• Title/Summary/Keyword: smart elements

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Development of Beauty Experience Pattern Map Based on Consumer Emotions: Focusing on Cosmetics (소비자 감성 기반 뷰티 경험 패턴 맵 개발: 화장품을 중심으로)

  • Seo, Bong-Goon;Kim, Keon-Woo;Park, Do-Hyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.179-196
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    • 2019
  • Recently, the "Smart Consumer" has been emerging. He or she is increasingly inclined to search for and purchase products by taking into account personal judgment or expert reviews rather than by relying on information delivered through manufacturers' advertising. This is especially true when purchasing cosmetics. Because cosmetics act directly on the skin, consumers respond seriously to dangerous chemical elements they contain or to skin problems they may cause. Above all, cosmetics should fit well with the purchaser's skin type. In addition, changes in global cosmetics consumer trends make it necessary to study this field. The desire to find one's own individualized cosmetics is being revealed to consumers around the world and is known as "Finding the Holy Grail." Many consumers show a deep interest in customized cosmetics with the cultural boom known as "K-Beauty" (an aspect of "Han-Ryu"), the growth of personal grooming, and the emergence of "self-culture" that includes "self-beauty" and "self-interior." These trends have led to the explosive popularity of cosmetics made in Korea in the Chinese and Southeast Asian markets. In order to meet the customized cosmetics needs of consumers, cosmetics manufacturers and related companies are responding by concentrating on delivering premium services through the convergence of ICT(Information, Communication and Technology). Despite the evolution of companies' responses regarding market trends toward customized cosmetics, there is no "Intelligent Data Platform" that deals holistically with consumers' skin condition experience and thus attaches emotions to products and services. To find the Holy Grail of customized cosmetics, it is important to acquire and analyze consumer data on what they want in order to address their experiences and emotions. The emotions consumers are addressing when purchasing cosmetics varies by their age, sex, skin type, and specific skin issues and influences what price is considered reasonable. Therefore, it is necessary to classify emotions regarding cosmetics by individual consumer. Because of its importance, consumer emotion analysis has been used for both services and products. Given the trends identified above, we judge that consumer emotion analysis can be used in our study. Therefore, we collected and indexed data on consumers' emotions regarding their cosmetics experiences focusing on consumers' language. We crawled the cosmetics emotion data from SNS (blog and Twitter) according to sales ranking ($1^{st}$ to $99^{th}$), focusing on the ample/serum category. A total of 357 emotional adjectives were collected, and we combined and abstracted similar or duplicate emotional adjectives. We conducted a "Consumer Sentiment Journey" workshop to build a "Consumer Sentiment Dictionary," and this resulted in a total of 76 emotional adjectives regarding cosmetics consumer experience. Using these 76 emotional adjectives, we performed clustering with the Self-Organizing Map (SOM) method. As a result of the analysis, we derived eight final clusters of cosmetics consumer sentiments. Using the vector values of each node for each cluster, the characteristics of each cluster were derived based on the top ten most frequently appearing consumer sentiments. Different characteristics were found in consumer sentiments in each cluster. We also developed a cosmetics experience pattern map. The study results confirmed that recommendation and classification systems that consider consumer emotions and sentiments are needed because each consumer differs in what he or she pursues and prefers. Furthermore, this study reaffirms that the application of emotion and sentiment analysis can be extended to various fields other than cosmetics, and it implies that consumer insights can be derived using these methods. They can be used not only to build a specialized sentiment dictionary using scientific processes and "Design Thinking Methodology," but we also expect that these methods can help us to understand consumers' psychological reactions and cognitive behaviors. If this study is further developed, we believe that it will be able to provide solutions based on consumer experience, and therefore that it can be developed as an aspect of marketing intelligence.

Different Look, Different Feel: Social Robot Design Evaluation Model Based on ABOT Attributes and Consumer Emotions (각인각색, 각봇각색: ABOT 속성과 소비자 감성 기반 소셜로봇 디자인평가 모형 개발)

  • Ha, Sangjip;Lee, Junsik;Yoo, In-Jin;Park, Do-Hyung
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.27 no.2
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    • pp.55-78
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    • 2021
  • Tosolve complex and diverse social problems and ensure the quality of life of individuals, social robots that can interact with humans are attracting attention. In the past, robots were recognized as beings that provide labor force as they put into industrial sites on behalf of humans. However, the concept of today's robot has been extended to social robots that coexist with humans and enable social interaction with the advent of Smart technology, which is considered an important driver in most industries. Specifically, there are service robots that respond to customers, the robots that have the purpose of edutainment, and the emotionalrobots that can interact with humans intimately. However, popularization of robots is not felt despite the current information environment in the modern ICT service environment and the 4th industrial revolution. Considering social interaction with users which is an important function of social robots, not only the technology of the robots but also other factors should be considered. The design elements of the robot are more important than other factors tomake consumers purchase essentially a social robot. In fact, existing studies on social robots are at the level of proposing "robot development methodology" or testing the effects provided by social robots to users in pieces. On the other hand, consumer emotions felt from the robot's appearance has an important influence in the process of forming user's perception, reasoning, evaluation and expectation. Furthermore, it can affect attitude toward robots and good feeling and performance reasoning, etc. Therefore, this study aims to verify the effect of appearance of social robot and consumer emotions on consumer's attitude toward social robot. At this time, a social robot design evaluation model is constructed by combining heterogeneous data from different sources. Specifically, the three quantitative indicator data for the appearance of social robots from the ABOT Database is included in the model. The consumer emotions of social robot design has been collected through (1) the existing design evaluation literature and (2) online buzzsuch as product reviews and blogs, (3) qualitative interviews for social robot design. Later, we collected the score of consumer emotions and attitudes toward various social robots through a large-scale consumer survey. First, we have derived the six major dimensions of consumer emotions for 23 pieces of detailed emotions through dimension reduction methodology. Then, statistical analysis was performed to verify the effect of derived consumer emotionson attitude toward social robots. Finally, the moderated regression analysis was performed to verify the effect of quantitatively collected indicators of social robot appearance on the relationship between consumer emotions and attitudes toward social robots. Interestingly, several significant moderation effects were identified, these effects are visualized with two-way interaction effect to interpret them from multidisciplinary perspectives. This study has theoretical contributions from the perspective of empirically verifying all stages from technical properties to consumer's emotion and attitudes toward social robots by linking the data from heterogeneous sources. It has practical significance that the result helps to develop the design guidelines based on consumer emotions in the design stage of social robot development.

The Analysis of the Successful Factors from User Side of MMORPG (사용자 측면에서의 MMORPG <월드 오브 워크래프트> 성공요인 분석)

  • Baek, Jaeyong;Kim, Kenneth Chi Ho
    • Cartoon and Animation Studies
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    • s.42
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    • pp.151-175
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    • 2016
  • The game industry has evolved from mobile games to PC online games after the smart-phone industry was opened up. In this environment, the game industry has rather been negatively developing its commercials means than the sufficient fundamental entertainment to the users. Especially, many games were released with better graphic qualities yet poor originality, continuing to be popular without enhancing the market itself. Moreover, the user's recognition level has improved. The users share their online gaming experience easily with the development of network environment. They receive the feedbacks on the quality of the game through the online channels and media by sharing them together. The high margin of the game industry will lead to the negative feedbacks of the users, effecting them to critique the content although the market looks good for now. The game industry's evolution has to be reviewed in the perspective of users, to look back at the successful cases of the past before the mobile era by analyzing and indicating the quality of the games and content's direction. This research is focused on the success factors of from the user's point of view, which has been widely claimed as a popular game franchise publicly before the mobile games had risen. WOW has been the most successful MMORPG game with its user record of 1.2 million till now. For these reasons, this study analyzes 's success factors from the user's point of view by configuring five expert groups, sequentially applying expert group survey, interview, Jobs-to-be-done and Fishbein Model as UX methodologies based on the business model to see through its long term rein in the industry. Consequently, The success factors from the user side of MMORPG provides an opportunity for the users to interact deeply with the game by (1) using well designed 'world view' over 10 years, (2) providing 'national policy' that is based on the locations of the users' culture and language, (3) providing 'expansions' with changes in time to give the digging elements to the users.

A Study on Promotion and Improvement of YouTube Music Contents Through the User Evaluation of Card Live ('명함라이브' 사용자 평가를 통한 유튜브 음악 콘텐츠 홍보 및 개선방안 연구)

  • You, Jae-Sun
    • Journal of Korea Entertainment Industry Association
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    • v.14 no.4
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    • pp.105-120
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    • 2020
  • This study explores the process of the actual content production and distribution, by creating a YouTube channel to promote the popular music contents produced by the researcher, which thus reflects the reality where the production of video contents rapidly increases. A YouTube channel titled "Alida Music", of which the focus was to promote indie musicians, was created on February 2019. The contents of 10 indie musicians were produced in one-take live format. The information of the indie musicians was displayed in the form of a screen business card, with their e-mail address and SNS account at the top. Therefore, this promotional design was named "Card Live". Promotional video contents marked with the QR code in the lower right on the screen were produced, along with the promotional phrase "Communicate directly with the artist through the QR code", which allows viewers to watch other contents of the indie musician when they scan the QR code. This research conducted a study on how to improve and promote "Card Live" contents of "Alida Music", which were produced through this process. A group interview targeting five indie musicians, among whom one participant deemed significant was selected to conduct a one-to-one in-depth interview. As a result of the study, the following three conclusions were drawn. First, YouTube was found to be the medium with the greatest influence and highest efficiency at the lowest cost. Second, the evaluation of the participants on "Card Live" were divided into the three categories: need for one-take live, the design elements of "Card Live", and scanning issues of the QR code. Third, there is a need for promotional methods that can effectively utilize the media aspects of YouTube: the channel management issues such as raising public awareness as well as the number of subscribers of "Alida Music" should be resolved and measures to effectively use various media including other SNS should be developed. In terms of its content, it is imperative to recruit diverse performers to make various contents, as well as to come up with ways to link "Card Live" contents with offline. Based on these results, "Card Live" contents should be further revised and complemented in order to provide interesting contents to consumers, which will further develop "Alida Music" as a platform where various musicians and companies meet, thereby inducing contracts with popular music agencies and generating advertising revenues. However, since this study was carried out only with the limited number of participants, future studies should include more participants to bring forth a variety of promotional plans and improvement measures. Also, in the era of consuming contents through smart devices, the fact that some features of "Card Live" were available only on PC, did not fully reflect the characteristics of the times. In the future research, various contents that smartphone users can access and view freely without PC should be produced.

Analysis of Contribution to Net Zero of Non-Urban Settlement - For Green Infrastructure in Rural Areas - (비도시 정주지의 탄소중립 기여도 분석 - 농촌지역 그린인프라를 대상으로 -)

  • Lee, Dong-Kyu;An, Byung-Chul
    • Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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    • v.50 no.3
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    • pp.19-34
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    • 2022
  • This study was conducted to provide basic data that can be used when establishing Net Zero policies and implementation plans for non-urban settlements by quantitatively analyzing the Net Zero contribution to green infrastructure in rural areas corresponding to non-urban settlements. The main purpose is to first, systematize green infrastructure in rural areas, secondly derive basic units for each element of green infrastructure, and thirdly quantify and present the impact on Net Zero in Korea using these. In this study, CVR(Content Validity Ration) analysis was performed to verify the adequacy of green infrastructure elements in rural areas derived through research and analysis of previous studies, is as follows. First, Hubs of Green infrastructure in rural area include village forests, wetlands, farm land, and smart farms with a CVR value of .500 or higher. And Links of Green infrastructure in rural area include streams, village green areas, and LID (rainwater recycling). Second, the basic unit for each green infrastructure element was presented by classifying it into minimum, maximum, and median values using the results of previous studies so that it could be used for spatial planning and design for Net Zero. Third, when Green infrastructure in rural areas is applied to non-urban settlements in Korea, it is analyzed that it has the effect of indirectly reducing CO2 by at least 70.76 million tons and up to 141.16 million tons. This is 3.4 to 6.7 times the amount of CO2 emission from the agricultural sector in 2019, and it can be seen that the contribution to Net Zero is very high. It is expected to greatly contribute to the transformation of the ecosystem. This study quantitatively presented the carbon-neutral contribution to settlements located in non-urban areas, and by deriving the carbon reduction unit for each element of green infrastructure in rural areas, it can be used in spatial planning and design for carbon-neutral at the village level. It has significance as a basic research. In particular, the basic unit of carbon reduction for each green infrastructure factors will be usable for Net Zero policy at the village level, presenting a quantitative target when establishing a plan, and checking whether or not it has been achieved. In addition, based on this, it will be possible to expand and apply Net Zero at regional and city units such as cities, counties, and districts.

A Study on Analysis of Components and Color Characteristics of History·Culture Streets - focused on Street of Gaya in Gimhae - (역사·문화가로의 구성요소 및 색채특성 분석 연구 - 김해시 가야의 거리를 중심으로 -)

  • An, Su Mi;Son, Kwang Ho;Choi, In Young
    • Korea Science and Art Forum
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    • v.20
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    • pp.255-265
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    • 2015
  • When it comes to how to define history·culture streets, people think of the streets as street environments that would create local identity in association with this local community's particular historical and cultural resources as well as urban streets. In order to build such streets, any relevant fields first need to apply some original design based on understanding on historical and cultural resources. With Street of Gaya in Gimhae selected as a research subject, this study aims to look into components and color characteristics of the history·culture street and finds ways to create other streets of that kind. As a frame to understand the history·culture streets, what this study would come up with is considered significant in that it helps the value to be re-recognized and promoted. In order to achieve the research goal, the study (1) extracted components of streetscapes referring to relevant previous researches and then, (2) analyzed a current status of these components of Street of Gaya via field investigation. (3) The study examined color characteristics of each of the components. Findings of the research are summarized as follows. (1) From a comprehensive point of view, the study categorized and subdivided the components of the history·culture street into nonphysical and physical elements. (2) After analyzing the current status of the components, the study learned that Street of Gaya basically consists of historical and cultural remains and sculptures as well as street facilities. (3) Results of the color investigation reported that the plan on designing of Street of Gaya had been processed with a focus laid on harmony of historical remains and cultural remains which are told to be natural components. However, the study also figured out that as long as relevant fields want to create different identity in each section and to efficiently deliver information, they should first prepare this smart design system to integrate each pieces of a streetscape as a whole.

Development of a complex failure prediction system using Hierarchical Attention Network (Hierarchical Attention Network를 이용한 복합 장애 발생 예측 시스템 개발)

  • Park, Youngchan;An, Sangjun;Kim, Mintae;Kim, Wooju
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.26 no.4
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    • pp.127-148
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    • 2020
  • The data center is a physical environment facility for accommodating computer systems and related components, and is an essential foundation technology for next-generation core industries such as big data, smart factories, wearables, and smart homes. In particular, with the growth of cloud computing, the proportional expansion of the data center infrastructure is inevitable. Monitoring the health of these data center facilities is a way to maintain and manage the system and prevent failure. If a failure occurs in some elements of the facility, it may affect not only the relevant equipment but also other connected equipment, and may cause enormous damage. In particular, IT facilities are irregular due to interdependence and it is difficult to know the cause. In the previous study predicting failure in data center, failure was predicted by looking at a single server as a single state without assuming that the devices were mixed. Therefore, in this study, data center failures were classified into failures occurring inside the server (Outage A) and failures occurring outside the server (Outage B), and focused on analyzing complex failures occurring within the server. Server external failures include power, cooling, user errors, etc. Since such failures can be prevented in the early stages of data center facility construction, various solutions are being developed. On the other hand, the cause of the failure occurring in the server is difficult to determine, and adequate prevention has not yet been achieved. In particular, this is the reason why server failures do not occur singularly, cause other server failures, or receive something that causes failures from other servers. In other words, while the existing studies assumed that it was a single server that did not affect the servers and analyzed the failure, in this study, the failure occurred on the assumption that it had an effect between servers. In order to define the complex failure situation in the data center, failure history data for each equipment existing in the data center was used. There are four major failures considered in this study: Network Node Down, Server Down, Windows Activation Services Down, and Database Management System Service Down. The failures that occur for each device are sorted in chronological order, and when a failure occurs in a specific equipment, if a failure occurs in a specific equipment within 5 minutes from the time of occurrence, it is defined that the failure occurs simultaneously. After configuring the sequence for the devices that have failed at the same time, 5 devices that frequently occur simultaneously within the configured sequence were selected, and the case where the selected devices failed at the same time was confirmed through visualization. Since the server resource information collected for failure analysis is in units of time series and has flow, we used Long Short-term Memory (LSTM), a deep learning algorithm that can predict the next state through the previous state. In addition, unlike a single server, the Hierarchical Attention Network deep learning model structure was used in consideration of the fact that the level of multiple failures for each server is different. This algorithm is a method of increasing the prediction accuracy by giving weight to the server as the impact on the failure increases. The study began with defining the type of failure and selecting the analysis target. In the first experiment, the same collected data was assumed as a single server state and a multiple server state, and compared and analyzed. The second experiment improved the prediction accuracy in the case of a complex server by optimizing each server threshold. In the first experiment, which assumed each of a single server and multiple servers, in the case of a single server, it was predicted that three of the five servers did not have a failure even though the actual failure occurred. However, assuming multiple servers, all five servers were predicted to have failed. As a result of the experiment, the hypothesis that there is an effect between servers is proven. As a result of this study, it was confirmed that the prediction performance was superior when the multiple servers were assumed than when the single server was assumed. In particular, applying the Hierarchical Attention Network algorithm, assuming that the effects of each server will be different, played a role in improving the analysis effect. In addition, by applying a different threshold for each server, the prediction accuracy could be improved. This study showed that failures that are difficult to determine the cause can be predicted through historical data, and a model that can predict failures occurring in servers in data centers is presented. It is expected that the occurrence of disability can be prevented in advance using the results of this study.

Efficient Topic Modeling by Mapping Global and Local Topics (전역 토픽의 지역 매핑을 통한 효율적 토픽 모델링 방안)

  • Choi, Hochang;Kim, Namgyu
    • Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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    • v.23 no.3
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    • pp.69-94
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    • 2017
  • 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.

A Study on the Evaluation of Fertilizer Loss in the Drainage(Waste) Water of Hydroponic Cultivation, Korea (수경재배 유출 배액(폐양액)의 비료 손실량 평가 연구)

  • Jinkwan Son;Sungwook Yun;Jinkyung Kwon;Jihoon Shin;Donghyeon Kang;Minjung Park;Ryugap Lim
    • Journal of Wetlands Research
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    • v.25 no.1
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    • pp.35-47
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    • 2023
  • Korean facility horticulture and hydroponic cultivation methods increase, requiring the management of waste water generated. In this study, the amount of fertilizer contained in the discharged waste liquid was determined. By evaluating this as a price, it was suggested to reduce water treatment costs and recycle fertilizer components. It was evaluated based on the results of major water quality analysis of waste liquid by crop, such as tomatoes, paprika, cucumbers, and strawberries, and in the case of P component, it was analyzed by converting it to the amount of phosphoric acid (P2O5). The amount of nitrogen (N) can be calculated by discharging 1,145.90kg·ha-1 of tomatoes, 920.43kg·ha-1 of paprika, 804.16kg·ha-1 of cucumbers, 405.83kg·ha-1 of strawberries, and the fertilizer content of P2O5 is 830.65kg·ha-1 of paprika, 622.32kg·ha-1 of tomatoes, 477.67kg·ha-1 of cucumbers. In addition, trace elements such as potassium (K), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), iron (Fe), and manganese (Mn) were also analyzed to be emitted. The price per kg of each item calculated by averaging the price of fertilizer sold on the market can be evaluated as KRW, N 860.7, P 2,378.2, K 2,121.7, Ca 981.2, Mg 1,036.3, Fe 126,076.9, Mn 62,322.1, Zn 15,825.0, Cu 31,362.0, B 4,238.0, Mo 149,041.7. The annual fertilizer loss amount for each crop was calculated by comprehensively considering the price per kg calculated based on the market price of fertilizer, the concentration of waste by crop analyzed earlier, and the average annual emission of hydroponic cultivation. As a result of the analysis, the average of the four hydroponic crops was 5,475,361.1 won in fertilizer ingredients, with tomatoes valued at 6,995,622.3 won, paprika valued at 7,384,923.8 won, cucumbers valued at 5,091,607.9 won, and strawberries valued at 2,429,290.6 won. It was expected that if hydroponic drainage is managed through self-treatment or threshing before discharge rather than by leaking it into a river and treating it as a pollutant, it can be a valuable reusable fertilizer ingredient along with reducing water treatment costs.

Consumer's Negative Brand Rumor Acceptance and Rumor Diffusion (소비자의 부정적 브랜드 루머의 수용과 확산)

  • Lee, Won-jun;Lee, Han-Suk
    • 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.

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