• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.113-145
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• 2008

Marketing for the distribution industry is making an ongoing progress in the changes of customers, the competitive environment, and the internal marketing environment. Integrated marketing communication activities are required for the enhancement of efficiency in the market.oriented activities. In this study, IMC is defined as "a notion that a market oriented business integrated marketing communication means, conducting and evaluating marketing activities with consistent messages in order to communicate with customers based on databases." In this study, an IMC planning model for the improvement of marketing efficiency in the distribution industry was derived from a pilot study. This model may be broken down into the following phases: IMC goals setting, situational analysis (customer analysis, competition analysis and company analysis), customer data analysis, contact management, budgeting, the establishment of an IMC strategy, the IMC mix and execution, an evaluation system, and feedback. In consideration of the characteristics of the distribution industry, this study was accompanied by a vocational study on IMC means employed by, in particular, department stores and other distributors such as: advertising, sales promotion, sales promotion advertising, direct marketing, public relations, personal selling, the Internet, mobile, visual merchandising, words of mouth. In addition, this study also covered the correlation among variables such as IMC activities of distributors, the process of forming customer's brand attitudes, brand loyalty and repurchase intention. This research would enhance the utilization of IMC. The analysis on customer's brand attitudes toward the IMC activities of distributors requires the simultaneous consideration of how they are linked to purchase as well as their attitudes toward both distributors and stores. The formation of brand loyalty and repurchase intention is related to the integration of marketing communication and the maintenance of consistency in contents, which requires integrated brand communication (IBC) strategies. IBC is a concept of using IMC means to manage the brand in a continuing and consistent manner and measuring their effect, which is a process to establish enterprise.level brand identity and maximize brand loyalty and repurchase intention by integrating IMC means. For an empirical analysis in this study, an online questionnaire survey was conducted among those department store customers from 20's to 50's who reside either in the Seoul and Gyeonggi areas and have made purchase at department stores. In this study, the research model consisted of four theoretical variables: IMC activities, IMC attitudes, brand loyalty, and repurchase intention, on which variables a pilot study was conducted. A number of hypotheses were constructed on the relations between IMC activities and IMC attitudes, between IMC attitudes and repurchase intention, and between brand loyalty and repurchase intention. The test of the hypotheses may be summarized as follows: Firstly, the test of the hypothesis concerning the relation between IMC attitudes and IMC activities - advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations, personal selling, the Web, mobile, visual merchandising, and word of mouth - indicates that advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations, personal selling, mobile, visual merchandising, and word of mouth have significant impact on IMC activities. In addition to the result similar to those of previous studies that such marketing communication means as word of mouth, advertising, personal selling and sales promotion, in particular, play very important roles, a notable finding of this study is that visual merchandising performed by department stores is shown to have very significant impact on IMC activities. On a separate note, it is also noteworthy that Internet marketing activities engaged by department stores are not shown to have significant impact on IMC attitudes. Secondly, the test of the hypothesis on the relation between IMC attitudes and brand loyalty attests that IMC attitudes for the distribution industry significantly affect brand loyalty. Thirdly, the test of the hypothesis concerning the relation between IMC attitudes and repurchase intention confirms that IMC attitudes for the distribution industry significantly affect repurchase intention. Fourthly, the test of the hypothesis concerning the relation between brand loyalty and repurchase intention indicates that brand loyalty significantly affect repurchase intention. A comprehensive view of these findings points to the conclusion that the IMC activities for the distribution industry do affect IMC attitudes, brand loyalty, and repurchase intention.

• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.11 no.6
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• pp.237-248
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• 2020

The purpose of this study is to measure the agricultural product market efficiency of the three e-commerce platforms from the perspective of consumer price fairness perception, analyze the quality and price gap of invalid brands, and help agricultural products enterprises to formulate reasonable price strategies. The characteristics of farm products sold in e-commerce platforms(quality, origin, taste, safety level) were selected as output indicators and the prices of products were selected as input indicators to evaluate the efficiency of the market through DEA analysis. According to the analysis, JD mall has the largest proportion of effective brands, while YHD.com has the highest average market efficiency, and northeast rice has the largest difference in average efficiency among the three platforms. The results show that price inefficiencies still exist in the electronic market. The development of online market for agricultural products should pay attention to consumer price fairness and pay attention to the coordination between price and quality. The limitation of this paper is that it does not focus on the influence of words of mouth marketing in internet market and consumer experience, which can be the future research direction.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.65-82
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• 2020

Start-ups often use crowdfunding platforms such as Wadiz to get financing from corporate investors and general public. These platforms include functions to increase participant activity through the number of comments, interest and online word-of-mouth. This study aims to elucidate how these functions related to a participant activity exhibit mediating effects on a success of crowdfunding and an achievement rate of targeted investment amount. To this end, the individual variables such as progress period, target amount, venture company, experience of attracting investment, possession of intellectual property rights, a career of the representative and an award experience of the representative were classified into the project characteristics, the company characteristics and the representative characteristics through not only previous studies but also interviews with investment professionals and platform operators. Afterwards, this study went through an empirical verification process using a structural equation model that has both crowdfunding performance and participant activity, which is the independent and mediating factors of three perspectives, as well as the dependent variables. In other words, this study analyzes how the characteristics of three perspectives affect the participant activity and how the participant activity had the mediating effects on the crowdfunding performance. In addition, it derives how the analysis results mentioned above vary according to business types (internet services, culture/art, manufacturing/distribution) and investment styles (stock type and bond type). It is expected that this study will help not only in deriving the factors affecting the performance of an investment type crowdfunding but also in preparing the measures to increase a participant activity.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.105-130
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• 2008

Consumers of e-learning market differ from those of other markets in that they are replaced in a specific time scale. For example, e-learning contents aimed at highschool senior students cannot be consumed by a specific consumer over the designated period of time. Hence e-learning service providers need to attract new groups of students every year. Due to lack of information on products designed for continuously emerging consumers, the consumers face difficulties in making rational decisions in a short time period. Increased uncertainty of product purchase leads customers to herding behaviors to obtain information of the product from others and imitate them. Taking into consideration of these features of e-learning market, this study will focus on the online herding behavior in purchasing e-learning contents. There is no definite concept for e-learning. However, it is being discussed in a wide range of perspectives from educational engineering to management to e-business etc. Based upon the existing studies, we identify two main view-points regarding e-learning. The first defines e-learning as a concept that includes existing terminologies, such as CBT (Computer Based Training), WBT (Web Based Training), and IBT (Internet Based Training). In this view, e-learning utilizes IT in order to support professors and a part of or entire education systems. In the second perspective, e-learning is defined as the usage of Internet technology to deliver diverse intelligence and achievement enhancing solutions. In other words, only the educations that are done through the Internet and network can be classified as e-learning. We take the second definition of e-learning for our working definition. The main goal of this study is to investigate what factors affect consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents and to identify the differential impact of the factors between consumers with purchase experience and those without the experience. To accomplish the goal of this study, it focuses on herding behavior and perceived usefulness as antecedents to behavioral intention. The proposed research model in the study extends the Technology Acceptance Model by adding herding behavior and usability to take into account the unique characteristics of e-learning content market and e-learning systems use, respectively. The current study also includes consumer experience with e-learning content purchase because the previous experience is believed to affect purchasing intention when consumers buy experience goods or services. Previous studies on e-learning did not consider the characteristics of e-learning contents market and the differential impact of consumer experience on the relationship between the antecedents and behavioral intention, which is the target of this study. This study employs a survey method to empirically test the proposed research model. A survey questionnaire was developed and distributed to 629 informants. 528 responses were collected, which consist of potential customer group (n = 133) and experienced customer group (n = 395). The data were analyzed using PLS method, a structural equation modeling method. Overall, both herding behavior and perceived usefulness influence consumer intention to purchase e-learning contents. In detail, in the case of potential customer group, herding behavior has stronger effect on purchase intention than does perceived usefulness. However, in the case of shopping-experienced customer group, perceived usefulness has stronger effect than does herding behavior. In sum, the results of the analysis show that with regard to purchasing experience, perceived usefulness and herding behavior had differential effects upon the purchase of e-learning contents. As a follow-up analysis, the interaction effects of the number of purchase transaction and herding behavior/perceived usefulness on purchase intention were investigated. The results show that there are no interaction effects. This study contributes to the literature in a couple of ways. From a theoretical perspective, this study examined and showed evidence that the characteristics of e-learning market such as continuous renewal of consumers and thus high uncertainty and individual experiences are important factors to be considered when the purchase intention of e-learning content is studied. This study can be used as a basis for future studies on e-learning success. From a practical perspective, this study provides several important implications on what types of marketing strategies e-learning companies need to build. The bottom lines of these strategies include target group attraction, word-of-mouth management, enhancement of web site usability quality, etc. The limitations of this study are also discussed for future studies.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.219-230
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• 2010

Digital content makes big changes to our daily lives while bringing opportunities and challenges for companies. Creative firms integrate pictures, texts, videos, audios, and data by digitalization to develop new products or services and create digital experiences to promote their brands. Most articles on digital content contribute to the basic concept or development of marketing it in literature. Actually, compared with traditional value chains for common products or services, the digital content industry seems to have more potential value. Because quite a bit of digital content is free to the consumer, price is not necessarily perceived as an indicator of the quality or value of information (Rowley 2008). It becomes evident that a current theme in digital content is the issue of "value," and research on customers' perceived value of digital content is a necessity. This article argues that experiential value has an advantage in customers' evaluations of digital content. Two different but related contributions to the understanding of "value" of digital content are made here. First, based on the comparison of digital content with products and services, the article proposes two key characteristics that make experiential strategy available for digital content: intangibility and near-zero reproduction cost. On top of that, based on the discussion of the gap between company's idealized value and customer's perceived value, this article emphasizes that digital content prices and pricing of digital content is different from products and services. As a result of intangibility, prices may not reflect customer value. Moreover, the cost of digital content in the development stage may be very high while reproduction costs shrink dramatically. Moreover, because of the value gap mentioned before, the pricing polices vary for different digital contents. For example, flat price policy is generally used for movies and music (Magiera 2001; Netherby 2002), while for continuous demand, digital content such as online games and anti-virus programs involves a more complicated matter of utility and competitive price levels. Digital content companies have to explore various kinds of strategies to overcome this gap. Rethinking marketing solutions such as advertisements, images, and word-of-mouth and their effect on customers' perceived value becomes essential. China's digital content industry is becoming more and more globalized and drawing special attention from different countries and regions that have respective competitive advantages. The 2008-2009 Annual Report on the Development of China's Digital Content Industry (CCIDConsulting 2009) indicates that, with the driven power of domestic demand and governmental policy support, the country's digital content industry maintained a fast growth of some 30 percent in 2008, obviously indicating the initial stage of industry expansion. In China, anti-virus programs and other software programs which need to be updated use a quarter-based pricing policy. Customers can download a trial version for free and use it for six months or a year. If they want to use it longer, continuous payment is needed. They examine the excellence of the digital content during this trial period and decide whether to pay for continued usage. For China’s music and movie industries, as a result of initial development, experiential strategy has not been much applied, even though firms in other countries find the trial experience and explore important strategies(such as customers listening to music for several seconds for free before downloading it). For the above reasons, anti-virus program may be a representative for digital content industry in China and an exploratory study of the advantage of experiential value in customer's perceived value of digital content is done in the anti-virus market of China. In order to enhance the reliability of the survey data, this study focused on people who were experienced users of anti-virus programs. The empirical results revealed that experiential value has a positive effect on customers' perceived value of digital content. In other words, because digital content is intangible and the reproduction costs are nearly zero, customers' evaluations are based heavily on their experience. Moreover, image and word-of-mouth do not have a positive effect on perceived value, only on experiential value. That is to say, a digital content value chain is different from that of a general product or service. Experiential value has a notable advantage and mediates the effect of image and word-of-mouth on perceived value. The results of this study help provide an understanding of why free digital content downloads exist in developing countries. Customers can perceive the value of digital content only by using and experiencing it. This is also why such governments support the development of digital content. Other developing countries whose digital content business is also in the beginning stage can make use of the suggestions here. Moreover, based on the advantage of experiential strategy, companies should make more of an effort to invest in customers' experience. As a result of the characteristics and value gap of digital content, customers perceive more value in the intangible digital content only by experiencing what they really want. Moreover, because of the near-zero reproduction costs, companies can perhaps use experiential strategy to enhance customer understanding of digital content.