• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.65-93
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• 2011

As relationship between buyer and seller has been brought closer and long-term relationship has been more important in B2B markets, the importance of service and service convenience increases as well as product. In homogeneous markets, where service offerings are similar and therefore not key competitive differentiator, providing greater convenience may enable a competitive advantage. Service convenience, as conceptualized by Berry et al. (2002), is defined as the consumers' time and effort perceptions related to buying or using a service. For this reason, B2B customers are interested in how fast the service is provided and how much save non-monetary cost like time or effort by the service convenience along with service quality. Therefore, this study attempts to investigate the impact of service convenience on relationship factors such as relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and relationship performance. The purpose of this study is to find out whether service convenience can be a new antecedent of relationship quality and relationship performance. In addition, this study tries to examine how five-dimensional service convenience constructs (decision convenience, access convenience, transaction convenience, benefit convenience, post-benefit convenience) affect customers' relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and relationship performance. The service convenience comprises five fundamental components - decision convenience (the perceived time and effort costs associated with service purchase or use decisions), access convenience(the perceived time and effort costs associated with initiating service delivery), transaction convenience(the perceived time and effort costs associated with finalizing the transaction), benefit convenience(the perceived time and effort costs associated with experiencing the core benefits of the offering) and post-benefit convenience (the perceived time and effort costs associated with reestablishing subsequent contact with the firm). Earlier studies of perceived service convenience in the industrial market are none. The conventional studies that have dealt with service convenience have usually been made in the consumer market, or they have dealt with convenience aspects in the service process. This service convenience measure for consumer market can be useful tool to estimate service quality in B2B market. The conceptualization developed by Berry et al. (2002) reflects a multistage, experiential consumption process in which evaluations of convenience vary at each stage. For this reason, the service convenience measure is good for B2B service environment which has complex processes and various types. Especially when categorizing B2B service as sequential stage of service delivery like Kumar and Kumar (2004), the Berry's service convenience measure which reflect sequential flow of service deliveries suitable to establish B2B service convenience. For this study, data were gathered from respondents who often buy business service and analyzed by structural equation modeling. The sample size in the present study is 119. Composite reliability values and average variance extracted values were examined for each variable to have reliability. We determine whether the measurement model supports the convergent validity by CFA, and discriminant validity was assessed by examining the correlation matrix of the constructs. For each pair of constructs, the square root of the average variance extracted exceeded their correlations, thus supporting the discriminant validity of the constructs. Hypotheses were tested using the Smart PLS 2.0 and we calculated the PLS path values and followed with a bootstrap re-sampling method to test the hypotheses. Among the five dimensional service convenience constructs, four constructs (decision convenience, transaction convenience, benefit convenience, post-benefit convenience) affected customers' positive relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and relationship performance. This result means that service convenience is important cue to improve relationship between buyer and seller. One of the five service convenience dimensions, access convenience, does not affect relationship quality and performance, which implies that the dimension of service convenience is not important factor of cumulative satisfaction. The Cumulative satisfaction can be distinguished from transaction-specific customer satisfaction, which is an immediate post-purchase evaluative judgment or an affective reaction to the most recent transactional experience with the firm. Because access convenience minimizes the physical effort associated with initiating an exchange, the effect on relationship satisfaction similar to cumulative satisfaction may be relatively low in terms of importance than transaction-specific customer satisfaction. Also, B2B firms focus on service quality, price, benefit, follow-up service and so on than convenience of time or place in service because it is relatively difficult to change existing transaction partners in B2B market compared to consumer market. In addition, this study using partial least squares methods reveals that customers' satisfaction and commitment toward relationship has mediating role between the service convenience and relationship performance. The result shows that management and investment to improve service convenience make customers' positive relationship satisfaction, and then the positive relationship satisfaction can enhance the relationship commitment and relationship performance. And to conclude, service convenience management is an important part of successful relationship performance management, and the service convenience is an important antecedent of relationship between buyer and seller such as the relationship commitment and relationship performance. Therefore, it has more important to improve relationship performance that service providers enhance service convenience although competitive service development or service quality improvement is important. Given the pressure to provide increased convenience, it is not surprising that organizations have made significant investments in enhancing the convenience aspect of their product and service offering.

• Korea Science and Art Forum
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• v.27
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• pp.277-288
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• 2017

The number of science museums in Korea has expanded quantitatively from 72 in 2008 to 128 in 2016. This study started with the fact that the government puts a lot of budget into building a science museum, but there are more than one quarter of science museums with less than 50 spectators per day and many inefficient institutions. The number of visitors is an important factor in improving the efficiency of the science museum operation. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relation between the service quality of the science museum and the customer satisfaction and the intention to revisit and to find out what kind of effort should be concentrated in the science museum to attract more visitors. Questionnaires were written in the exhibition, education, and culture fields of the Gwacheon National Science Museum. The results were derived by frequency analysis, reliability analysis, factor analysis, and multiple regression analysis. The results and contents of the study are as follows. First, in the field of exhibition, the quality of exhibition facilities was expected to affect customer satisfaction and intention to return, but did not have a meaningful relationship. Second, the education sector has been found to affect customer satisfaction and return intention in all aspects of service quality (operation and contents, instructors, educational facilities and environment). Third, in the field of culture (event), the quality of the cultural program influences the visitor satisfaction, but it does not affect the intention to revisit. The science museum can provide satisfaction to visitors by combining activities such as science and arts. Despite the limitations, it is necessary to make efforts to improve the visitor satisfaction and revisit by proceeding with the convergence research on the entire National Science Museum in the future.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.113-125
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• 2013

Every company wants to know customer's requirement and makes an effort to meet them. Cause that, communication between customer and company became core competition of business and that important is increasing continuously. There are several strategies to find customer's needs, but VOC (Voice of customer) is one of most powerful communication tools and VOC gathering by several channels as telephone, post, e-mail, website and so on is so meaningful. So, almost company is gathering VOC and operating VOC system. VOC is important not only to business organization but also public organization such as government, education institute, and medical center that should drive up public service quality and customer satisfaction. Accordingly, they make a VOC gathering and analyzing System and then use for making a new product and service, and upgrade. In recent years, innovations in internet and ICT have made diverse channels such as SNS, mobile, website and call-center to collect VOC data. Although a lot of VOC data is collected through diverse channel, the proper utilization is still difficult. It is because the VOC data is made of very emotional contents by voice or text of informal style and the volume of the VOC data are so big. These unstructured big data make a difficult to store and analyze for use by human. So that, the organization need to automatic collecting, storing, classifying and analyzing system for unstructured big VOC data. This study propose an intelligent VOC analyzing system based on opinion mining to classify the unstructured VOC data automatically and determine the polarity as well as the type of VOC. And then, the basis of the VOC opinion analyzing system, called domain-oriented sentiment dictionary is created and corresponding stages are presented in detail. The experiment is conducted with 4,300 VOC data collected from a medical website to measure the effectiveness of the proposed system and utilized them to develop the sensitive data dictionary by determining the special sentiment vocabulary and their polarity value in a medical domain. Through the experiment, it comes out that positive terms such as "칭찬, 친절함, 감사, 무사히, 잘해, 감동, 미소" have high positive opinion value, and negative terms such as "퉁명, 뭡니까, 말하더군요, 무시하는" have strong negative opinion. These terms are in general use and the experiment result seems to be a high probability of opinion polarity. Furthermore, the accuracy of proposed VOC classification model has been compared and the highest classification accuracy of 77.8% is conformed at threshold with -0.50 of opinion classification of VOC. Through the proposed intelligent VOC analyzing system, the real time opinion classification and response priority of VOC can be predicted. Ultimately the positive effectiveness is expected to catch the customer complains at early stage and deal with it quickly with the lower number of staff to operate the VOC system. It can be made available human resource and time of customer service part. Above all, this study is new try to automatic analyzing the unstructured VOC data using opinion mining, and shows that the system could be used as variable to classify the positive or negative polarity of VOC opinion. It is expected to suggest practical framework of the VOC analysis to diverse use and the model can be used as real VOC analyzing system if it is implemented as system. Despite experiment results and expectation, this study has several limits. First of all, the sample data is only collected from a hospital web-site. It means that the sentimental dictionary made by sample data can be lean too much towards on that hospital and web-site. Therefore, next research has to take several channels such as call-center and SNS, and other domain like government, financial company, and education institute.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.93-108
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• 2019

This study analyzed the influence of experiential marketing factors of 3D printing and Internet services on technology acceptance factors and usage intention. Furthermore, we analyzed how the user's innovativeness shows the effect on the intention to use. Data acquired from a total of 518 college students was used for the final analysis, which was perfromed by SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 23.0 programs. The results of this study are as follows. We analyzed the influence of the experiential marketing factors of fashion service utilizing the 3D printing and the Internet of Things on the acceptance of technology and intention to use these technologies. As for 3D printing, first, sensory and behavioral factors are positively related to the acceptance of technology. Second, emotional and cognitive factors have negative effects on all technology acceptance. Third, relational factors did not show a significant influence on several conditions of technology acceptance. Fourth, the effects of technology acceptance on the willingness to use have a positive effect on several conditions factors, except the effort expectation. As for the result concerning the Internet of Things first, behavioral factors have a positive effect on all technology acceptance. Second, emotional factors have a negative effect on all technology acceptance. Third, cognitive factors did not have a significant effect on various conditions and showed negative effects on several factors. Fourth, sensory and relational factors did not affect the acceptance of technology. Fifth, the effects of technology acceptance on the intention to use are affected by several conditions, except for effort expectation. As a result of analyzing the moderating effects of user's innovativeness on the willingness to use, 3D printing did not show any significant effect on innovation. However, the Internet of Things has a significant influence on the user acceptance of technology acceptance.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2014

The goal-gradient hypothesis states that the tendency to approach a goal increases with the increasing proximity of the goal (Hull 1932). It was initially supported with an evidence of animal experiments and since then, several papers have investigated the goal-gradient hypothesis in humans. Although there are some evidences related to the goal-gradient hypothesis in human behaviors, none of previous studies can properly explain its underlying mechanism, and what's more, they were not able to suggest useful managerial applications in human behaviors. From these perspectives, this work points out that there are some theoretical weaknesses to apply the goal-gradient hypothesis into the complicated human decision-making behaviors and proposes an alternative theoretical mechanismthat underlies the goal-gradient hypothesis in human. Finally, it offers insights into managerial implications of the goal-gradient hypothesis in the marketing field. This study focuses on the changes in motivations for achieving goals, in terms of how approaches to goals vary according to temporal distance from those goals. Specifically, the temporal construal theory (Liberman and Trope 1998) is considered as the underlying mechanism of the goal-gradient in that the temporal construal theory argues how the temporal distance from a goal makes people change their associated values regarding to that goal. According to the temporal construal theory, the value of distant future outcomes (near future outcomes) is construed on the basis of abstract and central features (concrete and peripheral features), and it argues that distant future situations are construed on a higher level than near future situations. This means that the value associated with the high-level construal is enhanced over delay, whereas the value associated with the low-level construal is discounted over delay. Our propositions suggest that the goal-gradient behavior in human can be motivated by the different aspects or characteristics of the goal as time changes based on the temporal construal theory. Thus, the following propositions are proposed. P 1-1: If the goal is far away, consumers put more value on the central features that are more associated with the desirability of the goal. P 1-2: If the goal is far away, consumers put more effort into accomplishing the goal that has more central features, regardless of its peripheral features. P 2-1: If a goal is near, consumers put more value on the peripheral features that are more associated with the feasibility of the goal. P 2-2: If a goal is near, consumers put more effort into accomplishing the goal that has more peripheral features, regardless of its central features. We hope to provide sufficient managerial implications for the companies as our research aims to show how consumers react differently as they progress toward the goal. Proposed propositions may provide guidance for companies developing a loyalty program, enabling them to understand what kinds of benefits or services they should provide or emphasize to consumers in loyalty programs on the basis of the time-dependent changes in outcome values (such as gifts, reward coupons). The effects of temporal distance from a goal should inform companies' marketing activities and help themto determine where emphasis should be placed in designing the benefits of their loyalty program.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.135-161
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• 2011

Social commerce is a more recent phenomenon and growing in number and size with the diffusion of social networking services. But it has not been studied as extensively. The purpose of this study is to investigate consumers' social commerce usage intention empirically. Using the theory of reasoned action suggested by Fishbein and Ajzen(1975), this study tests that perceived value created by social commerce affects social commerce usage intention. In this study, authors e identify to the conception of perceived value as a multidimensional construct, economic, psychology, and time value. This study is to analyze the effects of the value perceived by the consumer on attitude toward social commerce and the effects of the attitude and subjective norm on social commerce usage intention. Additionally, we examine the moderating role of coupon redemption effort in the relationship between attitude toward social commerce and usage intention. In order to evaluative the validity of the model, 258 questionnaires were collected from college students who frequently use SNS and accept new trend and technology using internet survey. All the instrument items used in this study were adapted from previous research and the data were analyzed using SPSS 18 and AMOS 7. This study proposed several hypotheses and conducted an experiment to test these hypotheses. Based on the data analysis results, it was found that economic and psychology value has significant effects on attitude toward the social commerce but time value had not the effect on attitude toward the social commerce. And the present study has also shown that both attitude toward the social commerce and subjective norm significantly influenced usage intention. This finding suggests that the theory of reasoned action effectively explains the social commerce usage intention. The result regarding the moderating effect of the coupon redemption effort has shown that the attitude toward social commerce and usage intention is moderated by consumer perception about coupon redemption.

• Korean Business Review
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• v.17
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• pp.83-110
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• 2004

In modern society, there exists a growing tendency that the product image, rather than the substance of the product, is given more and more emphasis. In other words, consumers tend to purchase a product whose brand image coincides with their self image. Today, it is one of the essential factors for marketing strategy of a modern enterprise to have brand image perceived by consumer self-image. The image, by affecting the perception of consumers, explains the reason why some consumers choose one brand out of many brands that are available to them. Furthermore, brand-image perceived by consumers becomes more important factor in improving the company's market share. For this research, we investigated the theoretical background based on previous studies and collected statistical data through a market survey. The results of the actual research indicate that the attributes of the images differ notably depending upon demographic attributes; that the brand image judged by a customer is positively correlated to the customer's self image; and that the regression analysis of the purchase intention in accordance with coincidence of independent variables proved to be insignificant. But the correlation analysis of the variables shows that the sensuous image of a perceived brand image product notable differences in the purchase intention. Most of Consumers tend to prefer certain brand of causal wears in accordance with their cognized brand-image and self-image: social self-image and actual self-image. Corporate must not spare any effort to establish differential advantage. through better image or changing image. Also marketers have to identify the strengths and weakness of their brand in relation to the competition in setting up their brand management strategy. In conclusion, the outcomes of the study suggest that the consumers purchase the images of the brands, rather than the products themselves. Accordingly, in the clothes markets with similar quality levels, the emphasis should be put on differentiation of the brand images in order to further increase sales and maximize profits.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.51-60
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• 2015

Purpose - Among potential marketing strategies, the most efficient method to encourage purchase intention is through sales promotions. Sales promotions also serve to enhance customer satisfaction, which is closely related to the incidence of repurchases. Therefore, the success of retail stores greatly depends on the effectiveness of their promotional activities. The present study aimed to obtain the necessary information for apparel stores to establish more effective promotional activities. To this end, the study's specific research questions were to examine 1) consumer satisfaction with the recent sales promotions of retail apparel stores, 2) the levels of consumer preferences for different types of sales promotions (cash discounts, promotional gifts, prize drawings, discount coupons, stamp cards, or mileage cards), and 3) the differences in purchase intention according to preference levels for different types of sales promotions. Research design, data, and methodology - The research employed a descriptive survey method using a self-administered questionnaire. The sample consisted of 700 men (n=234) and women (n=466) ranging in age from their 20s to their 50s and residing in the Seoul area. Data were analyzed through methods including factor analysis as well as Cronbach's α coefficients, the t-test, ANOVA, and the Duncan test. Results - Differences among consumer preferences were identified for each type of sales promotion according to the purchase amount and the customer's age. In relation to purchase amounts below 500,000 won, participants in their 50s have lower preferences for price discounts than those in their 20s or 30s, whereas participants in their 40s or 50s have lower preferences for stamp cards and mileage cards than those in their 20s. When the purchase amount is greater than 500,000 won, housewives have higher preferences for promotional gifts than respondents with other occupations. However, no gender differences were found with regard to preference levels for the different types of sales promotions. Respondents generally exhibited mediocre satisfaction with the sales promotion events of retail apparel stores. They also expressed negative opinions about sales promotions when such promotions lead to high prices, as well as dissatisfaction with the poor quality of promotional gifts. It was also found that, regardless of the purchase amount, the groups with higher preferences for discount coupons and mileage cards displayed higher purchase intentions. Only when the purchase amount is greater than 200,000 won did the group with higher preferences for lottery system promotional gifts express higher purchase intentions. On the other hand, for all purchase amount sizes, there were no differences in purchase intentions according to preferences for cash discounts, promotional gifts, or stamp cards. Conclusions - The results revealed that greater effort must be devoted to enhancing consumers' satisfaction levels with the promotional activities performed by apparel retail stores. The results also showed that it is necessary to differentiate among sales promotion strategies according to preference levels for different types of sales promotions, purchase amounts, and target consumer ages.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-12
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• 2024

As the service robot market grows among the food technology industry, the quality of robot service that affects consumer behavioral intentions in the restaurant industry has become important. Serving robots, which are common in restaurants, reduce employee work through order and delivery, but because they do not respond to service failures, they increase customer dissatisfaction as well as increase employee work. In order to improve the quality of service beyond the simple function of receiving and serving orders, functions of recovery effort, fairness, empathy, responsiveness, and certainty of the process after service failure, such as serving employees, are also required. Accordingly, we assumed the type of failure of restaurant serving service as two internal and external factors, and developed a serving robot with a vocational ethics module to respond with a professional ethical attitude when the restaurant serving service fails. At this time, the expression and action of the serving robot were developed by adding a failure mode reflecting failure recovery efforts and empathy to the normal service mode. And by recruiting college students, we tested whether the service robot's response to two types of service failures had a significant effect on evaluating the robot. Participants responded that they were more uncomfortable with service failures caused by other customers' mistakes than robot mistakes, and that the serving robot's professional ethical empathy and response were appropriate. In addition, unlike the robot's favorability, the evaluation of the safety of the robot had a significant difference depending on whether or not a professional ethical empathy module was installed. A professional ethical empathy response module for natural service failure recovery using generative artificial intelligence should be developed and mounted, and the domestic serving robot industry and market are expected to grow more rapidly if the Korean serving robot certification system is introduced.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.91-107
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• 2023

Lean startup is a concept that combines the words "lean," meaning an efficient way of running a business, and "startup," meaning a new business. It is often cited as a strategy for minimizing failure in early-stage businesses, especially in software-based startups. By scrutinizing the case of a startup L, this study suggests that lean startup methodology(LSM) can be useful for hardware and manufacturing companies and identifies ways for early startups to successfully implement LSM. To this end, the study explained the core of LSM including the concepts of hypothesis-driven approach, BML feedback loop, minimum viable product(MVP), and pivot. Five criteria to evaluate the successful implementation of LSM were derived from the core concepts and applied to evaluate the case of startup L . The early startup L pivoted its main business model from defecation alert system for patients with limited mobility to one for infants or toddlers, and finally to a smart bottle for infants. In developing the former two products, analyzed from LSM's perspective, company L neither established a specific customer value proposition for its startup idea and nor verified it through MVP experiment, thus failed to create a BML feedback loop. However, through two rounds of pivots, startup L discovered new target customers and customer needs, and was able to establish a successful business model by repeatedly experimenting with MVPs with minimal effort and time. In other words, Company L's case shows that it is essential to go through the customer-market validation stage at the beginning of the business, and that it should be done through an MVP method that does not waste the startup's time and resources. It also shows that it is necessary to abandon and pivot a product or service that customers do not want, even if it is technically superior and functionally complete. Lastly, the study proves that the lean startup methodology is not limited to the software industry, but can also be applied to technology-based hardware industry. The findings of this study can be used as guidelines and methodologies for early-stage companies to minimize failures and to accelerate the process of establishing a business model, scaling up, and going global.