R&D into future technologies should be conducted in conjunction with technological innovation strategies that are linked to corporate survival within a framework of information and knowledge-based competitiveness. As such, future technology strategies should be ensured through open R&D organizations. The development of future technologies should not be conducted simply on the basis of future forecasts, but should take into account customer needs in advance and reflect them in the development of the future technologies or services. This research aims to select as segmentation variables the customers' attitude towards accepting future telecommunication technologies and their value orientation in their everyday life, as these factors wilt have the greatest effect on the demand for future telecommunication services and thus segment the future telecom service market. Likewise, such research seeks to segment the market from the stage of technology R&D activities and employ the results to formulate technology development strategies. Based on the customer attitude towards accepting new technologies, two groups were induced, and a hierarchical customer segmentation model was provided to conduct secondary segmentation of the two groups on the basis of their respective customer value orientation. A survey was conducted in June 2006 on 800 consumers aged 15 to 69, residing in Seoul and five other major South Korean cities, through one-on-one interviews. The samples were divided into two sub-groups according to their level of acceptance of new technology; a sub-group demonstrating a high level of technology acceptance (39.4%) and another sub-group with a comparatively lower level of technology acceptance (60.6%). These two sub-groups were further divided each into 5 smaller sub-groups (10 total smaller sub-groups) through two rounds of segmentation. The ten sub-groups were then analyzed in their detailed characteristics, including general demographic characteristics, usage patterns in existing telecom services such as mobile service, broadband internet and wireless internet and the status of ownership of a computing or information device and the desire or intention to purchase one. Through these steps, we were able to statistically prove that each of these 10 sub-groups responded to telecom services as independent markets. We found that each segmented group responds as an independent individual market. Through correspondence analysis, the target segmentation groups were positioned in such a way as to facilitate the entry of future telecommunication services into the market, as well as their diffusion and transferability.
The purpose of this research is to construct research framework for international franchising based on existing literature and to identify research components in the framework. Franchise can be defined as management styles that allow franchisee use various management assets of franchisor in order to make or sell product or service. It can be divided into product distribution franchise that is designed to sell products and business format franchise that is designed for running it as business whatever its form is. International franchising can be defined as a way of internationalization of franchisor to foreign country by providing its business format or package to franchisee of host country. International franchising is growing fast for last four decades but academic research on this is quite limited. Especially in Korea, research about international franchising is carried out on by case study format with single case or empirical study format with survey based on domestic franchise theory. Therefore, this paper tries to review existing literature on international franchising research, providing research framework, and then stimulating new research on this field. International franchising research components include motives and environmental factors for decision of expanding to international franchising, entrance modes and development plan for international franchising, contracts and management strategy of international franchising, and various performance measures from different perspectives. First, motives of international franchising are fee collection from franchisee. Also it provides easier way to expanding to foreign country. The other motives including increase total sales volume, occupying better strategic position, getting quality resources, and improving efficiency. Environmental factors that facilitating international franchising encompasses economic condition, trend, and legal or political factors in host and/or home countries. In addition, control power and risk management capability of franchisor plays critical role in successful franchising contract. Final decision to enter foreign country via franchising is determined by numerous factors like history, size, growth, competitiveness, management system, bonding capability, industry characteristics of franchisor. After deciding to enter into foreign country, franchisor needs to set entrance modes of international franchising. Within contractual mode, there are master franchising and area developing franchising, licensing, direct franchising, and joint venture. Theories about entrance mode selection contain concepts of efficiency, knowledge-based approach, competence-based approach, agent theory, and governance cost. The next step after entrance decision is operation strategy. Operation strategy starts with selecting a target city and a target country for franchising. In order to finding, screening targets, franchisor needs to collect information about candidates. Critical information includes brand patent, commercial laws, regulations, market conditions, country risk, and industry analysis. After selecting a target city in target country, franchisor needs to select franchisee, in other word, partner. The first important criteria for selecting partners are financial credibility and capability, possession of real estate. And cultural similarity and knowledge about franchisor and/or home country are also recognized as critical criteria. The most important element in operating strategy is legal document between franchisor and franchisee with home and host countries. Terms and conditions in legal documents give objective information about characteristics of franchising agreement for academic research. Legal documents have definitions of terminology, territory and exclusivity, agreement of term, initial fee, continuing fees, clearing currency, and rights about sub-franchising. Also, legal documents could have terms about softer elements like training program and operation manual. And harder elements like law competent court and terms of expiration. Next element in operating strategy is about product and service. Especially for business format franchising, product/service deliverable, benefit communicators, system identifiers (architectural features), and format facilitators are listed for product/service strategic elements. Another important decision on product/service is standardization vs. customization. The rationale behind standardization is cost reduction, efficiency, consistency, image congruence, brand awareness, and competitiveness on price. Also standardization enables large scale R&D and innovative change in management style. Another element in operating strategy is control management. The simple way to control franchise contract is relying on legal terms, contractual control system. There are other control systems, administrative control system and ethical control system. Contractual control system is a coercive source of power, but franchisor usually doesn't want to use legal power since it doesn't help to build up positive relationship. Instead, self-regulation is widely used. Administrative control system uses control mechanism from ordinary work relationship. Its main component is supporting activities to franchisee and communication method. For example, franchisor provides advertising, training, manual, and delivery, then franchisee follows franchisor's direction. Another component is building franchisor's brand power. The last research element is performance factor of international franchising. Performance elements can be divided into franchisor's performance and franchisee's performance. The conceptual performance measures of franchisor are simple but not easy to obtain objectively. They are profit, sale, cost, experience, and brand power. The performance measures of franchisee are mostly about benefits of host country. They contain small business development, promotion of employment, introduction of new business model, and level up technology status. There are indirect benefits, like increase of tax, refinement of corporate citizenship, regional economic clustering, and improvement of international balance. In addition to those, host country gets socio-cultural change other than economic effects. It includes demographic change, social trend, customer value change, social communication, and social globalization. Sometimes it is called as westernization or McDonaldization of society. In addition, the paper reviews on theories that have been frequently applied to international franchising research, such as agent theory, resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning theory, and international expansion theories. Resource based theory is used in strategic decision based on resources, like decision about entrance and cooperation depending on resources of franchisee and franchisor. Transaction cost theory can be applied in determination of mutual trust or satisfaction of franchising players. Agent theory tries to explain strategic decision for reducing problem caused by utilizing agent, for example research on control system in franchising agreements. Organizational Learning theory is relatively new in franchising research. It assumes organization tries to maximize performance and learning of organization. In addition, Internalization theory advocates strategic decision of direct investment for removing inefficiency of market transaction and is applied in research on terms of contract. And oligopolistic competition theory is used to explain various entry modes for international expansion. Competency theory support strategic decision of utilizing key competitive advantage. Furthermore, research methodologies including qualitative and quantitative methodologies are suggested for more rigorous international franchising research. Quantitative research needs more real data other than survey data which is usually respondent's judgment. In order to verify theory more rigorously, research based on real data is essential. However, real quantitative data is quite hard to get. The qualitative research other than single case study is also highly recommended. Since international franchising has limited number of applications, scientific research based on grounded theory and ethnography study can be used. Scientific case study is differentiated with single case study on its data collection method and analysis method. The key concept is triangulation in measurement, logical coding and comparison. Finally, it provides overall research direction for international franchising after summarizing research trend in Korea. International franchising research in Korea has two different types, one is for studying Korean franchisor going overseas and the other is for Korean franchisee of foreign franchisor. Among research on Korean franchisor, two common patterns are observed. First of all, they usually deal with success story of one franchisor. The other common pattern is that they focus on same industry and country. Therefore, international franchise research needs to extend their focus to broader subjects with scientific research methodology as well as development of new theory.
Mobile commerce provides a convenient shopping experience in which users can buy products without the constraints of time and space. Mobile commerce has already set off a mega trend in Korea. The market size is estimated at approximately 15 trillion won (KRW) for 2015, thus far. In the Korean market, social commerce and open market are key components. Social commerce has an overwhelming open market in terms of the number of users in the Korean mobile commerce market. From the point of view of the industry, quick market entry, and content curation are considered to be the major success factors, reflecting the rapid growth of social commerce in the market. However, academics' empirical research and analysis to prove the success rate of social commerce is still insufficient. Henceforward, it is to be expected that social commerce and the open market in the Korean mobile commerce will compete intensively. So it is important to conduct an empirical analysis to prove the differences in user experience between social commerce and open market. This paper is an exploratory study that shows a comparative analysis of social commerce and the open market regarding user experience, which is based on the mobile users' reviews. Firstly, this study includes a collection of approximately 10,000 user reviews of social commerce and open market listed Google play. A collection of mobile user reviews were classified into topics, such as perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use through LDA topic modeling. Then, a sentimental analysis and co-occurrence analysis on the topics of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use was conducted. The study's results demonstrated that social commerce users have a more positive experience in terms of service usefulness and convenience versus open market in the mobile commerce market. Social commerce has provided positive user experiences to mobile users in terms of service areas, like 'delivery,' 'coupon,' and 'discount,' while open market has been faced with user complaints in terms of technical problems and inconveniences like 'login error,' 'view details,' and 'stoppage.' This result has shown that social commerce has a good performance in terms of user service experience, since the aggressive marketing campaign conducted and there have been investments in building logistics infrastructure. However, the open market still has mobile optimization problems, since the open market in mobile commerce still has not resolved user complaints and inconveniences from technical problems. This study presents an exploratory research method used to analyze user experience by utilizing an empirical approach to user reviews. In contrast to previous studies, which conducted surveys to analyze user experience, this study was conducted by using empirical analysis that incorporates user reviews for reflecting users' vivid and actual experiences. Specifically, by using an LDA topic model and TAM this study presents its methodology, which shows an analysis of user reviews that are effective due to the method of dividing user reviews into service areas and technical areas from a new perspective. The methodology of this study has not only proven the differences in user experience between social commerce and open market, but also has provided a deep understanding of user experience in Korean mobile commerce. In addition, the results of this study have important implications on social commerce and open market by proving that user insights can be utilized in establishing competitive and groundbreaking strategies in the market. The limitations and research direction for follow-up studies are as follows. In a follow-up study, it will be required to design a more elaborate technique of the text analysis. This study could not clearly refine the user reviews, even though the ones online have inherent typos and mistakes. This study has proven that the user reviews are an invaluable source to analyze user experience. The methodology of this study can be expected to further expand comparative research of services using user reviews. Even at this moment, users around the world are posting their reviews about service experiences after using the mobile game, commerce, and messenger applications.
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
Recently, increase of demand for big data analysis has been driving the vigorous development of related technologies and tools. In addition, development of IT and increased penetration rate of smart devices are producing a large amount of data. According to this phenomenon, data analysis technology is rapidly becoming popular. Also, attempts to acquire insights through data analysis have been continuously increasing. It means that the big data analysis will be more important in various industries for the foreseeable future. Big data analysis is generally performed by a small number of experts and delivered to each demander of analysis. However, increase of interest about big data analysis arouses activation of computer programming education and development of many programs for data analysis. Accordingly, the entry barriers of big data analysis are gradually lowering and data analysis technology being spread out. As the result, big data analysis is expected to be performed by demanders of analysis themselves. Along with this, interest about various unstructured data is continually increasing. Especially, a lot of attention is focused on using text data. Emergence of new platforms and techniques using the web bring about mass production of text data and active attempt to analyze text data. Furthermore, result of text analysis has been utilized in various fields. Text mining is a concept that embraces various theories and techniques for text analysis. Many text mining techniques are utilized in this field for various research purposes, topic modeling is one of the most widely used and studied. Topic modeling is a technique that extracts the major issues from a lot of documents, identifies the documents that correspond to each issue and provides identified documents as a cluster. It is evaluated as a very useful technique in that reflect the semantic elements of the document. Traditional topic modeling is based on the distribution of key terms across the entire document. Thus, it is essential to analyze the entire document at once to identify topic of each document. This condition causes a long time in analysis process when topic modeling is applied to a lot of documents. In addition, it has a scalability problem that is an exponential increase in the processing time with the increase of analysis objects. This problem is particularly noticeable when the documents are distributed across multiple systems or regions. To overcome these problems, divide and conquer approach can be applied to topic modeling. It means dividing a large number of documents into sub-units and deriving topics through repetition of topic modeling to each unit. This method can be used for topic modeling on a large number of documents with limited system resources, and can improve processing speed of topic modeling. It also can significantly reduce analysis time and cost through ability to analyze documents in each location or place without combining analysis object documents. However, despite many advantages, this method has two major problems. First, the relationship between local topics derived from each unit and global topics derived from entire document is unclear. It means that in each document, local topics can be identified, but global topics cannot be identified. Second, a method for measuring the accuracy of the proposed methodology should be established. That is to say, assuming that global topic is ideal answer, the difference in a local topic on a global topic needs to be measured. By those difficulties, the study in this method is not performed sufficiently, compare with other studies dealing with topic modeling. In this paper, we propose a topic modeling approach to solve the above two problems. First of all, we divide the entire document cluster(Global set) into sub-clusters(Local set), and generate the reduced entire document cluster(RGS, Reduced global set) that consist of delegated documents extracted from each local set. We try to solve the first problem by mapping RGS topics and local topics. Along with this, we verify the accuracy of the proposed methodology by detecting documents, whether to be discerned as the same topic at result of global and local set. Using 24,000 news articles, we conduct experiments to evaluate practical applicability of the proposed methodology. In addition, through additional experiment, we confirmed that the proposed methodology can provide similar results to the entire topic modeling. We also proposed a reasonable method for comparing the result of both methods.
The study examines how the environmental factors of store influence service brand personality and repurchase intention in the service environment. The service industry has been experiencing the intensified competition with the industry's continuous growth and the influence from rapid technological advancement. Under the circumstances, it has become ever more important for the brand competitiveness to be distinctively recognized against competition. A brand needs to be distinguished and differentiated from competing companies because they are all engaged in the similar environment of the service industry. The differentiation of brand achievement has become increasingly important to highlight certain brand functions to include emotional, self-expressive, and symbolic functions since the importance of such functions has been further emphasized in promoting consumption activities. That is the recent role of brand personality that has been emphasized in the service industry. In other words, customers now freely and actively express their personalities or egos in consumption activities, taking an important role in construction of a brand asset. Hence, the study suggests that it is necessary to disperse the recognition and acknowledgement that the maintenance of the existing customers contributes more to boost repurchase intention when it is compared to the efforts to create new customers, particularly in the service industry. Meanwhile, the store itself can offer a unique environment that may influence the consumer's purchase decision. Consumers interact with store environments in the process of,virtually, all household purchase they make (Sarel 1981). Thus, store environments may encourage customers to purchase. The roles that store environments play are to provide informational cues to customers about the store and goods and communicate messages to stimulate consumers' emotions. The store environments differentiate the store from competing stores and build a unique service brand personality. However, the existing studies related to brand in the service industry mostly concentrated on the relationship between the quality of service and customer satisfaction, and they are mostly generalized while the connective studies focused on brand personality. Such approaches show limitations and are insufficient to investigate on the relationship between store environment and brand personality in the service industry. Accordingly, the study intends to identify the level of contribution to the establishment of brand personality made by the store's physical environments that influence on the specific brand characteristics depending on the type of service. The study also intends to identify what kind of relationships with brand personality exists with brand personality while being influenced by store environments. In addition, the study intends to make meaningful suggestions to better direct marketing efforts by identifying whether a brand personality makes a positive influence to induce an intention for repurchase. For this study, the service industry is classified into four categories based on to the characteristics of service: experimental-emotional service, emotional -credible service, credible-functional service, and functional-experimental service. The type of business with the most frequent customer contact is determined for each service type and the enterprise with the highest brand value in each service sector based on the report made by the Korea Management Association. They are designated as the representative of each category. The selected representatives are a fast-food store (experimental-emotional service), a cinema house (emotional-credible service), a bank (credible-functional service), and discount store (functional-experimental service). The survey was conducted for the four selected brands to represent each service category among consumers who are experienced users of the designated stores in Seoul Metropolitan City and Gyeonggi province via written questionnaires in order to verify the suggested assumptions in the study. In particular, the survey adopted 15 scales, which represent each characteristic factor, among the 42 unique characteristics developed by Jennifer Aaker(1997) to assess the brand personality of each service brand. SPSS for Windows Release 12.0 and LISREL were used in the analysis of data verification. The methodology of the structural equation model was used for the study and the pivotal findings are as follows. 1) The environmental factors ware classified as design factors, ambient factors, and social factors. Therefore, the validity of measurement scale of Baker et al. (1994) was proved. 2) The service brand personalities were subdivided as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, which makes the use of the brand personality scales by Jennifer Aaker(1997) appropriate in the service industry as well. 3) One-way ANOVA analysis on the scales of store environment and service brand personality showed that there exist statistically significant differences in each service category. For example, the social factors were highest in discount stores, while the ambient factors and design factors were highest in fast-food stores. The discount stores were highest in the sincerity and excitement, while the highest point for banks was in the competence and ruggedness, and the highest point for fast-food stores was in the sophistication, The consumers will make a different respond to the physical environment of stores and service brand personality that are inherent to the corresponding service interface. Hence, the customers will make a different decision-making when dealing with different service categories. In this aspect, the relationships of variables in the proposed hypothesis appear to work in a different way depending on the exposed service category. 4) The store environment factors influenced on service brand personalities differently by category of service. The factors of store's physical environment are transferred to a brand and were verified to strengthen service brand personalities. In particular, the level of influence on the service brand personality by physical environment differs depending on service category or dimension, which indicates that there is a need to apply a different style of management to a different service category or dimension. It signifies that there needs to be a brand strategy established in order to positively influence the relationship with consumers by utilizing an appropriate brand personality factor depending on different characteristics by service category or dimension. 5) The service brand personalities influenced on the repurchase intention. Especially, the largest influence was made in the sophistication dimension of service brand personality scale; the unique and characteristically appropriate arrangement of physical environment will make customers stay in the service environment for a long time and will lead to give a positive influence on the repurchase intention. 6) The store environment factors influenced on the repurchase intention. Particularly, the largest influence was made on the social factors of store environment. The most intriguing finding is that the service factor among all other environment factors gives the biggest influence to the repurchase intention in most of all service types except fast-food stores. Such result indicates that the customers pay attention to how much the employees try to provide a quality service when they make an evaluation on the service brand. At the same time, it also indicates that the personal factor is directly transmitted to the construction of brand personality. The employees' attitude and behavior are the determinants to establish a service brand personality in the process of enhancing service interface. Hence, there should be a reinforced search for a method to efficiently manage the service staff who has a direct contact with customers in order to make an affirmative improvement of the customers' brand evaluation at the service interface. The findings suggest several managerial implications. 1) Results from the empirical study indicated that store environment factors have a strong positive impact on a service brand personality. To increase customers' repurchase intention of a service brand, the management is required to effectively manage store environment factors and create a friendly brand personality based on the corresponding service environment. 2) Mangers and researchers must understand and recognize that the store environment elements are important marketing tools, and that brand personality influences on consumers' repurchase intention. Based on such result of the study, a service brand could be utilized as an efficient measure to achieve a differentiation by enforcing the elements that are most influential among all other store environments for each service category. Therefore, brand personality established involving various store environments will further reinforce the relationship with customers through the elevated brand identification of which utilization to induce repurchase decision can be used as an entry barrier. 3) The study identified the store environment as a component of service brand personality for the store's effective communication with consumers. For this, all communication channels should be maintained with consistency and an integrated marketing communication should be executed to efficiently approach to a larger number of customers. Mangers and researchers must find strategies for aligning decisions about store environment elements with the retailers' marketing and store personality objectives. All ambient, design, and social factors need to be orchestrated so that consumers can take an appropriate store personality. In this study, the induced results from the previous studies were extended to the service industry so as to identify the customers' decision making process that leads to repurchase intention and a result similar to those of the previous studies. The findings suggested several theoretical and managerial implications. However, the situation that only one service brand served as the subject of analysis for each service category, and the situation that correlations among store environment elements were not identified, as well as the problem of representation in selection of samples should be considered and supplemented in the future when further studies are conducted. In addition, various antecedents and consequences of brand personality must be looked at in the aspect of the service environment for further research.