• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.

• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.111-138
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• 2014

As the Internet is widely used worldwide, Cyber world has become a part of daily life. On the other hand, the adverse effects of Internet, such as abusive comments, illegal harmful contents, rumor diffusion, infringement on a right have emerged with the increase. Researchers recognized the important of cyber ethics as an effective means of coping with the adverse effects on Internet. But, Little empirical research has been related to cyber ethics in management information systems. Thus, the purpose of this research is to identify multidimensional motivation factors that cyber ethics awareness and compliance behavior Intention. For this, this study investigated the factors that might influence Internet users to compliance cyber ethics. Using university students as a sample, one hundred and ninety six are collected for further analysis. The results of this study are as follows; First, self-esteem, Moral Obligation, self-control, cyber ethics education and Social Influence are significantly related to cyber ethics awareness, while punishment is not significantly related. Second, cyber ethics awareness have a positive effect on cyber ethics compliance behavior Intention. Third, the moderating effect of ego strength is also significant. This study is significant in that it established a behavior model to understand the compliance of cyber ethics with internet user in Korea.

• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.45-54
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• 2010

The purpose of this study was to offer the importance on factors of selecting dental institution according to general characteristics targeting general dental patients, and the information of having important influence upon choosing dental clinic and dental hospital. The survey was carried out from August 2009 to September. As a result of analyzing SAS(ver 9.1), the following conclusions were obtained. In the importance on factors of selecting dental institution according to general characteristics, it was thought to be important in convenience of movement or mobility such as distance, transportation, and parking convenience according to age level. According to final academic background, the importance in a factor of rumor in dental clinic was high(p < 0.05). According to job, the significant difference was shown in rumor of dentistry and parking convenience(p < 0.05). According to income, the factor in the appearance of training a medical specialist was indicated to be statistically higher in the group with over 5 million won than the group with under 2 million won(p < 0.05). Given seeing the distribution of opinion about dental hospitals (comparison with dental clinics), the excellence in the medical staff's ability was indicated to be the highest in all of the factor of influencing the use satisfaction(${\beta}=0.18$), the factor of influencing the recommendation level(${\beta}=0.21$), and the factor of influencing the re-use intention(OR=2.09).