• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.245-276
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• 2008

Brand equity is one of the most important concepts in business practice as well as in academic research. Successful brands can allow marketers to gain competitive advantage (Lassar et al.,1995), including the opportunity for successful extensions, resilience against competitors' promotional pressures, and the ability to create barriers to competitive entry (Farquhar, 1989). Branding plays a special role in service firms because strong brands increase trust in intangible products (Berry, 2000), enabling customers to better visualize and understand them. They reduce customers' perceived monetary, social, and safety risks in buying services, which are obstacles to evaluating a service correctly before purchase. Also, a high level of brand equity increases consumer satisfaction, repurchasing intent, and degree of loyalty. Brand equity can be considered as a mixture that includes both financial assets and relationships. Actually, brand equity can be viewed as the value added to the product (Keller, 1993), or the perceived value of the product in consumers' minds. Mahajan et al. (1990) claim that customer-based brand equity can be measured by the level of consumers' perceptions. Several researchers discuss brand equity based on two dimensions: consumer perception and consumer behavior. Aaker (1991) suggests measuring brand equity through price premium, loyalty, perceived quality, and brand associations. Viewing brand equity as the consumer's behavior toward a brand, Keller (1993) proposes similar dimensions: brand awareness and brand knowledge. Thus, past studies tend to identify brand equity as a multidimensional construct consisted of brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand knowledge, customer satisfaction, perceived equity, brand associations, and other proprietary assets (Aaker, 1991, 1996; Blackston, 1995; Cobb-Walgren et al., 1995; Na, 1995). Other studies tend to regard brand equity and other brand assets, such as brand knowledge, brand awareness, brand image, brand loyalty, perceived quality, and so on, as independent but related constructs (Keller, 1993; Kirmani and Zeithaml, 1993). Walters(1978) defined information search as, "A psychological or physical action a consumer takes in order to acquire information about a product or store." But, each consumer has different methods for informationsearch. There are two methods of information search, internal and external search. Internal search is, "Search of information already saved in the memory of the individual consumer"(Engel, Blackwell, 1982) which is, "memory of a previous purchase experience or information from a previous search."(Beales, Mazis, Salop, and Staelin, 1981). External search is "A completely voluntary decision made in order to obtain new information"(Engel & Blackwell, 1982) which is, "Actions of a consumer to acquire necessary information by such methods as intentionally exposing oneself to advertisements, taking to friends or family or visiting a store."(Beales, Mazis, Salop, and Staelin, 1981). There are many sources for consumers' information search including advertisement sources such as the internet, radio, television, newspapers and magazines, information supplied by businesses such as sales people, packaging and in-store information, consumer sources such as family, friends and colleagues, and mass media sources such as consumer protection agencies, government agencies and mass media sources. Understanding consumers' purchasing behavior is a key factor of a firm to attract and retain customers and improving the firm's prospects for survival and growth, and enhancing shareholder's value. Therefore, marketers should understand consumer as individual and market segment. One theory of consumer behavior supports the belief that individuals are rational. Individuals think and move through stages when making a purchase decision. This means that rational thinkers have led to the identification of a consumer buying decision process. This decision process with its different levels of involvement and influencing factors has been widely accepted and is fundamental to the understanding purchase intention represent to what consumers think they will buy. Brand equity is not only companies but also very important asset more than product itself. This paper studies brand equity model and influencing factors including information process such as information searching and information resources in the fashion market in Asia and Europe. Information searching and information resources are influencing brand knowledge that influences consumers purchase decision. Nine research hypotheses are drawn to test the relationships among antecedents of brand equity and purchase intention and relationships among brand knowledge, brand value, brand attitude, and brand loyalty. H1. Information searching influences brand knowledge positively. H2. Information sources influence brand knowledge positively. H3. Brand knowledge influences brand attitude. H4. Brand knowledge influences brand value. H5. Brand attitude influences brand loyalty. H6. Brand attitude influences brand value. H7. Brand loyalty influences purchase intention. H8. Brand value influence purchase intention. H9. There will be the same research model in Asia and Europe. We performed structural equation model analysis in order to test hypotheses suggested in this study. The model fitting index of the research model in Asia was $X^2$=195.19(p=0.0), NFI=0.90, NNFI=0.87, CFI=0.90, GFI=0.90, RMR=0.083, AGFI=0.85, which means the model fitting of the model is good enough. In Europe, it was $X^2$=133.25(p=0.0), NFI=0.81, NNFI=0.85, CFI=0.89, GFI=0.90, RMR=0.073, AGFI=0.85, which means the model fitting of the model is good enough. From the test results, hypotheses were accepted. All of these hypotheses except one are supported. In Europe, information search is not an antecedent of brand knowledge. This means that sales of global fashion brands like jeans in Europe are not expanding as rapidly as in Asian markets such as China, Japan, and South Korea. Young consumers in European countries are not more brand and fashion conscious than their counter partners in Asia. The results have theoretical, practical meaning and contributions. In the fashion jeans industry, relatively few studies examining the viability of cross-national brand equity has been studied. This study provides insight on building global brand equity and suggests information process elements like information search and information resources are working differently in Asia and Europe for fashion jean market.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.41-54
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• 2011

Given the prevalence of home trading systems, it has become important to examine user behaviors in a stock investment environment. In this vein, this paper developed an integrated model to deeply understand the key determinants of user's continuance intention to use investment information through constructs prescribed by incorporating trust and perceived risk into expectation-confirmation model. The proposed research model was tested by using survey data collected from 160 users who have experience with stock investment. PLS (partial least squares) was employed for the analysis of the data. The findings of this study showed that the proposed framework provides a statistically significant explanation of the variation in continuance intention to search investment information. The findings revealed that trust and perceived risk are more prevalent predictors of continuance intention to use investment information compared to perceived usefulness. It was also found that user satisfaction serves as the salient antecedents of continuance intention to use investment information. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings were described.

• Journal of Families and Better Life
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• v.32 no.2
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• pp.117-130
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• 2014

Since 1992, with the beginning of trade between Korea and China, their commercial relationship has become closer than before. As a result of better quality of life, the consumers of the two countries value well-being more the before. Thus, this paper examined the information search, awareness, purchasing motivation, and purchasing intention of well-being food of Korean and Chinese consumers, and identified the dominant factors influencing the purchasing intentions of well-being food. Firstly, the information searches of well-being food showed significant differences between the Korean and Chinese consumers. Secondly, the awareness of well-being food between the consumers of the two countries did not show significant differences. Thirdly, the results about the purchasing motivation of well-being food showed that the Chinese consumers had stronger purchasing motivation related to 'social responsibility' than that of Korean consumers, and the differences were significant. Fourthly, the results on the purchasing intentions of well-being food indicated that the Chinese consumers had greater intentions than Korean consumers. Fifthly, for the Korean consumers, the variables influencing the purchasing intentions of well-being food were the considerations of health care, purchasing motivation ('personal desire'), and the awareness of well-being food. For the Chinese consumers, the awareness of well-being food, gender (female), information search of well-being food, and education were formed the main variables.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.105-115
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• 2010

Search engines provide web documents that are related to user's query. However, using only the query terms that user provided, it is hard for search engines to know user's exact intention and provide the very matching web documents. To remedy this problem, search systems are needed to exploit personalized search technologies. In this paper, we propose not only a novel personalized query recommendation scheme based on folksonomy but also a new personalized search service architecture which reduces the risk of privacy violation while enabling search service providers to provide other various personalized services such as personalized advertisement.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.79-100
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• 2015

This study is to examine the factors that influence purchasing behavior and decision-making when consumers buy goods through mobile shopping, define purchasing decision-making with the steps of problem recognition, information search, alternative assessment, and purchasing behavior to understand mobile consumer behavior, and investigate how the factors of each step play roles and influence consumers' purchasing decision-making through positive analysis to figure out consumer purchasing behavior in mobile shopping. The study results, First, the user characteristics of information search influence flow. Second, in the relations between the user characteristics in the step of information search and perceived risk in alternative assessment, if recognition on gains is higher, perceived risk for time loss gets lower, and when the level of skills is higher, perceived risk gets higher, and it has been partly adopted that innovativeness does not influence risk perception. Third, in the relations between flow experience and purchasing intention, it has been found to be partially significant that remote presence and challenge do not influence purchasing intention but do influence excitement, attention concentration, and control and also do influence perceived risk and purchasing intention. Fourth, according to the results of analyzing the difference of consumer purchasing behavior by the types of involvement, practical involvement and sensual involvement, user characteristics and flow, and perceived risk differ by the types of products in terms of the search process, thereby changing purchasing intention. Lastly, the significance and limitations of this study was discussed.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.99-113
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• 2009

The goal of this article is to ascertain the factors that govern consumers' choosing to outbound travel product. The authors assess the consumers' travel product choosing processes with information search(internal knowledge, external information knowledge). alternative evaluation(perceived image, emotional experience, price acceptability, appeal, trust), and alternative choice(purchasing intention). Using data on Thailand travel product, the authors find considerable results and conclude by discussing prescriptive recommendations for the travel industry.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.644-655
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• 2020

The study examined differences between perceptions of AI speakers and intention to continuous use of AI speakers according to usage function. We divided usage patterns into single- and multi-function orientations based on the usage by different functions of audio content (music, news, and search), and analyzed the differences between perceptions of using AI speakers and the intention to continuous use. 335 men and women who had experience using AI speakers participated in an online survey. Results are as follows. First, men used AI speakers mainly for acquiring news, and the extent to which 20s and 40s acquire news was different. Second, perceptions of usefulness and ease of use were found to be higher in the multi-functional group(music-news-search). Last, regarding the intention to continuous use of AI speakers, the multi-functional group was highest, and users focusing on music listening were relatively higher than users for other functions. The findings of the study are expected to be used as foundational data for expanding the use of AI speakers and developing strategies for service provision in each AI speaker brand.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.6
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• pp.212-220
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• 2013

Recently, there has been tremendous increase in human-computer/machine interaction system, where the goal is to provide with an appropriate service to the user at the right time with minimal human inputs for human augmented cognition system. To develop an efficient human augmented cognition system based on human computer/machine interaction, it is important to interpret the user's implicit intention, which is vague, in addition to the explicit intention. According to cognitive visual-motor theory, human eye movements and pupillary responses are rich sources of information about human intention and behavior. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the identification of human implicit visual search intention based on eye movement pattern and pupillary analysis such as pupil size, gradient of pupil size variation, fixation length/count for the area of interest. The proposed model identifies the human's implicit intention into three types such as navigational intent generation, informational intent generation, and informational intent disappearance. Navigational intent refers to the search to find something interesting in an input scene with no specific instructions, while informational intent refers to the search to find a particular target object at a specific location in the input scene. In the present study, based on the human eye movement pattern and pupillary analysis, we used a hierarchical support vector machine which can detect the transitions between the different implicit intents - navigational intent generation to informational intent generation and informational intent disappearance.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.33-41
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• 2003

It is not easy to find desired information in the world wide web. In this research, we introduce a notion of concept network that is useful in finding information if it is used in search engines that are specialized in domains such as medicine, law or engineering. The concept network that we propose is a network in which nodes represent significant concepts in the domain, and links represent relationships between the concepts. We may use the concept network constructor as a preprocessor to speci-alized search engines. When user enters a target word to find information, our system generates and displays a concept network in which nodes are con-cepts that are closely related with the target word. By reviewing the network, user may confirm that the target word is properly selected for his intention, otherwise he may replace the target word with better ones discovered in the network. In this research, we propose a detailed method to construct concept net-work, implemented a prototypical system that constructs concept networks, and illustrate its usefulness by demonstrating a practical case.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.71-97
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• 2012

There has been an upward trend in smartphone sales in Korea as well as the rest of the world. Even though smartphones are now at the peak of their popularity, the fact that they are somewhat limited in terms of their usages for certain purposes is unexpected. Precisely, compared to PC, smartphones typically have smaller display screens with a lower resolution, which make them difficult to use in general. For instance, when customers search the information about products in mobile shopping malls, due to the smaller screen with a low resolution smartphone users may realize that it is not easy and convenient not only to search the information, but also to read the information they found in the shopping malls. This restriction could become one of reasons that lowers the perceived quality of information in the shopping malls, which in turn leads to the reluctance to use the shopping malls. A comprehensive information systems (IS) literature review found that there has been little empirical evidence on perceived information quality that affects smartphone users' intention to use mobile shopping malls. The purposes of this study is to examine 1) the effects of perceived information quality on smartphone users' intention to use mobile shopping malls and 2) the relationships among behavioral beliefs in the middle of independent and dependent variables, such as information satisfaction, perceived usefulness, and customers' attitude toward mobile shopping. A survey was conducted in March 2012. College students and practitioners took participated in the survey. Structural Equation Modeling(SEM) was used for all data analysis. The results found that there is a strong relationship between perceived information quality and smartphone users' intention to use mobile shopping malls. In addition, this study also showed that there are strong relationships among behavioral beliefs. Further research is expected to validate the findings of this study and apply them in specific contexts.