• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.135-148
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• 2010

Arab boycotts of Danish products, Australian boycotts of French products and Chinese consumer aversion toward Japanese products are all examples of how adverse actions at the country level might impact consumers' behavior. The animosity literature has examined how consumers react to the adverse actions of other countries, and how such animosity impacts consumers' attitudes and preferences for products from the transgressing country. For example, Chinese consumers are less likely to buy Japanese products because of Japanese atrocities during World War II and the unjust economic dealings of the Japanese (Klein, Ettenson and Morris 1998). The marketing literature, however, has not examined how consumers react to adverse actions committed by their own country against other countries, and whether such actions affect their attitudes towards purchasing products that originated from the adversely affected country. The social psychology literature argues that consumers will experience a feeling called collective guilt, in response to such adverse actions. Collective guilt stems from the distress experienced by group members when they accept that their group is responsible for actions that have harmed another group (Branscombe, Slugoski, and Kappenn 2004). Examples include Americans feeling guilty about the atrocities committed by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison (Iyer, Schamder and Lickel 2007), and the Dutch about their occupation of Indonesia in the past (Doosje et al. 1998). The primary aim of this study is to examine consumers' perceptions of adverse actions by members of one's own country against another country and whether such perceptions affected their attitudes towards products originating from the country transgressed against. More specifically, one objective of this study is to examine the perceptual antecedents of collective guilt, an emotional reaction to adverse actions performed by members of one's country against another country. Another objective is to examine the impact of collective guilt on consumers' perceptions of, and preference for, products originating from the country transgressed against by the consumers' own country. If collective guilt emerges as a significant predictor, companies originating from countries that have been transgressed against might be able to capitalize on such unfortunate events. This research utilizes the animosity model introduced by Klein, Ettenson and Morris (1998) and later expanded on by Klein (2002). Klein finds that U.S. consumers harbor animosity toward the Japanese. This animosity is experienced in response to events that occurred during World War II (i.e., the bombing of Pearl Harbor) and more recently the perceived economic threat from Japan. Thus this study argues that the events of Word War II (i.e., bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) might lead U.S. consumers to experience collective guilt. A series of three hypotheses were introduced. The first hypothesis deals with the antecedents of collective guilt. Previous research argues that collective guilt is experienced when consumers perceive that the harm following a transgression is illegitimate and that the country from which the transgressors originate should be responsible for the adverse actions. (Wohl, Branscombe, and Klar 2006). Therefore the following hypothesis was offered: H1a. Higher levels of perceived illegitimacy for the harm committed will result in higher levels of collective guilt. H1b. Higher levels of responsibility will be positively associated with higher levels of collective guilt. The second and third hypotheses deal with the impact of collective guilt on the preferences for Japanese products. Klein (2002) found that higher levels of animosity toward Japan resulted in a lower preference for a Japanese product relative to a South Korean product but not a lower preference for a Japanese product relative to a U.S. product. These results therefore indicate that the experience of collective guilt will lead to a higher preference for a Japanese product if consumers are contemplating a choice that inv olves a decision to buy Japanese versus South Korean product but not if the choice involves a decision to buy a Japanese versus a U.S. product. H2. Collective guilt will be positively related to the preference for a Japanese product over a South Korean product, but will not be related to the preference for a Japanese product over a U.S. product. H3. Collective guilt will be positively related to the preference for a Japanese product over a South Korean product, holding constant product judgments and animosity. An experiment was conducted to test the hypotheses. The illegitimacy of the harm and responsibility were manipulated by exposing respondents to a description of adverse events occurring during World War II. Data were collected using an online consumer panel in the United States. Subjects were randomly assigned to either the low levels of responsibility and illegitimacy condition (n=259) or the high levels of responsibility and illigitemacy (n=268) condition. Latent Variable Structural Equation Modeling (LVSEM) was used to test the hypothesized relationships. The first hypothesis is supported as both the illegitimacy of the harm and responsibility assigned to the Americans for the harm committed against the Japanese during WWII have a positive impact on collective guilt. The second hypothesis is also supported as collective guilt is positively related to preference for a Japanese product over a South Korean product but is not related to preference for a Japanese product over a U.S. product. Finally there is support for the third hypothesis, since collective guilt is positively related to the preference for a Japanese product over a South Korean product while controlling for the effect of product judgments about Japanese products and animosity. The results of these studies lead to several conclusions. First, the illegitimacy of harm and responsibility can be manipulated and that they are antecedents of collective guilt. Second, collective guilt has an impact on a consumers' decision when they face a choice set that includes a product from the country that was the target of the adverse action and a product from another foreign country. This impact however disappears from a consumers' decision when they face a choice set that includes a product from the country that was the target of the adverse action and a domestic product. This result suggests that collective guilt might be a viable factor for company originating from the country transgressed against if its competitors are foreign but not if they are local.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.195-211
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• 2010

An exhibition is defined as market events for specific duration to present exhibitors' main product range to either business or private visitors, and it also plays a key role as effective marketing channels. Especially, as the effect of the opinions of the visitors after the exhibition impacts directly on sales or the image of companies, exhibition organizers must consider various needs of visitors. To meet needs of visitors, ubiquitous technologies have been applied in some exhibitions. However, despite of the development of the ubiquitous technologies, their services cannot always reflect visitors' preferences as they only generate information when visitors request. As a result, they have reached their limit to meet needs of visitors, which consequently might lead them to loss of marketing opportunity. Recommendation systems can be the right type to overcome these limitations. They can recommend the booths to coincide with visitors' preferences, so that they help visitors who are in difficulty for choices in exhibition environment. One of the most successful and widely used technologies for building recommender systems is called Collaborative Filtering. Traditional recommender systems, however, only use neighbors' evaluations or behaviors for a personalized prediction. Therefore, they can not reflect visitors' dynamic preference, and also lack of accuracy in exhibition environment. Although there is much useful information to infer visitors' preference in ubiquitous environment (e.g., visitors' current location, booth visit path, and so on), they use only limited information for recommendation. In this study, we propose a booth recommendation methodology using Sequential Association Rule which considers the sequence of visiting. Recent studies of Sequential Association Rule use the constraints to improve the performance. However, since traditional Sequential Association Rule considers the whole rules to recommendation, they have a scalability problem when they are adapted to a large exhibition scale. To solve this problem, our methodology composes the confidence database before recommendation process. To compose the confidence database, we first search preceding rules which have the frequency above threshold. Next, we compute the confidences of each preceding rules to each booth which is not contained in preceding rules. Therefore, the confidence database has two kinds of information which are preceding rules and their confidence to each booth. In recommendation process, we just generate preceding rules of the target visitors based on the records of the visits, and recommend booths according to the confidence database. Throughout these steps, we expect reduction of time spent on recommendation process. To evaluate proposed methodology, we use real booth visit records which are collected by RFID technology in IT exhibition. Booth visit records also contain the visit sequence of each visitor. We compare the performance of proposed methodology with traditional Collaborative Filtering system. As a result, our proposed methodology generally shows higher performance than traditional Collaborative Filtering. We can also see some features of it in experimental results. First, it shows the highest performance at one booth recommendation. It detects preceding rules with some portions of visitors. Therefore, if there is a visitor who moved with very a different pattern compared to the whole visitors, it cannot give a correct recommendation for him/her even though we increase the number of recommendation. Trained by the whole visitors, it cannot correctly give recommendation to visitors who have a unique path. Second, the performance of general recommendation systems increase as time expands. However, our methodology shows higher performance with limited information like one or two time periods. Therefore, not only can it recommend even if there is not much information of the target visitors' booth visit records, but also it uses only small amount of information in recommendation process. We expect that it can give real?time recommendations in exhibition environment. Overall, our methodology shows higher performance ability than traditional Collaborative Filtering systems, we expect it could be applied in booth recommendation system to satisfy visitors in exhibition environment.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.197-218
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• 2019

In addition to economic growth and national income increase, China is also experiencing rapid growth in consumption of cosmetics. About 67% of the total trade volume of Chinese cosmetics is made by e-commerce and especially K-Beauty products, which are Korean cosmetics are very popular. According to previous studies, 80% of consumer goods such as cosmetics are affected by the word of mouth information, searching the product information before purchase. Mostly, consumers acquire information related to cosmetics through comments made by other consumers on SNS such as SINA Weibo and Wechat, and recently they also use information about beauty related video channels. Most of the previous online word-of-mouth researches were mainly focused on media itself such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. However, the informational characteristics and the expression forms are also diverse. Typical types are text, picture, and video. This study focused on these types. We analyze the unstructured data of SINA Weibo, the SNS representative platform of China, and Meipai, the video platform, and analyze the impact of K-Beauty brand sales by dividing online word-of-mouth information with quantity and direction information. We analyzed about 330,000 data from Meipai, and 110,000 data from SINA Weibo and analyzed the basic properties of cosmetics. As a result of analysis, the amount of online word-of-mouth information has a positive effect on the sales of cosmetics irrespective of the type of media. However, the online videos showed higher impacts than the pictures and texts. Therefore, it is more effective for companies to carry out advertising and promotional activities in parallel with the existing SNS as well as video related information. It is understood that it is important to generate the frequency of exposure irrespective of media type. The positiveness of the video media was significant but the positiveness of the picture and text media was not significant. Due to the nature of information types, the amount of information in video media is more than that in text-oriented media, and video-related channels are emerging all over the world. In particular, China has made a number of video platforms in recent years and has enjoyed popularity among teenagers and thirties. As a result, existing SNS users are being dispersed to video media. We also analyzed the effect of online type of information on the online cosmetics sales by dividing the product type of cosmetics into basic cosmetics and color cosmetics. As a result, basic cosmetics had a positive effect on the sales according to the number of online videos and it was affected by the negative information of the videos. In the case of basic cosmetics, effects or characteristics do not appear immediately like color cosmetics, so information such as changes after use is often transmitted over a period of time. Therefore, it is important for companies to move more quickly to issues generated from video media. Color cosmetics are largely influenced by negative oral statements and sensitive to picture and text-oriented media. Information such as picture and text has the advantage and disadvantage that the process of making it can be made easier than video. Therefore, complaints and opinions are generally expressed in SNS quickly and immediately. Finally, we analyzed how product diversity affects sales according to online word of mouth information type. As a result of the analysis, it can be confirmed that when a variety of products are introduced in a video channel, they have a positive effect on online cosmetics sales. The significance of this study in the theoretical aspect is that, as in the previous studies, online sales have basically proved that K-Beauty cosmetics are also influenced by word-of-mouth. However this study focused on media types and both media have a positive impact on sales, as in previous studies, but it has been proven that video is more informative and influencing than text, depending on media abundance. In addition, according to the existing research on information direction, it is said that the negative influence has more influence, but in the basic study, the correlation is not significant, but the effect of negation in the case of color cosmetics is large. In the case of temporal fashion products such as color cosmetics, fast oral effect is influenced. In practical terms, it is expected that it will be helpful to use advertising strategies on the sales and advertising strategy of K-Beauty cosmetics in China by distinguishing basic and color cosmetics. In addition, it can be said that it recognized the importance of a video advertising strategy such as YouTube and one-person media. The results of this study can be used as basic data for analyzing the big data in understanding the Chinese cosmetics market and establishing appropriate strategies and marketing utilization of related companies.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.69-98
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• 2009

We investigated what factors motivate gamers to participate in a guild and why they continue to be engaged as members of the guild. We find that, based on the result of focus group interviews with MMORPG gamers, social support and self-esteem factors play important roles. Considering both prior research and the focus group interviews we have conducted, we define social support and character control as independent variables. Character identity, guild identity, and self-esteem are proposed as mediating variables while guild flow and game loyalty as dependent variables. Accordingly, we develop the research model and hypotheses, and verify them empirically. Based on our experiences of playing the WoW game, we proposed a research model and conducted focus-group interviews (FGIs). FGIs involve formulating a hypothesis and then collecting some relevant data. FGIs were conducted face-to-face with students of C University in Korea. We formulated structured interview schedules, and the questions were based on our research variables and personal experiences. The questions for the interviews encompassed the following areas: (a) the demographic characteristics of the focus group; (b) the number of years for which respondents had played online games; (c) the motive for starting a game; (d) the number of game-characters assumed by each gamer; (e) the type of game played; and (f) other issues such as the reasons for involvement in the play, the willingness to reuse the game in case new versions were released, etc. On average, it took two hours to interview each of three groups. A primary set of FGIs was conducted with three groups on the premise that there would be some differences caused by character race (Horde vs. Alliance) or by playable server (Normal vs. Combat). With respect to the manner of playing, we found that guild members shared information, felt a sense of belonging, and played computer games for quite a long time through the guild; however, they did not undergo these experiences when playing alone. Gamers who belonged to a specific guild helped other players without expecting compensation for that, freely shared information about the game, gave away items for free, and more generous with other members who made mistakes. The guild members were aware of the existence other members and experienced a sense of belonging through interactions with, and evaluations from, other players. It was clear that social support was shown within the guild and that it played an important role as a major research variable. Based on the results of the first FGIs, a second set of in-depth FGIs was carried out with a focus on the psychology of the individual within the guild and the social community of the guild. The second set of FGIs also focused on the guild's offline meetings. Gamers, over all, recognize the necessity of joining a community, not only off-line but also online world of the guild. They admit that the guild is important for them to easily and conveniently enjoy playing online computer games. The active behavior and positive attitudes of existing guild members can motivate new members of the guild to adapt themselves to the guild environment. They then adopt the same behaviors and attitudes of established guild members. In this manner, the new members of the guild strengthen the bonds with other gamers while feeling a sense of belonging, and developing social identity, thereby. It was discovered that the interaction among guild members and the social support encouraged new gamers to quickly develop a sense of social identity and increase their self-esteem. The guild seemed to play the role of socializing gamers. Sometimes, even in the real world, the guild members helped one another; therefore, the features of the guild also spilled over to the offline environment. We intend to use self-esteem, which was found through the second set of FGIs, as an important research variable. To collect data, an online survey was designed with a questionnaire to be completed by WoW gamers, who belong to a guild. The survey was registered on the best three domestic game-sites: 'WoW playforum,' 'WoW gamemeca,' and 'Wow invent.' The selected items to be measured in the questionnaire were decided based on prior research and data from FGIs. To verify the content of the questionnaire, we carried out a pilot test with the same participants to point out ambiguous questions as a way to ensure maximum accuracy of the survey result. A total of 244 responses were analyzed from the 250 completed questionnaires. The SEM analysis was used to test goodness-of-fit of the model. As a result, we found important results as follows: First, according to the statistics, social support had statistically significant impacts on character control, character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Second, character control had significant effects on character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Third, character identity shows its clear impact on self-esteem and game loyalty. Fourth, guild identity affected self-esteem, guild flow and game loyalty. Fifth, self-esteem had a positive influence on the guild flow. These days, the number of virtual community is rising along with its significance largely because of the nature of the online games. Accordingly, this study is designed to clarify the psychological relationship between gamers within the guild that has been generally established by gamers to play online games together. This study focuses on the relationships in which social support influences guild flow or game loyalty through character control, character identity, guild identity, and self-esteem, which are present within a guild in the MMORPG game environment. The study results are as follows. First, the effects of social support on character control, character identity, guild identity and self-esteem are proven to be statistically significant. It was found that character control improves character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Among the seven variables, social support, which is derived from FGIs, plays an important role in this study. With the active support of other guild members, gamers can improve their ability to develop good characters and to control them. Second, character identity has a positive effect on self-esteem and game loyalty, while guild identity has a significant effect on self-esteem, guild flow and game loyalty. Self-esteem affects guild flow. It was found that the higher the character and guild identities become, the greater the self-esteem is established. Contrary to the findings of prior research, our study results indicate that the relationship between character identity and guild flow is not significant. Rather, it was found that character identity directly affects game players' loyalty. Even though the character identity had no direct effect on increasing guild flow, it has indirectly affected guild flow through self-esteem. The significant relationship between self-esteem and guild flow indicates that gamers achieve flow, i.e., a feeling of pleasure and excitement through social support. Several important implications of this study should be noted. First, both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to conduct this study. Through FGIs, it was observed that both social support and self-esteem are important variables. Second, because guilds had been rarely studied, this research is expected to play an important role in the online community. Third, according to the result, six hypotheses (H1, H5, H6, H7, H8, and H11) setup based on FGIs, were statistically significant; thus, we can suggest the corresponding relationships among the variables as a guideline for follow-up research. Our research is significant as it has following implications: first, the social support of the guild members is important when establishing character control, character identity, guildidentity and self-esteem. It is also a major variable that affects guild flow and game loyalty. Second, character control when improved by social support shows notable influence on the development of character identity, guild identity and self-esteem. Third, character identity and guild identity are major factors to help establish gamers' own self-esteem. Fourth, character identity affects guild flow through self-esteem and game loyalty. The gamers usually express themselves through characters; the higher character identity is, the more loyalty a gamer has. Fifth, guild identity, established within the guild, has clear effects on self-esteem, guild flow and game loyalty. Sixth, qualitative and quantitative methods are employed to conduct this study. Based on the results of focus group interviews and SEM analysis, we find that the social support by guild members and psychological factors are significant in strengthening the flow of guild and loyalty to the game. As such, game developers should provide some extra functions for guild community, through which gamers can play online games in collaboration with one another. Also, we suggest that positive self-esteem which is built up through social support can help gamers achieve higher level of flow and satisfaction, which will consequently contribute to minimizing the possibility for the players to develop negative attitude toward the guild they belong to.