• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.147-174
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• 2017

Korean companies currently operating in China have made active efforts to undertake corporate social responsibility activities and corporate advertising to improve their image, as well as marketing activities directly related to their products. In this context, this study aims to analyze how corporate social responsibility activities and corporate advertising influence a company's image from the perspective of Chinese consumers. This study also analyzes corporate image, consumer-company identification, and the structural relationship between the consumers' behavioral responses and their evaluation of Korean products. Based on theoretical discussions and previous studies, the study tests five research hypotheses for the development of a theoretical research model. In order to empirically test the research model, data were collected by enlisting and observing MBA students from major universities in China. The results obtained by actual analysis are as follows. First, corporate social responsibility activities and corporate advertising were found to be positively influential on corporate image. Second, corporate image is positively influential on consumer-company identification. The consumer-company identification of Chinese consumers' evaluation of Korean products, and positive evaluation of Korean products in turn induce positive influences on Chinese consumers' behavioral responses. These results suggest that the Korean companies already established in China not only need to enhance a positive corporate image but also have to make efforts to undertake corporate social responsibility activities and corporate advertising activities in order to improve their continuous and long-term relationship with Chinese consumers.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.283-297
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• 2018

This research focuses on the perceived marketplace influence(PMI: A belief that recognizes the effect that an individual's actions will have on the behavior of other consumers in the market and thus drives them to act on fair trade consumption) of consumers who may act as a more fundamental explanatory alternative to the gap in attitudes and behaviors of fair trade products. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between consumer's self - determination psychological needs (autonomy, competence, relevance), influence (personal influence, market influence), and the assets of fair trade products. As a result of the empirical analysis, it was found that among the major psychological needs related to self-determination, the variables other than competence and the perceived influence relations of consumers can be directly formed, and the perceived consumer effectiveness(PCE) has a positive influence on perceived marketplace influence(PMI). It is also found that the perceived influence of consumers(PCE, PMI) has an influence on the consumers' perceived equity of Fair Trade products. The results of this study will provide an opportunity to theoretically explain the gap between consumers' attitudes and behaviors of Fair Trade products, which is a part of ethical consumption, and provide important implications for the establishment of marketing strategies.

• 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.

• Culinary science and hospitality research
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.218-236
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• 2010

The concept of food coordination was introduced at the end of the 1990s and has generated a great deal of interest until now. However, no standard for the classification of such studies has been established yet. This study was conducted to examine the trends in food coordination studies published from 2000 to 2008. To accomplish this, approximately 335 food coordination articles were reviewed. Classification based on content analysis and the document review were conducted based on study themes(subjects), study forms, study designs, places of application, survey area and sample types. The most important type of study identified in this review was study themes. The themes of the study were divided into the following 10 subjects: 1) studies on the definition and recognition of food coordination, 2) studies on the environment, 3) studies on colors and package designs, 4) studies on table setting, table manner and etiquette, 5) studies on photography, editorial design, identity design and menu, 6) studies on components of dining atmosphere display and table/glass ware, 7) studies on emotions and sensibility, the five senses and food coordination, 8) studies on human resources, 9) studies on reviews, food & culture and education, 10) studies on purchasing, consumer behavior and marketing. The most common subjects were the components of dining atmosphere display and table/glass ware(23.6%). In addition, 17% of the articles reviewed were conducted to study colors and package designs, 14.6% to evaluate purchasing and consumer behavior and marketing, 13.4% to evaluate the environment, and 9.6% to study food & culture and education. Overall, these five subjects accounted for more than 75% of the articles reviewed.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.41-51
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• 2004

The objectives of this study is to suggest marketing strategies directed of retroactive-socialized parents who have environmental-educated children at school. For this purpose, this study based on the consumer socialization agent such as family and demographic variables were studied. The scope of this study includes attitudes toward price and advertising, and interests related to environmental problems and environmental-products preference. As a result, The parents of environmental-educated children get much more environmental information and show favorable buying behaviors for environmental-products. Most of parents who get environmental information from children educated at school show favorable attitude towards the advertising and also show more preference to environmental-products and more frequent communication among family members. Parents who have environmental-educated children were insensitive to price, more consciousness about environmental problem and flexible to change in their buying behaviors. In conclusion, This study shows that behaviors of children had a significant influence on buying behavior of parents.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.408-422
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• 2021

In this study, the relationship between trust and purchase intention, which is an outcome variable, was empirically verified by discovering the trust-forming factors of anti-aging products and developing measurement variables. In addition to the existing trust-forming factors such as perceived quality, perceived reputation, brand recognition, and customization, a newly discovered factor is 'accredited certification'. Since the anti-aging industry in Korea is an industry that directly affects consumer health, it was determined that the existing trust-forming factors had limitations in building consumer trust, and a new measure was discovered. This study conducted a survey on anti-aging product consumers and analyzed the solidity and relationship of the questions. As a result of the analysis, it was found that perceived quality, brand recognition, customization, and accredited certification among the anti-aging product trust-forming factors had a positive (+) effect on trust, and perceived reputation had a negative (-) effect on trust. appeared to affect It was found that there was a positive (+) effect between trust and purchase intention, which are the trailing variables. This study proved the meaningful relationship between trust-forming factors and trust by strategically developing and empirically and practically examining meaningful and effective trust-forming factors and measurement items. At the same time, this study is expected to significantly contribute to the establishment of marketing strategies related to anti-aging products in the future by discovering key factors for forming trust that are important for marketing in the anti-aging industry.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.195-215
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• 2008

The scarcity is pervasive aspect of human life and is a fundamental precondition of economic behavior of consumers. Also, the effect of scarcity message is a power social influence principle used by marketers to increase the subjective desirability of products. Because valuable objects are often scare, consumers tend to infer the scarce objects are valuable. Marketers often do base promotional appeals on the principle of scarcity to increase the subjective desirability their products among consumers. Specially, advertisers and retailers often promote their products using restrictions. These restriction act to constraint consumers' ability th take advantage of the promotion and can assume several forms. For example, some promotions are advertised as limited time offers, while others limit the quantity that can be bought at the deal price by employing the statements such as 'limit one per consumer,' 'limit 5 per customer,' 'limited products for special commemoration celebration,' Some retailers use statements extensively. A recent weekly flyer by a prominent retailer limited purchase quantities on 50% of the specials advertised on front page. When consumers saw these phrase, they often infer value from the product that has limited availability or is promoted as being scarce. But, the past researchers explored a direct relationship between the purchase quantity and time limit on deal purchase intention. They also don't explored that all restriction message are not created equal. Namely, we thought that different restrictions signal deal value in different ways or different mechanism. Consumers appear to perceive that time limits are used to attract consumers to the brand, while quantity limits are necessary to reduce stockpiling. This suggests other possible differences across restrictions. For example, quantity limits could imply product quality (i.e., this product at this price is so good that purchases must be limited). In contrast, purchase preconditions force the consumer to spend a certain amount to qualify for the deal, which suggests that inferences about the absolute quality of the promoted item would decline from purchase limits (highest quality) to time limits to purchase preconditions (lowest quality). This might be expected to be particularly true for unfamiliar brands. However, a critical but elusive issue in scarcity message research is the impacts of a inferred motives on the promoted scarcity message. The past researchers not explored possibility of inferred motives on the scarcity message context. Despite various type to the quantity limits message, they didn't separated scarcity message among the quantity limits. Therefore, we apply a stricter definition of scarcity message(i.e. quantity limits) and consider scarcity message type(general scarcity message vs. special scarcity message), scarcity depth(high vs. low). The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the scarcity message on the consumer's purchase intension. Specifically, we investigate the effect of general versus special scarcity messages on the consumer's purchase intention using the level of the scarcity depth as moderators. In other words, we postulates that the scarcity message type and scarcity depth play an essential moderating role in the relationship between the inferred motives and purchase intention. In other worlds, different from the past studies, we examine the interplay between the perceived motives and scarcity type, and between the perceived motives and scarcity depth. Both of these constructs have been examined in isolation, but a key question is whether they interact to produce an effect in reaction to the scarcity message type or scarcity depth increase. The perceived motive Inference behind the scarcity message will have important impact on consumers' reactions to the degree of scarcity depth increase. In relation ti this general question, we investigate the following specific issues. First, does consumers' inferred motives weaken the positive relationship between the scarcity depth decrease and the consumers' purchase intention, and if so, how much does it attenuate this relationship? Second, we examine the interplay between the scarcity message type and the consumers' purchase intention in the context of the scarcity depth decrease. Third, we study whether scarcity message type and scarcity depth directly affect the consumers' purchase intention. For the answer of these questions, this research is composed of 2(intention inference: existence vs. nonexistence)${\times}2$(scarcity type: special vs. general)${\times}2$(scarcity depth: high vs. low) between subject designs. The results are summarized as follows. First, intention inference(inferred motive) is not significant on scarcity effect in case of special scarcity message. However, nonexistence of intention inference is more effective than existence of intention inference on purchase intention in case of general scarcity. Second, intention inference(inferred motive) is not significant on scarcity effect in case of low scarcity. However, nonexistence of intention inference is more effective than existence of intention inference on purchase intention in case of high scarcity. The results of this study will help managers to understand the relative importance among the type of the scarcity message and to make decisions in using their scarcity message. Finally, this article have several contribution. First, we have shown that restrictions server to activates a mental resource that is used to render a judgment regarding a promoted product. In the absence of other information, this resource appears to read to an inference of value. In the presence of other value related cue, however, either database(i.e., scarcity depth: high vs. low) or conceptual base(i.e.,, scarcity type special vs. general), the resource is used in conjunction with the other cues as a basis for judgment, leading to different effects across levels of these other value-related cues. Second, our results suggest that a restriction can affect consumer behavior through four possible routes: 1) the affective route, through making consumers feel irritated, 2) the cognitive making route, through making consumers infer motivation or attribution about promoted scarcity message, and 3) the economic route, through making the consumer lose an opportunity to stockpile at a low scarcity depth, or forcing him her to making additional purchases, lastly 4) informative route, through changing what consumer believe about the transaction. Third, as a note already, this results suggest that we should consider consumers' inferences of motives or attributions for the scarcity dept level and cognitive resources available in order to have a complete understanding the effects of quantity restriction message.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.4
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• pp.77-87
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• 2015

Purpose - This study aims to investigate the current state of distribution terminology usage by retailers and consumers nationwide, and to suggest a practical improvement plan for its standardization. The Korean distribution industry is closely related to consumers' daily lives. However, in reality, there exists a gap among producers, distributors, and consumers in terms of the definition, understanding, and perception of the terminology. Therefore, standardizing this terminology is essential for more smooth communication. This paper suggests the necessity of committing overall research and survey activities to the actual conditions of using Korean distribution terminology by organizations and their respective management situations, and further, the necessity of probing the problem and its measures in line with the objective and mission of the "Fundamental Law of the Korean Language." Research design, data, and methodology - This study's scope is limited to wholesale and retail including some information systems. First, the study covers most written material including lexicons and glossary of distribution terminology, university textbooks and teaching material for national certificate of qualification, and related laws and ordinances. Second, the survey covers retailers' management situations by store format. The retailers used as the sample for the survey include department stores, discount stores, SSM, and convenience stores. Altogether, 20 specialists were interviewed in their respective sectors or retail formats. Finally, the project team surveyed a sample of 1,300 consumers nationwide on 50 distribution terms mainly used by consumers, including those about awareness, understanding, usage, and attitude. Results - In total, 1,249 terms are drawn through literature research including distribution terminology used in the related literature, glossary and lexicons, distribution terminology in textbooks, and legal terminology. A classified table comprises four large categories including general distribution, distribution marketing, distribution information, and merchandise. The results of the three-step research including literature survey, field survey of retailers, and consumer survey were advised to be screened by academia (retail associations, faculty etc.), retailers (major retail management by store format), retail specialists and consultants, consumers, and Korean linguists. In total, 1,300 questionnaires for 50 terms of the distribution terminology closely associated with consumers were distributed to subjects nationwide. Conclusions - The desired and expected results from this study are summarized from three perspectives as follows: First, from retailers' perspective, a new concept, or coinage of new terms of the distribution industry stems from advanced countries such as America and Europe. However, the original meaning and definition are diluted and distorted with changes in the language users' situations and context. This study provides basic guidelines for standardization of distribution terms used among various retail formats in most daily life situations that consumers encounter. Second, from the nation's perspective, this study suggests optimal choices of distribution terminology in the context of laws and ordinances regarding concerned Ministries. Last, from the consumers' perspective, this paper enables consumers to understand and use distribution terms properly in their daily life.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Library and Information Science
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.415-437
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• 2011

The increased interest in consumer health information(CHI) has brought about a rapid increase in CHI resources. There are diverse means for obtaining such information, and one CHI acquisition route is the public library. In the U.S. public libraries, the demand for CHI reference services is increasing, and a variety of projects to promote these services are in progress. On the other hand, Korean public library services for CHI is at a very basic level, and thus a very small amount of such research could be found. This study drew suggestions from a literature review of research studies in the U.S. and Canada, and analyzed public library CHI services in Korea. The findings are as follows. 1) Only 17.25% of public libraries in Korea provided CHI service, and it evidences very low needs and awareness for CHI services in Korea. 2) Only three kinds of services including CHI-related websites, users training, and promotional and marketing were provided, and only 13(1.74%) of libraries surveyed offered more than two kinds of services. 3) There were no CHI librarians, nor did any librarians receive CHI-related education. 4) ILL services, outreach services, and cooperation with CHI- and medical-related institutions for CHI services were not found. Therefore, this study suggests that more research on delivery strategies for CHI services should be conducted in the future.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.20 no.8
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• pp.456-471
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• 2019

Consumers' growing interest in the environment has recently led them to recognize the importance of their dietary life and sustainable consumption. Thus, there is an increasing necessity to identify consumers' response on the relationship between the consumption of functional food and their interest in helping environment. This research was conducted to analyze consumers' behaviors as related to Spirulina, an eco-friendly functional food brand, by subdividing markets according to consumers' food lifestyle. The results showed that consumers were categorized into 3 types (high involvement in diet, pursuit of safety in diet, and pursuit of convenience in diet), and there was a significant difference in the consumption behaviors of the functional food according to the 3 types. Their positive attitude towards functional food and interest in the environment led to changes of their actual purchasing behavior by increased purchase of Spirulina. Also, consumers who displayed high environmental involvement showed a more favorable attitude towards functional food. Therefore, to expand the market of eco-friendly functional food, it is necessary to subdivide the market and target the consumers who are highly involved with protecting the environment, and to execute marketing strategies for eco-friendly products, in order to increase the consumers' awareness about eco-friendly functional food.