• Information Systems Review
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.89-110
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• 2013

Affiliate marketing is classified as a type of online advertising, where merchants share a percentage of sales revenue generated by each customer, who visited the company's website via a content provider. Content provider, referred to as an affiliate, usually places an online advertisement at its website. For the past few years, there have been a lot of companies or individuals who participate in affiliate marketing. Generally speaking, most of them have websites and post the merchant's ads on their own websites. However, building and maintaining websites have some technology requirements. The widespread use of Social Network Service (SNS), especially microblog-based SNS such as Twitter and Sina Weibo, provides opportunities for individuals who want to be content providers of affiliate marketing. Since information spreads quickly on microblog-based SNS and the easy in targeting customers, it is both an effective and an efficient tool to do affiliate marketing. The relationship between a content provider and the potential customer, which is referred as "tie strength", is quite an important issue in such situation. This paper proved that service characteristics of the microblog-based SNS (security, community drivenness and navigability) and content quality all had positive influence on click-through intention, while tie strength played a moderating role. For the group with strong tie, tie strength is crucial in influencing click-through intention. While for the weak tie group, content quality was very important. Finally, we proposed some implications for both academics and practitioners.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.291-322
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• 2010

Many companies make active use of loyalty programs to improve their customers' loyalty to the company. Loyalty programs are widely used in various industries and sectors, including oil, telecommunications, credit card, department stores, and internet shopping malls; their performance seems to be successful in building a positive relationship with customers. This study emphasizes the role of affiliate programs in creating loyalty, thereby helping companies to maintain their competitive advantage. To objectives of this study are to investigate which antecedent variables(affiliate program benefit, service company characteristic , consumer characteristic) have significant effects on consumer perceived affiliate program satisfaction and to examine whether these factors have differences between Korean and Japanese consumers. The useful results will provide marketing strategy for marketers of service companies. The results also show that affiliate program is very important in order to maintain relationship with customers in service companies.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.49-59
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• 2011

A franchise can be said to be the main method of distribution and marketing. It appears to be the future of the retail industry and is one of the world's fastest growing businesses sectors, as many policy reports and research results have acknowledged. Korea's franchise industry began in the 1970s, spread out into many areas (including food services, retail, and the service industry), and has grown by over 10% each year ever since. The industry's influence on the national economy becomes ever greater. Although the size of the franchise industry is expected to grow as it spreads and as the government expands its support, it has not yet attracted much academic interest. Research has so far been very fragmented. The main interest has been the relationship and conflicts between the head offices and the affiliates. No study has yet occurred on whether the concepts of satisfaction and intent to conclude a contract directly affect the success or failure of the affiliates. Few studies have empirically inquired into the demographic characteristics and abilities of the affiliates that significantly affect their results. Domestic franchise industries must prepare to leap from quantitative to qualitative growth. Most important is the need for affiliate headquarters and affiliates to build confidence between them. A friendly and reliable relationship between affiliate headquarters and affiliates will eliminate distrust from the franchise and maintain a healthy franchise system. This study suggests that current and prospective heads of affiliation should concentrate not on attracting affiliates but on investment and techniques of affiliate support. They should work on the reinforcement of brand power, the appropriate affiliate business environment, systematic education/training, taking burdens off the affiliate business persons, consolidating the relationship with the affiliate business persons, marketing mix factors (e.g. products, price conditions, logistics and shipping services, promotion, supervising and supervisor, operation procedures/processes, and material evidence); these all greatly affect the success or failure of the affiliate business. Supporting the affiliates is an important factor that enhances their results and satisfaction and consequently increases the positive recommendations to others and the ratio of recurrent conclusions of contracts, which ultimately generate the growth of the franchises. In addition, it is suggested that prospective franchise founders should make every effort to choose a good head office since the characteristics of the head office greatly influence the success of the affiliates. This study is significant in that it grasps the characteristics of the head office of affiliation and of the affiliates that influence affiliate results in ways not yet academically attempted.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.3-21
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• 2011

In this study, several experiments were designed to test the effectiveness of social media in export marketing. In particular, the experiments were made using Twitter and Facebook. The results showed that users' interest were able to increase the effects combined with B2B and B2C marketing events. The B2C marketing events could be made by personal target Event, Poll event, guest comments and social commerce. The B2B marketing was performed using Page Manager, Affiliate page, building and affiliate marketing group. Special features of Facebook such as social plug-in, Twitter integration, and Photo Tagging were found effective. A couple of implications were found in this study. First, the link between social media channel system was key success factor in effective export marketing. Second, the corporate marketing mix and social media consistent with the marketing mix strategy, communication between the managers and the managers' competencies were obtained for the key success factors.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.311-317
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• 2022

The research is devoted to the substantiation of the system approach to the involvement of digital marketing tools as a guarantee of international business development. It is proved that digital marketing, as a type of marketing based on the use of digital technologies allows to make a profit, to promote the brand, as well as goods and services in the market. The digital marketing toolkit system is a set of elements with existing relationships that ensure the effectiveness of the entire digital marketing, which in total is greater than its individual components. The implementation of a systems approach involves the implementation of the philosophy of digital marketing in general, its functions in the form of systems analysis, formation of strategic development goals and entry and promotion in the international market, preparation and implementation of tactical and strategic development plans.The use of such digital marketing tools as: content marketing, social media marketing, Email-marketing, targeted advertising, contextual advertising, media advertising, Search Engine Optimization, affiliate programs and the company's website is analyzed in detail.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.137-151
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• 2012

Established in May 2005, INNOCEAN Worldwide started as an affiliate marketing and communications company of the Hyundai Motor Group and grew into a top agency ranked no. 2 in the South Korean market within seven years. Currently, INNOCEAN Worldwide has become a global company, operating in sixteen countries through four regional headquarters, fifteen overseas subsidiaries, and seven branch offices with more than 1,100 employees. The company holds top clients from finance, electronics, telecommunications, food, retail, education and other various industries. The accomplishment of INNOCEAN Worldwide can be summarized by the following five key factors. The first factor is INNOCEAN Worldwide's strong and enduring passion and commitment to enter the global market and to build and strengthen its global network. The second factor is achieving successful localization through recruiting talented employees for its overseas branches directly from the local workforce, which enables the company to overcome language barriers, cultural differences, and creative gaps among different regional markets. Third is the company's effective implementation of the 'Global Resource Remix' strategy, which incorporates the distinctive competencies of each overseas operation as a global company standard. Fourth is the creation of the 'Discover System,' a global knowledge management system enabling overseas offices worldwide to share each other's accumulated knowledge and experiences. The fifth factor is the successful establishment of INNOCEAN Worldwide's unique Total Marketing Solution Service. Through this service, the company has offered integrated consulting services for strategic brand management to solve various marketing problems. In summary, the passion and commitment of INNOCEAN Worldwide's top management for the company's globalization and the supporting system that enables such commitment have made it possible for the company to take a global leap and become not merely a company with global operations but a truly global company.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.14 no.10
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• pp.449-454
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• 2016

Characters have been frequently used as a symbol or an icon in above the line advertising for generations. It has become an essential factor for companies to research about the experience that consumers have by engaging with the products that are partnered with famous or brand characters before introducing a product to the market. The character trademark has become more popular and interesting than the product itself. Therefore, products have become dependent on its character trademark. The ultimate purpose of this research is to find effective ways of increasing the value of the brand by observing various characters and how people interact with these characters, depending on the consumer's age, gender, and so forth. One would be able to collect data or information from documents as a method of this research and grasp different contents, components, concepts, and contexts of character collaboration and affiliate characters from well-known messengers, such as Kakaotalk and Line. In addition, by re-analyzing Peter Morville's Honeycomb tool, its method would set the scale of the user experience and one would be able to conduct interviews with those who are using collaboration products. This study reveals extensive guidelines for character partnership or collaboration that have been successful and creating effective marketing skills.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1-32
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to investigate upon a diversification strategy through market creation of CJ Group, which has contributed in positioning of the firm as one of the leading conglomerates in South Korea. With such objective, the background of CJ Group, followed by its business diversification strategies were explored, with reference to several case studies. The history of CJ Group began with establishment of CheilJedang Industrial Corporation in 1953, as the first domestic sugar producer and exporter of South Korea. The corporation gradually expanded its business ever since at both national and global level, to include the fields of food production, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and life chemicals. Later, CheilJedang (CJ) Group was established as an affiliate of CheilJedang Industrial Corporation. With such independence, extension of business has been witnessed across the industries of media, entertainment, finance, information technology and distribution. Thus, the current CJ Group pursues to define itself as a progressive global living culture company with four major business categories from food and food service, biotechnology, entertainment and media, and logistics. Despite its success in today's market, CJ Group underwent hardships in its business diversification in 1990s due to indiscreet management, along with the Asian financial crisis. Here, many firms overcame the financial difficulties by taking advantage of the exchange rate for overseas expansion. Though, CJ Group tried to differentiate itself by focusing on the domestic market by creating something out of nothing. Hence, CJ Group takes a unique position among many cases of business diversification and their categorization. In an effort to identify and classify the types of growth experienced by the top 30 companies in South Korea, the firms were categorized into four groups according to their diversification strategies adapted after the Asian financial crisis. Based on the mode and time of entry, corporations were identified either as the 'Explorer', 'Invader', 'Venture Capitalist', or 'Assimilator'. Here, the majority of the firms showed the qualities of Invader, entering mature markets through large-scaled mergers and acquisitions. However, CJ Group was the only firm that was categorized as an Explorer, for its focus on the newly emerging service sector in culture-contents industry. This diversification strategy through market creation is worth examining, due to its contribution in generating simultaneous growth between the market and the company itself. Diverse brands of CJ Group have been referred to as case studies in this regard, from 'Hatban', 'Cine de Chef', 'VIPS' to 'CJ GLS'. These four businesses, each to represent processed food, film, restaurant service, and logistics industries respectively, show CJ Group's effectiveness in creating a whole new category of goods and services that are innovative. In fact, such businesses not only contributed in advancement of consumers' wellbeing, but toward generating additional value and employment. It is true that the diversification strategy of CJ Group requires long-term capital investment with high risk, compared to the other strategies mentioned in the paper. However, this model does create high employment and additional values that are positive to both the society and the firm itself. Therefore, the paper comes to a conclusion that the diversification strategy through market creation conveys the most positive impact relative to the others.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.41-72
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is the investigation of the effects of user participation, network effect, social influence, and usefulness on stickiness and continued use on Internet communities. In this research, stickiness refers to repeat visit and visit duration to an Internet community. Continued use means the willingness to continue to use an Internet community in the future. Internet community-based companies can earn money through selling the digital contents such as game, music, and avatar, advertizing on internet site, or offering an affiliate marketing. For such money making, stickiness and continued use of Internet users is much more important than the number of Internet users. We tried to answer following three questions. Fist, what is the effects of user participation on stickiness and continued use on Internet communities? Second, by what is user participation formed? Third, are network effect, social influence, and usefulness that was significant at prior research about technology acceptance model(TAM) still significant on internet communities? In this study, user participation, network effect, social influence, and usefulness are independent variables, stickiness is mediating variable, and continued use is dependent variable. Among independent variables, we are focused on user participation. User participation means that Internet user participates in the development of Internet community site (called mini-hompy or blog in Korea). User participation was studied from 1970 to 1997 at the research area of information system. But since 1997 when Internet started to spread to the public, user participation has hardly been studied. Given the importance of user participation at the success of Internet-based companies, it is very meaningful to study the research topic of user participation. To test the proposed model, we used a data set generated from the survey. The survey instrument was designed on the basis of a comprehensive literature review and interviews of experts, and was refined through several rounds of pretests, revisions, and pilot tests. The respondents of survey were the undergraduates and the graduate students who mainly used Internet communities. Data analysis was conducted using 217 respondents(response rate, 97.7 percent). We used structural equation modeling(SEM) implemented in partial least square(PLS). We chose PLS for two reason. First, our model has formative constructs. PLS uses components-based algorithm and can estimated formative constructs. Second, PLS is more appropriate when the research model is in an early stage of development. A review of the literature suggests that empirical tests of user participation is still sparse. The test of model was executed in the order of three research questions. First user participation had the direct effects on stickiness(${\beta}$=0.150, p<0.01) and continued use (${\beta}$=0.119, p<0.05). And user participation, as a partial mediation model, had a indirect effect on continued use mediated through stickiness (${\beta}$=0.007, p<0.05). Second, optional participation and prosuming participation significantly formed user participation. Optional participation, with a path magnitude as high as 0.986 (p<0.001), is a key determinant for the strength of user participation. Third, Network effect (${\beta}$=0.236, p<0.001). social influence (${\beta}$=0.135, p<0.05), and usefulness (${\beta}$=0.343, p<0.001) had directly significant impacts on stickiness. But network effect and social influence, as a full mediation model, had both indirectly significant impacts on continued use mediated through stickiness (${\beta}$=0.11, p<0.001, and ${\beta}$=0.063, p<0.05, respectively). Compared with this result, usefulness, as a partial mediation model, had a direct impact on continued use and a indirect impact on continued use mediated through stickiness. This study has three contributions. First this is the first empirical study showing that user participation is the significant driver of continued use. The researchers of information system have hardly studies user participation since late 1990s. And the researchers of marketing have studied a few lately. Second, this study enhanced the understanding of user participation. Up to recently, user participation has been studied from the bipolar viewpoint of participation v.s non-participation. Also, even the study on participation has been studied from the point of limited optional participation. But, this study proved the existence of prosuming participation to design and produce products or services, besides optional participation. And this study empirically proved that optional participation and prosuming participation were the key determinant for user participation. Third, our study compliments traditional studies of TAM. According prior literature about of TAM, the constructs of network effect, social influence, and usefulness had effects on the technology adoption. This study proved that these constructs still are significant on Internet communities.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.83-98
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• 2012

In a market where new and used cars are competing with each other, we would run the risk of obtaining biased estimates of cross elasticity between them if we focus on only new cars or on only used cars. Unfortunately, most of previous studies on the automobile industry have focused on only new car models without taking into account the effect of used cars' pricing policy on new cars' market shares and vice versa, resulting in inadequate prediction of reactive pricing in response to competitors' rebate or price discount. However, there are some exceptions. Purohit (1992) and Sullivan (1990) looked into both new and used car markets at the same time to examine the effect of new car model launching on the used car prices. But their studies have some limitations in that they employed the average used car prices reported in NADA Used Car Guide instead of actual transaction prices. Some of the conflicting results may be due to this problem in the data. Park (1998) recognized this problem and used the actual prices in his study. His work is notable in that he investigated the qualitative effect of new car model launching on the pricing policy of the used car in terms of reinforcement of brand equity. The current work also used the actual price like Park (1998) but the quantitative aspect of competitive price promotion between new and used cars of the same model was explored. In this study, I develop a model that assumes that the cross elasticity between new and used cars of the same model is higher than those amongst new cars and used cars of the different model. Specifically, I apply the nested logit model that assumes the car model choice at the first stage and the choice between new and used cars at the second stage. This proposed model is compared to the IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) model that assumes that there is no decision hierarchy but that new and used cars of the different model are all substitutable at the first stage. The data for this study are drawn from Power Information Network (PIN), an affiliate of J.D. Power and Associates. PIN collects sales transaction data from a sample of dealerships in the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. These are retail transactions, i.e., sales or leases to final consumers, excluding fleet sales and including both new car and used car sales. Each observation in the PIN database contains the transaction date, the manufacturer, model year, make, model, trim and other car information, the transaction price, consumer rebates, the interest rate, term, amount financed (when the vehicle is financed or leased), etc. I used data for the compact cars sold during the period January 2009- June 2009. The new and used cars of the top nine selling models are included in the study: Mazda 3, Honda Civic, Chevrolet Cobalt, Toyota Corolla, Hyundai Elantra, Ford Focus, Volkswagen Jetta, Nissan Sentra, and Kia Spectra. These models in the study accounted for 87% of category unit sales. Empirical application of the nested logit model showed that the proposed model outperformed the IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives) model in both calibration and holdout samples. The other comparison model that assumes choice between new and used cars at the first stage and car model choice at the second stage turned out to be mis-specfied since the dissimilarity parameter (i.e., inclusive or categroy value parameter) was estimated to be greater than 1. Post hoc analysis based on estimated parameters was conducted employing the modified Lanczo's iterative method. This method is intuitively appealing. For example, suppose a new car offers a certain amount of rebate and gains market share at first. In response to this rebate, a used car of the same model keeps decreasing price until it regains the lost market share to maintain the status quo. The new car settle down to a lowered market share due to the used car's reaction. The method enables us to find the amount of price discount to main the status quo and equilibrium market shares of the new and used cars. In the first simulation, I used Jetta as a focal brand to see how its new and used cars set prices, rebates or APR interactively assuming that reactive cars respond to price promotion to maintain the status quo. The simulation results showed that the IIA model underestimates cross elasticities, resulting in suggesting less aggressive used car price discount in response to new cars' rebate than the proposed nested logit model. In the second simulation, I used Elantra to reconfirm the result for Jetta and came to the same conclusion. In the third simulation, I had Corolla offer $1,000 rebate to see what could be the best response for Elantra's new and used cars. Interestingly, Elantra's used car could maintain the status quo by offering lower price discount ($160) than the new car ($205). In the future research, we might want to explore the plausibility of the alternative nested logit model. For example, the NUB model that assumes choice between new and used cars at the first stage and brand choice at the second stage could be a possibility even though it was rejected in the current study because of mis-specification (A dissimilarity parameter turned out to be higher than 1). The NUB model may have been rejected due to true mis-specification or data structure transmitted from a typical car dealership. In a typical car dealership, both new and used cars of the same model are displayed. Because of this fact, the BNU model that assumes brand choice at the first stage and choice between new and used cars at the second stage may have been favored in the current study since customers first choose a dealership (brand) then choose between new and used cars given this market environment. However, suppose there are dealerships that carry both new and used cars of various models, then the NUB model might fit the data as well as the BNU model. Which model is a better description of the data is an empirical question. In addition, it would be interesting to test a probabilistic mixture model of the BNU and NUB on a new data set.