The Effect of the 'Silver Consumer's Product Satisfaction and Knowledge on the Health Functional Consumer's Well-being (실버소비자의 건강기능 제품에 대한 만족과 지식이 웰빙에 미치는 영향)
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- Journal of Distribution Science
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- v.9 no.2
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- pp.131-140
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- 2011
On 1 July 2000, as the over-65 year-old population numbered 3,371,000 and accounted for over 7.1% of Korea's total population, an aging society was revealed. The over-65 percentage climbed to 11.0% by late 2010. A truly aged society is expected soon, by 2019. This aging society requires marketing research concerning the consumer behaviour and well-being of the elderly, because the 'silver generation' is emerging as a large part of the consumer market. The purpose of this study is to empirically analyse one effect among several satisfaction factors in the consuming cycle of various health functional products on consumer's well-being and the effect of product knowledge on the relationship between product satisfaction and well-being. To achieve this purpose, we established a research model after reviewing previous studies on product satisfaction, product knowledge, and consumer's well-being. The following hypotheses were developed from the research model. Hypothesis 1: When elderly consumers' satisfaction with health functional products increases, their well-being will increase. Hypothesis 2: The effect of their satisfaction with health functional products on their well-being will be strengthened according to the level of their knowledge of the products. Those hypotheses were tested by multiple and moderated regressions to the empirical data through a questionnaire survey. As a result, Hypothesis 1 was totally adopted, and Hypothesis 2 was only partially adopted. The study has many practical implications for well-being marketing. First, in order to heighten the elderly consumer's well-being, the level of his or her satisfaction with the health functional products has to be raised in every stage: during the acquisition, preparation, use, maintenance, and disposition of the consumption cycle. Moreover, promoting positive emotional experiences while diminishing negative ones requires effort because a consumer's well-being is made up of various needs. Second, the marketing of health functional products should be invigorated in order to raise the level of elderly consumers' knowledge of them. In other words, it is important to give them an expertise in the health functional products through different channels. A statistical analysis showed, however, that their knowledge has a decisive effect on only two satisfaction stages, preparation and maintenance. Nevertheless, this merely confirmed the intuitive assumption that the knowledge of health functional products is most relevant to their preparation and maintenance. In conclusion, this study is timely because few empirical studies exist on the relationships between silver consumer behaviour and well-being marketing. It contributes to our understanding of this subject by revealing the causality between the silver consumer's satisfaction and his or her well-being in the consumption cycle and by discovering the moderating influence of knowledge in that process.
With the MICE(Meeting, Incentive travel, Convention, Exhibition) industry coming into the spotlight, there has been a growing interest in the domestic exhibition industry. Accordingly, in Korea, various studies of the industry are being conducted to enhance exhibition performance as in the United States or Europe. Some studies are focusing particularly on analyzing visiting patterns of exhibition visitors using intelligent information technology in consideration of the variations in effects of watching exhibitions according to the exhibitory environment or technique, thereby understanding visitors and, furthermore, drawing the correlations between exhibiting businesses and improving exhibition performance. However, previous studies related to booth recommendation systems only discussed the accuracy of recommendation in the aspect of a system rather than determining changes in visitors' behavior or perception by recommendation. A booth recommendation system enables visitors to visit unplanned exhibition booths by recommending visitors suitable ones based on information about visitors' visits. Meanwhile, some visitors may be satisfied with their unplanned visits, while others may consider the recommending process to be cumbersome or obstructive to their free observation. In the latter case, the exhibition is likely to produce worse results compared to when visitors are allowed to freely observe the exhibition. Thus, in order to apply a booth recommendation system to exhibition halls, the factors affecting the performance of the system should be generally examined, and the effects of the system on visitors' unplanned visiting behavior should be carefully studied. As such, this study aims to determine the factors that affect the performance of a booth recommendation system by reviewing theories and literature and to examine the effects of visitors' perceived performance of the system on their satisfaction of unplanned behavior and intention to reuse the system. Toward this end, the unplanned behavior theory was adopted as the theoretical framework. Unplanned behavior can be defined as "behavior that is done by consumers without any prearranged plan". Thus far, consumers' unplanned behavior has been studied in various fields. The field of marketing, in particular, has focused on unplanned purchasing among various types of unplanned behavior, which has been often confused with impulsive purchasing. Nevertheless, the two are different from each other; while impulsive purchasing means strong, continuous urges to purchase things, unplanned purchasing is behavior with purchasing decisions that are made inside a store, not before going into one. In other words, all impulsive purchases are unplanned, but not all unplanned purchases are impulsive. Then why do consumers engage in unplanned behavior? Regarding this question, many scholars have made many suggestions, but there has been a consensus that it is because consumers have enough flexibility to change their plans in the middle instead of developing plans thoroughly. In other words, if unplanned behavior costs much, it will be difficult for consumers to change their prearranged plans. In the case of the exhibition hall examined in this study, visitors learn the programs of the hall and plan which booth to visit in advance. This is because it is practically impossible for visitors to visit all of the various booths that an exhibition operates due to their limited time. Therefore, if the booth recommendation system proposed in this study recommends visitors booths that they may like, they can change their plans and visit the recommended booths. Such visiting behavior can be regarded similarly to consumers' visit to a store or tourists' unplanned behavior in a tourist spot and can be understand in the same context as the recent increase in tourism consumers' unplanned behavior influenced by information devices. Thus, the following research model was established. This research model uses visitors' perceived performance of a booth recommendation system as the parameter, and the factors affecting the performance include trust in the system, exhibition visitors' knowledge levels, expected personalization of the system, and the system's threat to freedom. In addition, the causal relation between visitors' satisfaction of their perceived performance of the system and unplanned behavior and their intention to reuse the system was determined. While doing so, trust in the booth recommendation system consisted of 2nd order factors such as competence, benevolence, and integrity, while the other factors consisted of 1st order factors. In order to verify this model, a booth recommendation system was developed to be tested in 2011 DMC Culture Open, and 101 visitors were empirically studied and analyzed. The results are as follows. First, visitors' trust was the most important factor in the booth recommendation system, and the visitors who used the system perceived its performance as a success based on their trust. Second, visitors' knowledge levels also had significant effects on the performance of the system, which indicates that the performance of a recommendation system requires an advance understanding. In other words, visitors with higher levels of understanding of the exhibition hall learned better the usefulness of the booth recommendation system. Third, expected personalization did not have significant effects, which is a different result from previous studies' results. This is presumably because the booth recommendation system used in this study did not provide enough personalized services. Fourth, the recommendation information provided by the booth recommendation system was not considered to threaten or restrict one's freedom, which means it is valuable in terms of usefulness. Lastly, high performance of the booth recommendation system led to visitors' high satisfaction levels of unplanned behavior and intention to reuse the system. To sum up, in order to analyze the effects of a booth recommendation system on visitors' unplanned visits to a booth, empirical data were examined based on the unplanned behavior theory and, accordingly, useful suggestions for the establishment and design of future booth recommendation systems were made. In the future, further examination should be conducted through elaborate survey questions and survey objects.