• Journal of Smart Tourism
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.31-44
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• 2021

The emergence of the digital economy and easy accessibility to Web 2.0 tools has seen an expansion of the influencer ecosystem within the travel and tourism industry. Founded on the principles of reference groups and peer reference there is a growing trend amongst industry practitioners who are now opting to move away from many of the traditional approaches used to market their products and services and are instead taking advantage of the concept of e-word-of-mouth (eWOM). Whilst there is a growing body of academic literature addressing the notion of influencer marketing, there is little understanding of influencer marketers themselves. Consequentially, this study addresses this gap in the literature through the quantitative examination of those who promote products, services, or companies by distributing eWOM through their online digital channels and presence; otherwise known as travel influencers. A quantitative research approach involving an online survey yielded 255 responses from travel influencers. The research findings indicate that those who work in this field prefer not to be awarded the label "travel influencer," focusing instead on their specific method of influencing, such as blogging and vlogging or sharing Instagram updates. The research also demonstrates how the new influencers have a strong role in generating travel urge and desire. The research contributes to the wider body of academic literature and travel industry practitioners by establishing the general profile of influencers and their increasingly specialized role in tourism and hospitality marketing.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.77-89
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• 2024

This study investigated central and peripheral route factors to assess the impact of Google Advertisements on how these factors contribute to users' call-to-action (CTA) and electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) behaviors. We explored the persuasive effects of Google Advertisements on consumers by using a dataset of 483 valid empirical samples from Taiwan. We employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the hypotheses. The empirical results of this study indicate that both peripheral (image appeal) and central (information completeness) routes positively lead to the persuasion effect. This finding confirms that the peripheral and central routes increase the persuasion effect. The empirical results indicate that the most effective pathway was image appeal to the persuasion effect and, ultimately, to call to action. Image appeal was also determined to be a secondary pathway that enhances the persuasion effect, ultimately leading to e-WOM. These findings have valuable implications for companies seeking to attract customers to purchase electronic products through the Google search engine. The novelty of our study is that it includes the peripheral route. Our study findings were derived from the symbolic value lens, rather than the central route based solely on the utilitarian and hedonistic value perspective.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.15 no.7
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• pp.403-413
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• 2015

Social media has recently become one of the primary tools for viral marketing as an effective advertising channel, in order to maximize effects of world-of-mouth through social media, it is very important to obtain customer experience-centric differentiated contents in offline. However, viral marketing is still being implemented mainly based on online channels because of the lack of effective services and methods to support social medial marketing in conjunction with offline. On that account, this study proposes O2O(Online to Offline) based social media marketing method allowing customers to connect their personal experience conveniently and easily in offline in which they voluntarily participate. Furthermore, this study aims to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method by analyzing the empirical cases thereof. This study would eventually contribute to the vitalization of social media marketing market by enabling customers to obtain personalized posts as connecting online to offline organically and also by allowing corporations to get an ample amount of useful CRM information for planning marketing strategies.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.215-227
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• 2013

Currently, improved quality of life has facilitated consumers' indulgence in a diverse range of cultural cuisines. Consequently, the evolvement of the food service industry has been developing itself according to the diversified needs of the consumers. In particular, a great amount of interest has been expressed in a new form of food service known as family restaurants. Family restaurant service providers have begun to provide information regarding family restaurant usage, including various foods and services, through their websites in order to yield better service to consumers. For family restaurant service providers, comprehending the consumers' purpose of using the company's websites is a crucial managerial issue and it plays an important role in the development of good marketing strategies. There exists a distinction in websites usage purposes according to the different values of consumers; the hedonic value and the utilitarian value. When consumers gain satisfaction through family restaurant websites usage, this satisfaction extends to word of mouth communication effect. In order to develop good Internet marketing strategies, this study is prepared to assist family restaurant service providers understand the relationships among customer value, usage purpose, customer satisfaction, and word of mouth communication with regards to the family restaurant websites. The results of this study provide useful implications to understand consumer behavior and to develop marketing strategies in a family restaurant websites.

• Journal of Information Technology Services
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.227-240
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• 2012

Given the prevalence of internet and web 2.0, SNS(Social Network Service) market is growing rapidly. IT providers which focused marketing point on network hub have become to disseminate SNS mainly now. Many users are using the various functions of SNS to communicate each other or share the information. At this point, identifying the influencing factors to WOM(Word-Of-Mouth) of SNS is very important. In this paper, we aim to examine the effects of perceived variables on the WOM of SNS. In order to analyze the antecedents, we selected perceived factors such as perceived usefulness, perceived easiness, perceived enjoyment and perceived crowd. For statistical analysis, we surveyed real users of SNS. As a result, all antecedents of WOM showed significant influence and among the variables the perceived enjoyment has top standardized coefficient. In addition, perceived crowd has significant on perceived easiness, perceived enjoyment but not on perceived usefulness. The result of this research can be useful guidelines to increase SNS Market.

• Korean Management Science Review
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.29-43
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• 2015

Word-of-Mouth (WOM), which is the unpaid spread of a positive marketing message from person to person, has been shown to be even more effective in influencing purchase decisions than traditional advertising channels. The effects of WOM might be different by types of persuaders (purchasers vs. non-purchasers), however, the current body of research has not given attention to the differential effects of WOM. This study focuses on whether or not potential customers are influenced by the WOM from non-purchasers as well as from purchasers, and it investigates if the impacts of WOM from non-purchasers are different with those from purchasers. Based on conjoint analyses, it concludes that potential customers are affected by the communication with non-purchasers as well as with purchasers but the impacts of non-purchasers are not greater than those of purchasers.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.3169-3181
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• 2015

Nowadays, online word-of-mouth has become a powerful influencer to marketing and sales in business. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis is frequently adopted at market research and business analytics field for analyzing word-of-mouth content. However, there still remain several challengeable areas for 1) sentiment analysis aiming for Korean word-of-mouth content in film market, 2) availability of machine learning models only using linguistic features, 3) effect of the size of the feature set. This study took a sample of 10,000 movie reviews which had posted extremely negative/positive rating in a movie portal site, and conducted sentiment analysis with four machine learning algorithms: naïve Bayesian, decision tree, neural network, and support vector machines. We found neural network and support vector machine produced better accuracy than naïve Bayesian and decision tree on every size of the feature set. Besides, the performance of them was boosting with increasing of the feature set size.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.151-163
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• 2018

Today, the development of internet brings many changes in formation exploration and acceptance. Not only the customers can come into contact much information about the firm and its product by quick and easy search, but also they produce information by themselves or can spread the information via the internet. Nowadays, customers are progressive information explorer and producer on online. In this sense, this study examined the effects of e-word-of-mouth information characteristics on the consumer's perceived usefulness and perceived acceptance of e-word-of-mouth information in the food service industry in order to suggest directions to enhances marketing strategies for marketer. The research model for this study was designed based on the hypothesis that the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth information and credibility of the information influenced both the user's perceived usefulness and acceptance. Based on total 277 customers obtained from the empirical research, this study reviewed validity, reliability and fitness of research model. The analysis results on these factors are as follow. First, the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth information; vividness, consensus, direction had an influence on the customer's perceived usefulness. Second, the characteristics of e-word-of-mouth information; vividness, consensus, direction had an influence on the customer's perceived acceptance. Third, the reliability of information had an influence on the customer's perceived usefulness and the credibility of e-word-of-mouth information perceived acceptance. Fourth, the customer's perceived usefulness had an influence on the customer's perceived acceptance.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.85-93
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• 2023

Purpose: This research is intended to analyze how distribution of brand communication of a Soft Drink brand on brand image mediated through electronic word of mouth on packaged carbonated drink in Indonesian Gen-Z. This research also aims to find out how electronic word of mouth can have a role in creating a brand image for Indonesia Gen-Z. Research design, data and methodology: This research is using a quantitative approach with purposive sampling technique, a survey was conduct online and the number of samples being 384 responders who are spread all over Indonesia. The questionnaire construct was designed based on several variables, such as brand communication, brand image, and e-WOM. E-WOM was positioned as a mediating variable in this research. Brand Communication indicators consist of event and experience, public relation and publicity, direct marketing and personal selling. Meanwhile brand image consists of Attributes, Benefits, and Attitudes. E-WOM indicators consist of intensity, balance of opinion, and content. Results: The result of this research being (1) There is a significant influence between brand communication and brand image. (2) There is a significant influence between brand communication and electronic word-of-mouth. And (3) There is a significant influence between brand communication and brand image mediated through electronic word-of-mouth. Conclusion: The findings of this research prove that there is significant influence between brand communication, brand image and electronic word-of-mouth, this study also provide several information about how other factor affect the distribution of brand communication.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.707-723
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• 2016

The purpose of this study is to focus on the effects of different channel types of Word-of-Mouth on the product attitude. Additionally, the product involvement and gender are considered as moderating variables. The results of this study show that different word-of-mouth channel types have different effects on the product attitude, that is, off-line has more influence than on-line does. Also the product involvement moderates the relationship between the channel types of word-of-mouth and the product attitude, while the gender does not. The results imply that while building the word-of-mouth marketing strategy, companies should not only pay attention to the on-line media channel, but lay importance on the off-line communication channel.