Costume Consumption Culture for Costumeplay (코스튬플레이 의상 소비문화)
-
- Archives of design research
- /
- v.19 no.5 s.67
- /
- pp.203-212
- /
- 2006
With interests and participation in the costumeplay that mimics characters appeared on carton or animation in recent days, the costumeplay becomes one of cultural phenomena. Using a qualitative research method, this study identified costumeplayers' costume consumption pattern and explored its meanings from the perspective of consumption culture. Indeed, this study intended to help for understanding costumeplayer group as a consumer, and to provide basic knowledge about new market analysis related to fashion design and marketing. The results from the analyzing participant observation and in-depth interviews data are as follows: first, costumeplayers usually begin costumeplay by friends' invitations or by themselves and then continue on participating. Through the costumeplay, participants have benefits such as fun, departure from the daily life, and social interaction. Second, participants acquire costumes through purchase, rent, producing or combination of daily wear, but both purchase and rent account high. Third, the meanings of consumption culture in costumeplay include consumption behavior repeating possession and disposal. Also, costumeplayers concerns efficiency when purchasing or renting the costumes, and internet is a place where information search, comparison, and actual purchasing are occurred. Based on the results, fashion design and marketing implication, limitation of this study and further research ideas were suggested.
The recommender system is a system which recommends products to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Based on automated information filtering technology, various recommender systems have been developed. Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most successful recommendation algorithms, has been applied in a number of different domains such as recommending Web pages, books, movies, music and products. But, it has been known that CF has a critical shortcoming. CF finds neighbors whose preferences are like those of the target customer and recommends products those customers have most liked. Thus, CF works properly only when there's a sufficient number of ratings on common product from customers. When there's a shortage of customer ratings, CF makes the formation of a neighborhood inaccurate, thereby resulting in poor recommendations. To improve the performance of CF based recommender systems, most of the related studies have been focused on the development of novel algorithms under the assumption of using a single profile, which is created from user's rating information for items, purchase transactions, or Web access logs. With the advent of big data, companies got to collect more data and to use a variety of information with big size. So, many companies recognize it very importantly to utilize big data because it makes companies to improve their competitiveness and to create new value. In particular, on the rise is the issue of utilizing personal big data in the recommender system. It is why personal big data facilitate more accurate identification of the preferences or behaviors of users. The proposed recommendation methodology is as follows: First, multimodal user profiles are created from personal big data in order to grasp the preferences and behavior of users from various viewpoints. We derive five user profiles based on the personal information such as rating, site preference, demographic, Internet usage, and topic in text. Next, the similarity between users is calculated based on the profiles and then neighbors of users are found from the results. One of three ensemble approaches is applied to calculate the similarity. Each ensemble approach uses the similarity of combined profile, the average similarity of each profile, and the weighted average similarity of each profile, respectively. Finally, the products that people among the neighborhood prefer most to are recommended to the target users. For the experiments, we used the demographic data and a very large volume of Web log transaction for 5,000 panel users of a company that is specialized to analyzing ranks of Web sites. R and SAS E-miner was used to implement the proposed recommender system and to conduct the topic analysis using the keyword search, respectively. To evaluate the recommendation performance, we used 60% of data for training and 40% of data for test. The 5-fold cross validation was also conducted to enhance the reliability of our experiments. A widely used combination metric called F1 metric that gives equal weight to both recall and precision was employed for our evaluation. As the results of evaluation, the proposed methodology achieved the significant improvement over the single profile based CF algorithm. In particular, the ensemble approach using weighted average similarity shows the highest performance. That is, the rate of improvement in F1 is 16.9 percent for the ensemble approach using weighted average similarity and 8.1 percent for the ensemble approach using average similarity of each profile. From these results, we conclude that the multimodal profile ensemble approach is a viable solution to the problems encountered when there's a shortage of customer ratings. This study has significance in suggesting what kind of information could we use to create profile in the environment of big data and how could we combine and utilize them effectively. However, our methodology should be further studied to consider for its real-world application. We need to compare the differences in recommendation accuracy by applying the proposed method to different recommendation algorithms and then to identify which combination of them would show the best performance.
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.