019

Purpose - Marketing has shifted towards communicating tailored messages and brand contents to consumers with the rise of the Internet and smartphones. These technologies and the brand contents provide the e-tailers with opportunities for brand loyalty and online shopping via SNS, especially Facebook. Thus, this study attempts to scrutinize the effects of the characteristics of brand contents on consumers' engagements. As well, Facebook allows global communication, and yet, Eastern and Western people still live under different cultures. Therefore, this study attempts to compare Germans and Koreans on Facebook. Research design, data, and methodology - 225 survey data were collected from Germany and Korea. The effects of Vividness, Entertainment, Credibility, and Relevance on Engagement in brand contents and the moderating effect of nationality were examined with the hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Results - Vividness and Entertainment are the most important characteristics to engage consumers in the brand contents regardless of nationality. However, Relevance is more important to Germans while Entertaining and Vividness are to Koreans. Conclusions - To engage young Facebook users and let them shop online, entertaining and vivid brand contents will be effective. Tailored brand contents are essential for users from different cultures on Facebook.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.27-38
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• 2019

Purpose - This study analyzes effects of word of mouth intention of restaurant product via SNS on trust of products, purchase intention, and word of mouth intention targeting restaurant customers. Research design, data, and methodology - Targeting restaurant customers, 500 surveys were distributed in restaurants located in Seoul (where restaurants are clustered, such as Myeongdong, Dongdaemoon Station Shopping Center, and Sadangdong) between July 1st, 2016 and July 30th, 2016. Among those, 490 were collected, and 478 were used for analysis excluding those with no answer or insincere answers. Results - SNS word of mouth information characteristics had significant effects on trust of restaurant product in the order of vividness, neutrality, and timing. Trust on restaurant product has significant effect on perceived risks (-) and perceived benefits (+) by SNS. While perceived benefits of restaurant product on SNS has effect on purchase intention, perceived risks of restaurant product on SNS does not affect purchase intention. Perceived benefits of restaurant product on SNS has significant effect on word of mouth intention, whereas perceived risks of restaurant product on SNS does not have significant effect on word of mouth intention. Conclusions - As marketing through SNS can bring about a huge reduction effect in terms of marking cost, it can be utilized as an effective promotion by not only large restaurant corporations, but also small restaurants.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.27 no.2
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• pp.77-98
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• 2017

The development of mobile social networking service (SNS) triggers the growth of social commerce industry. Customers rely considerably on electronic word of mouth (eWOM) to make purchasing decisions. Thus, SNS is an important commercial platform that offers attractive opportunities and challenges to firms. This study sheds light on the role of SNS as a social commerce platform by focusing on WeChat, the most popular SNS in China. This study identifies three different types of trust based on SNS that customers perceive in the context of social commerce. These types of trust are contents trust, source trust, and platform trust. This study suggests the antecedents and consequences of each trust. Our results prove that eWOM intention relies on contents trust and source trust, whereas purchase intention depends on contents trust, source trust, and platform trust. This study also finds that contents trust is positively influenced by source trust and platform trust. Finally, the result verifies the key antecedents of each trust, namely, vividness and timeliness for contents trust, competence, benevolence, and integrity for source trust, and instrumental need and social need for platform trust. The discussion and implications on the findings are provided.

• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.88-103
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• 2017

The rapid growth in the popularity of social media sites has meant that social media has become an important communication channel for brands. Brands create brand pages on social media to cultivate positive and strong relationships with consumers. This study seeks to enhance our understanding of how fashion brand pages in social media foster consumer-brand relationships by exploring the factors that affect the development of consumer-brand relationships. Drawing on the parasocial interaction theory, this study proposes parasocial interaction as a key factor of this process. Specifically, this study proposes four antecedents (vividness, interactivity, social presence, and focused attention) of consumers' parasocial interaction with brand pages, which further affects consumer responses in terms of affective engagement and brand loyalty. An online survey was administered with consumers who have followed and visited at least one fashion brand page via a social networking site (SNS). Structural equation modeling revealed that consumers' perceptions of vividness, interactivity, social presence, and focused attention on a fashion brand page positively affected their feelings towards parasocial interaction with the brand page, which in turn led to their affective engagement with the brand page and consequent brand loyalty. These findings suggest that consumers build relationships of varying degrees with brand pages in a similar manner to that with people, which leads to their development of a positive relationship with the brand. This study concludes with discussions and practical implications.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.159-174
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• 2014

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among vividness, consensus, reliability, homogeneity, ties and acceptance of WOM (Word Of Mouth), consumer attitude, SNS WOM transmission, offline WOM transmission, and visit intention perceived by married women consumers who learned SNS WOM regarding restaurants. This study performed a survey targeting married women, focusing on broadcasting stations, department stores, major supermarkets, government offices, and cultural centers in Busan. The surveying period was from March 1, 2014 to March 31, 2014. 304 questionnaires were used for the final analysis. As a result of the analysis, it could be concluded that vivid and reliable SNS words raise the level of acceptance of WOM, reliability makes consumer attitude positive, and homogeneity raises the level of acceptance of WOM, consumer attitude, SNS WOM transmission, and offline WOM transmission intention. In addition, it could be confirmed that acceptance of WOM have significant effects on consumer attitude and offline WOM transmission, and consumer attitude have positive effects on SNS WOM transmission, offline WOM transmission, and visit intention. Lastly, it could be learned that SNS WOM transmission and offline WOM transmission have significant effects on visit intention.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.307-314
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• 2016

This study empirically validate the impacts of WOM information characteristics on the WOM effect in accordance with SNS media due to the increased the WOM role under SNS. The key results showed that the more vivid, negative, and objective WOM information was, the more positive impacts on the intention to adopt information. In addition, the intention to adopt information had a positive impact on the re-WOM intention. Second, there was no significant difference between Facebook and Blog groups regarding the impacts of the WOM information characteristics on the WOM effect. This can be inferred from the fact that consumers recognize all SNS media as a single online medium regardless of their characteristics in the process of accepting and spreading information. Based on these results, this research drew the following implications. It conceptualized the information characteristics factors that influence the online information acceptance process and the relationship with WOM effects by focusing on SNS and high-tech products that are rapidly emerging. This study is also significant because it attempted to expand the characteristics of WOM information and WOM effects to Facebook and blogs, which are SNS media, and proposed a future research direction.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.199-209
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• 2019

With the rapid development of mobile communication tools, customers are using SNS as a major information tool. SNS can provide information to a small number of customers as well as people around them, with information about a product or service that a small number of customers know through experience. With these characteristics, dessert cafes are being used as a major marketing tool for online websites and mobile phones using SNS. Therefore, in this study, theoretical considerations about e-WOM quality, perceived value, and visit intention were performed. The effect of e-WOM quality of dessert cafe on perceived value was analyzed and the effect of perceived value on visit intention was analyzed. Based on these results, I would like to suggest theoretical implications and practical implications for online marketing of dessert cafes. This study was conducted to survey the customers who have visited dessert cafe through oral communication within the last 6 months. The survey was conducted from September 4, 2018 to September 18, 2018, and was used for the analysis of 317 additional items. The research hypotheses between the e-WOM quality of the dessert cafe and the utilitarian value, hedonic value, and visiting intention were used the structural equation model(SEM). First, neutrality and interactivity have a significant effect on utilitarian value, but consensus and vividness have not significant effect. Second, It was found that the consensus, vividness, and neutrality had a significant effect on the hedonic value but interactivity was not found to have a significant effect. Third, hedonic value has a significant effect on visit intention, but utilitarian value has not significant effect. As a result, online e-WOM quality management is important.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.191-211
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• 2013

The deployment of social network service(SNS) makes the social network game(SNG) as the new value added service of SNS be popular. But, a few study had identified the reason of this popularity and the elements of SNG. Based on the social presence theory and media richness theory, we had tried to identify three community artifacts (i.e. persistent labeling, self presentation and deep profiling) and two media characteristics(i.e. vividness and interactivity) as the SNG elements in this research. Then we had empirically validated the effect of these elements on the SNGexperience (i.e. social presence, perceived enjoyment) and behavioral intentions (i.e. Continuous usage intention, willingness to pay and loyalty) of the users. We conducted a survey to the actual SNG users. 243 data were collected and analyzed by PLS algorism. The results indicated that the community artifacts mediated by the social presence and media characteristics could significantly affect on the experiences and behavioral intentions. These findings could contribute to identify what element could be the reason of social network game popularity and could also contribute to design more attractive social network game in practice.

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