• Information Systems Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.49-68
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• 2014

These days, consumers have increasingly preferred to digital real-time streamlining and downloading to listen to music because this is convenient and affordable for the consumers. Accordingly, sales of music in compact disk formats have steadily declined. In this regards, online digital music has become a new communication channel to listen musics, where digital files can be delivered over various online networks to people's computing devices. The majority of online digital music distributors has Music Recommender Systems for sales of digital music on their websites. Music Recommender Systems are parts of information filtering systems that provide the ratings or preferences that users give to music. Korean online digital music distributors have Music Recommender Systems. But those online music distributors didn't provide any rules or clear procedures that recommend music. Therefore, we raise important questions as follows: "Is Music Recommender Systems Fair?", "What is the impact of Music Recommender Systems on online music rankings and sales?" While previous studies have focused on usefulness of Music Recommender Systems, this study investigates not only fairness of Current Music Recommender Systems but also Relationship between Music Recommender Systems and online Music Charts. This study examines these issues based on Bandwagon effect, ranking effect, Slot effect theories. For our empirical analysis, we selected the most famous five online digital music distributors in terms of market shares. We found that all recommended music is exposed to the top of 'daily music charts' in online digital music distributors' websites. We collected music ranking data and recommended music data from 'daily music chart' during a one month. The result shows that online music recommender systems are not fair, since they mainly recommend particular music that supported by a specific music production company. In addition, the recommended music are always exposed to the top of music ranking charts. We also find that recommended music usually appear at the top 20 ranking charts within one or two days. Also, the most music in the top 50 or 100 ranks are the recommended music. Moreover, recommended music usually remain the ranking charts more than one month while non-recommended music often disappear at the ranking charts within two week. Our study provides an important implication to online music industry. Because music recommender systems and music ranking charts are closely related, music distributors may improperly use their recommender systems to boost the sales of music that related to their own companies. Therefore, online digital music distributor must clearly announce the rules and procedures about music recommender systems for the better music industry.

• Journal of the Korean Society of International Agriculture
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• v.30 no.4
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• pp.292-299
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• 2018

In a survey in which farmers were asked about their levels of satisfaction with agricultural machines, Japanese products scored higher than local products by 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4 times for tractors, combine harvesters, and rice transplanter, respectively. Japanese products corresponded to generally high satisfaction levels in terms of operating performance, operability, frequency of breakdowns, and durability, excluding sales price and after-sales services. Effective countermeasures through quality improvement are therefore necessary for Korean products. Furthermore, a survey of dealers showed that the components and consumables for core agricultural machines had high frequencies of breakdowns and repairs. Four major components of tractors represented 85.3% of all breakdowns and repairs, five components of combine harvesters represented 89.6%, and three components of rice transplanters represented 80.5%. Moreover, a comparison of the technological levels between local and imported machines showed that the local machines' levels were at 60-100% for tractors, 70-100% for combine harvesters, and 70-95% for rice transplanters. Small and mid-sized tractors, 4 interrow combine harvesters, and 6 interrow rice transplanters showed similar levels of technology. The results of the analysis suggest that action is urgently needed at a policy level to establish an agricultural machinery component research center for the development, production, and supply of commonly-used components, with the participation of manufacturers of agricultural machines and components, in order to enhance the competitiveness of local manufacturers and to revitalize the agricultural machine market.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.185-203
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• 2009

Yuhan Kimberly, a joint-venture company of Korean Yuhan Company and American Kimberly-Clark, opened a premium diaper market in Korea by launching Pull-Ups which was pants-typed diapers in 1993. Pull-Ups was imported as finished goods from Kimberly-Clark. However, in spite of its huge market share in United States, it failed to land down in Korean market because of wrong positioning strategy which did not consider domestic customers' tastes. In 1996, Yuhan-Kimberly brought out a pants-typed diaper, Huggies-Toddler, to Korean market again. This paved the way for the combination of Kimberly-Clark's production power and Yuhan-Kimberly's marketing power and led to launch new product superior to Pull-Ups. However, this product was unsuccessful in the market because of wrong positioning which did not catch domestic customer's life styles such as cultural, environmental and habitual differences in toilet training, the cost increase coming from IMF crisis in Korea, weak trust within the company, weak trust within the company, and too much higher price than regular diapers. In 2005, Yuhan-Kimberly redeveloped new pants market business strategy. It was organically combined with winning product development plan, winning communication strategy and the market structure change through the pants market creation. Customer's habit, usage and attitude were studied with total 55 times market investigations. Also, all processes from planning to designing were executed in the customer's view by investigating product research, positioning research and advertisement research. Yuhan-Kimberly repositioned new product as a wearing diaper not as a toilet training diaper and launched Huggies Magic Panty as a premium product which had 25% higher price than previous Huggies. Huggies Magic Panty was recognized as a great hit product in domestic diaper market and the sales recorded 37.6 bill won in 2006, 57.2 bill won in 2007, and 90 bill won in 2008 since launching in 2005. The reason of Huggies Magic Panty's success was the repositioning strategy deduced from the precise check of customer's usage habit. It was the winning strategy of Huggies that were market investigation in order to survive in domestic baby goods market where a lot of companies struggled intensively, the exact positioning based on its market investigation and aggressive 360 degree communication strategy to give customers impressions efficiently.

• 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.