• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.125-148
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• 2014

This paper performs a historical analysis on the various factors contributing to the current carbon lock-in of Korean electricity industry by using techo-institutional complex. The possibilities of the industry's carbon lock-out toward more sustainable development are also investigated. It turns out that market, firm, consumer, and government factors are all responsible for the development of the carbon lock-in of Korean power industry; the Korean government consistently favoring large power plants based on the economy of scale; below-cost electricity tariff; inflation policy to suppress increases in power price; rapid demand growth in summer and winter seasons; rigidities of electricity tariff; and expansion of gas-fired and imported coal-fired large power plants. On the other hand, except for nuclear power generation and smart grid, environment laws and new and renewable energy laws are the other remaining factors contributing to the carbon lock-out. Considering three key points that Korea is an export-oriented economy, the generation mix is the most critical factor to decide the amounts of carbon emission in the power industry, and the share of industry and commercial power consumption is over 85%, it is unlikely that Korea will achieve the carbon lock-out of power industry in the near future. Therefore, there are needs for more integrated approaches from market, firm, consumer, and government all together in order to achieve the carbon lock-out in the electricity industry. Firstly, from the market perspective, it is necessary to persue more active new and renewable energy penetration and to guarantee consumer choices by mitigating the incumbent's monopoly power as in the OECD countries. Secondly, from the firm perspective, the promotion of distributed energy system is urgent, which includes new and renewable resources and demand resources. Thirdly, from the consumer perspective, more green choices in the power tariff and customer awareness on the carbon lock-out are needed. Lastly, the government shall urgently improve power planning frameworks to include the various externalities that were not properly reflected in the past such as environmental and social conflict costs.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.79-102
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• 2011

Researchers in channel dyads have devoted much attention to relationship between interdependence (i.e. interdependence enymmetry and total interdependence) and conflict that promote channel performance. In social science, in spite of the inconsistent results in marketing practice, there are two contradictory theories explain the relationship between interdependence and conflict - bilateral deterrence theory and conflict spiral theory. The authors apply these theories to co-marketing alliance situation in terms that this relationship is also incorporated both company's dependence, either from one company's perspective or each partner about its respective dependence. Using survey data and archival data from 181 companies enlisted in a telecommunication membership program, the authors find out the relationship between interdependence and conflict as well as investigate the antecedents of interdependence - transaction age, transaction frequency, the numbers of alliance partner, and co-marketing alliance specific assets according to previous researches. Using PLS analysis, the authors demonstrate that, with increasing total interdependence in a telecommunication membership program, two co-marketing partners' conflict level is increased in accord with the author's conflict spiral theory predictions. As expected, higher interdependence asymmetry has negative value to level of conflict even though this result is not statistically significant. Other findings can be summarized as follows. In the perspective of telecommunication company, transaction age, transaction frequency, and co-marketing alliance specific assets have influence on its dependence on a partner as independent variables. To the contrary, in a partner's perspective, transaction frequency, co-marketing alliance specific assets and the numbers of alliance partner have significantly impact on its dependence on a telecommunication company. In direct effect analysis, it is shown that transaction age, frequency and co-marketing alliance specific assets have direct influence on conflict. This results suggest that it is more useful for a telecommunication company to select a co-marketing partner which is frequently used by customers and earned high rates of mileage. In addition, the results show that dependence of a telecommunication company on a co-marketing partner is more significantly effected to co-marketing alliance conflict than partner's one. It provide an effective conflict management strategy to a telecommunication company for controling customer's usage rate or having the co-marketing partner deposit high level of alliance specific investment (i.e. mileage). To a co-marketing partner of telecommunication company, it is required control the percentage of co-marketing sales in total sales revenue or seek various co-marketing partners in order for co-marketing conflict management. The research implications, limitation and future research of these results are discussed.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.157-194
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• 2008

The popularity of communities on the internet has captured the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners. By adapting to the culture of the internet, however, and providing consumer with the ability to interact with one another in addition to the company, businesses can build new and deeper relationships with customers. The economic potential of online communities has been discussed with much hope in the many popular papers. In contrast to this enthusiastic prognostications, empirical and practical evidence regarding the economic potential of the online community has shown a little different conclusion. To date, even communities with high levels of membership and vibrant social arenas have failed to build financial viability. In this perspective, this study investigates the role of various kinds of influencing factors to online community loyalty and basically suggests the framework that explains the process of building purchase loyalty. Even though the importance of building loyalty in an online environment has been emphasized from the marketing theorists and practitioners, there is no sufficient research conclusion about what is the process of building purchase loyalty and the most powerful factors that influence to it. In this study, the process of building purchase loyalty is divided into three levels; characteristics of community site such as content superiority, site vividness, navigation easiness, and customerization, the mediating variables such as self congruency, consumer experience, and consumer to consumer interactivity, and finally various factors about online community loyalty such as visit loyalty, affect, trust, and purchase loyalty are those things. And the findings of this research are as follows. First, consumer-to-consumer interactivity is an important factor to online community purchase loyalty and other loyalty factors. This means, in order to interact with other people more actively, many participants in online community have the willingness to buy some kinds of products such as music, content, avatar, and etc. From this perspective, marketers of online community have to create some online environments in order that consumers can easily interact with other consumers and make some site environments in order that consumer can feel experience in this site is interesting and self congruency is higher than at other community sites. It has been argued that giving consumers a good experience is vital in cyber space, and websites create an active (rather than passive) customer by their nature. Some researchers have tried to pin down the positive experience, with limited success and less empirical support. Web sites can provide a cognitively stimulating experience for the user. We define the online community experience as playfulness based on the past studies. Playfulness is created by the excitement generated through a website's content and measured using three descriptors Marketers can promote using and visiting online communities, which deliver a superior web experience, to influence their customers' attitudes and actions, encouraging high involvement with those communities. Specially, we suggest that transcendent customer experiences(TCEs) which have aspects of flow and/or peak experience, can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes including subjective self-transformation and facilitate strong consumer's ties to a online community. And we find that website success is closely related to positive website experiences: consumers will spend more time on the site, interacting with other users. As we can see figure 2, visit loyalty and consumer affect toward the online community site didn't directly influence to purchase loyalty. This implies that there may be a little different situations here in online community site compared to online shopping mall studies that shows close relations between revisit intention and purchase intention. There are so many alternative sites on web, consumers do not want to spend money to buy content and etc. In this sense, marketers of community websites must know consumers' affect toward online community site is not a last goal and important factor to influnece consumers' purchase. Third, building good content environment can be a really important marketing tool to create a competitive advantage in cyberspace. For example, Cyworld, Korea's number one community site shows distinctive superiority in the consumer evaluations of content characteristics such as content superiority, site vividness, and customerization. Particularly, comsumer evaluation about customerization was remarkably higher than the other sites. In this point, we can conclude that providing comsumers with good, unique and highly customized content will be urgent and important task directly and indirectly impacting to self congruency, consumer experience, c-to-c interactivity, and various loyalty factors of online community. By creating enjoyable, useful, and unique online community environments, online community portals such as Daum, Naver, and Cyworld are able to build customer loyalty to a degree that many of today's online marketer can only dream of these loyalty, in turn, generates strong economic returns. Another way to build good online community site is to provide consumers with an interactive, fun, experience-oriented or experiential Web site. Elements that can make a dot.com's Web site experiential include graphics, 3-D images, animation, video and audio capabilities. In addition, chat rooms and real-time customer service applications (which link site visitors directly to other visitors, or with company support personnel, respectively) are also being used to make web sites more interactive. Researchers note that online communities are increasingly incorporating such applications in their Web sites, in order to make consumers' online shopping experience more similar to that of an offline store. That is, if consumers are able to experience sensory stimulation (e.g. via 3-D images and audio sound), interact with other consumers (e.g., via chat rooms), and interact with sales or support people (e.g. via a real-time chat interface or e-mail), then they are likely to have a more positive dot.com experience, and develop a more positive image toward the online company itself). Analysts caution, however, that, while high quality graphics, animation and the like may create a fun experience for consumers, when heavily used, they can slow site navigation, resulting in frustrated consumers, who may never return to a site. Consequently, some analysts suggest that, at least with current technology, the rule-of-thumb is that less is more. That is, while graphics etc. can draw consumers to a site, they should be kept to a minimum, so as not to impact negatively on consumers' overall site experience.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.2
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• pp.57-79
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• 2016

It is a rising trend that the number of users using one of the social media channels, the Social Network Service, so called the SNS, is getting increased. As per to this social trend, more companies have interest in this networking platform and start to invest their funds in it. It has received much attention as a tool spreading and expanding the message that a company wants to deliver to its customers and has been recognized as an important channel in terms of the relationship marketing with them. The environment of media that is radically changing these days makes possible for companies to approach their customers in various ways. Particularly, the social network service, which has been developed rapidly, provides the environment that customers can freely talk about products. For companies, it also works as a channel that gives customized information to customers. To succeed in the online environment, companies need to not only build the relationship between companies and customers but focus on the relationship between customers as well. In response to the online environment with the continuous development of technology, companies have tirelessly made the novel marketing strategy. Especially, as the one-to-one marketing to customers become available, it is more important for companies to maintain the relationship marketing with their customers. Among many SNS, Facebook, which many companies use as a communication channel, provides a fan page service for each company that supports its business. Facebook fan page is the platform that the event, information and announcement can be shared with customers using texts, videos, and pictures. Companies open their own fan pages in order to inform their companies and businesses. Such page functions as the websites of companies and has a characteristic of their brand communities such as blogs as well. As Facebook has become the major communication medium with customers, companies recognize its importance as the effective marketing channel, but they still need to investigate their business performances by using Facebook. Although there are infinite potentials in Facebook fan page that even has a function as a community between users, which other platforms do not, it is incomplete to regard companies' Facebook fan pages as communities and analyze them. In this study, it explores the relationship among customers through the network of the Facebook fan page users. The previous studies on a company's Facebook fan page were focused on finding out the effective operational direction by analyzing the use state of the company. However, in this study, it draws out the structural variable of the network, which customer committment can be measured by applying the social network analysis methodology and investigates the influence of the structural characteristics of network on the business performance of companies in an empirical way. Through each company's Facebook fan page, the network of users who engaged in the communication with each company is exploited and it is the one-mode undirected binary network that respectively regards users and the relationship of them in terms of their marketing activities as the node and link. In this network, it draws out the structural variable of network that can explain the customer commitment, who pressed "like," made comments and shared the Facebook marketing message, of each company by calculating density, global clustering coefficient, mean geodesic distance, diameter. By exploiting companies' historical performance such as net income and Tobin's Q indicator as the result variables, this study investigates influence on companies' business performances. For this purpose, it collects the network data on the subjects of 54 companies among KOSPI-listed companies, which have posted more than 100 articles on their Facebook fan pages during the data collection period. Then it draws out the network indicator of each company. The indicator related to companies' performances is calculated, based on the posted value on DART website of the Financial Supervisory Service. From the academic perspective, this study suggests a new approach through the social network analysis methodology to researchers who attempt to study the business-purpose utilization of the social media channel. From the practical perspective, this study proposes the more substantive marketing performance measurements to companies performing marketing activities through the social media and it is expected that it will bring a foundation of establishing smart business strategies by using the network indicators.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.155-175
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• 2010

Most of the service industries including finance and telecommunications have become matured and saturated. The competitions have become severe while the differences among brands become smaller. Therefore maintaining good relationships with customers has been critical for the service providers. In case of credit card and debit card, the similar patterns are shown. It is important for them to maintain good relationships with customers, and therefore, they have used marketing program which provides customized services to customers and utilizes the membership programs. Not only do they build and maintain good relationships, but also highlight their brands from the emotional aspects. For example, KB Card or Hyundai Card uses well-known designers' works for their credit card design. As well, they differentiate the designs of credit cards to stress on their brand personalities. BC Card introduced the credit card with perfume that a customer would like. Even though the credit card is small and not shown to public easily, it becomes more important for those companies to touch the customers' feelings with the brand personalities and their images. This is partly because of changes in consumers' lifestyles. Y-generations becomes highly likely to express themselves in many different ways and more emotional than X-generations. For the Y-generations, therefore, even credit cards in the wallet should be personalized and well-designed. In line with it, credit cards with good design can be seen as an example of brand identity, where different design for each customer can be used to recognize the membership groups that customers want to belong. On the other hand, these credit card companies offer the special treatment benefits for those customers who are heavy users for the cards. For example, those customers who love sports will receive some special discounts when they use their credit cards for sports related products. Therefore this study attempted to explore the relationships between relational benefits, brand identification and loyalty. It has been well known that relational benefits and brand identification lead to loyalty independently from many other studies, but there has been few study to review all the three variables all together in a research model. Furthermore, as reviewed above, in the card industry, many companies attempt to associate the brand image with their products to fit their customers' lifestyles while relational benefits are still playing an important role for their business. Therefore in our research model, relational benefits, brand identification, and loyalty are all included. We focus on the mediating effect of brand identification. From the relational benefits perspective, only special treatment benefit and confidence benefit are included. Social benefit is not applicable for this credit card industry because not many cases of face-to-face interaction can be found. From the brand identification perspective, personal brand identity and social brand identity are reviewed and included in the model. Overall, the research model emphasizes that the relationships between relational benefits and loyalty will be mediated by the effect of brand identification. The effects of relational benefits which are confidence benefit and special treatment benefits on loyalty will be realized when they fit to the personal brand identity and social brand identity. In the research model, therefore, the relationships between confidence benefit and social brand identity, and between confidence benefit and personal identity are hypothesized while the effects of special treatment benefit on social brand identity and personal brand identity are hypothesized. Loyalty, then, is hypothesized to have positive relationships with personal brand identity and social brand identity. In addition, confidence benefit among the relational benefits is expected to have a direct, positive relationship with loyalty because confidence benefit has been recognized as a critical factor for good relationships and satisfaction. Data were collected from college students who have been using either credit cards or debit cards. College students were regarded good subjects because they are in Y-generation cohorts and have tendency to express themselves more. Total sample size was two hundred three at the beginning, but after deleting those data with many missing values, one hundred ninety-seven data points were remained and used for the model testing. Measurement items were brought from the previous literatures and modified for this research. To test the reliability, using SPSS 14, chronbach's α was examined and all the values were from .874 to .928 exceeding over .7. Using AMOS 7.0, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to investigate the measurement model. The measurement model was found good fit with χ²(67)=188.388 (p= .000), GFI=.886, AGFI=.821, CFI=.941, RMSEA=.096. Using AMOS 7.0, structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model. Overall, the research model fit were χ²(68)=188.670 (p= .000), GFI=.886, AGFI=,824 CFI=.942, RMSEA=.095 indicating good fit. In details, all the paths hypothesized in the research model were found significant except for the path from social brand identity to loyalty. Personal brand identity leads to loyalty while both confidence benefit and special treatment benefit have a positive relationships with personal and social identities. As well, confidence benefit has a direct positive effect on loyalty. The results indicates the followings. First, personal brand identity plays an important role for credit/debit card usage. Therefore even for the products which are not shown to public easy, design and emotional aspect can be important to fit the customers' lifestyles. Second, confidence benefit and special treatment benefit have a positive effects on personal brand identity. Therefore it will be needed for marketers to associate the special treatment and trust and confidence benefits with personal image, personality and personal identity. Third, this study found again the importance of confidence and trust. However interestingly enough, social brand identity was not found to be significantly related to loyalty. It can be explained that the main sample of this study consists of college students. Those strategies to facilitate social brand identity are focused on high social status groups while college students have not been established their status yet.

• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.29 no.4
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• pp.123-142
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• 2010

This study suggest that firms can use online brand communities as an IMC tool to achieve high brand loyalty through marketer-controlled or loyal customer-controlled brand contacts. In this perspective, the online brand community as a marketing communication tool can help the firm in eliciting favorable responses from customers. This study finds that an online brand community, as a critical marketing promotion tool, helps a firm elicit favorable relationship with customers and build strong brand loyalty. In particular, this study suggests several important theoretical and managerial implications. First, this study confirm that "advertising usefulness" is the most powerful and important factor that affects cgerial 's positive emotionomehile "sales promotion usefulness" impacmehin "interactivity" but dies not impacmhin "cgerial iexperience"ltyevent usefulness" impacmehin "cgerial iexperience"but dies not impacmhin "interactivity." In addition, "cgerial iexperience" signifn "itly impacmehin "cgerial -to-cgerial iinteractivity." This indicates that online environment provides participapacmwith a fun and exciting environment. In that sense, enhancing the online brand community experiencemwould be a critical factor for building strong brand. Thi", mword of mouth can play a riclly important role in making many cgerial s to trust brand and to enhance online brand community loyalty. Web users are becoming web authoore owning and creating content limited only by their imaginations.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1-11
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• 2015

This study uses the contingent valuation method to estimate the switching cost for adopting the MVNO service. The findings are as follows.: First, Willingness To Switch(WTS) increases as users' using pattern and perceived degree of MVNO service, but satisfaction with current service provider does not play a significant role in predicting Switching Cost. This means that as amount of money users can save exceeds a certain level, users decide to willingly change their service provider to MVNO regardless of their level of satisfaction with current service provider. Second, there are differences in WTS among service subscribers in SKT, KT and LGU+. It means that there will be a difference in the tendency to switch to MVNO among subscribers of service providers. This study suggest the following mangerial perspective to effectively promote the MVNO and boost the MVNO market for activation of mobile data services.: First, MVNOs are better off applying differentiated pricing scheme at attractive rates than using a differentiation of service product and quality. Second, regulators should consider how to implement an MVNO regulatory policy when there is an asymmetric customer loyalty among MNOs. This research will be used to set the MVNO's pricing strategy and to build up a successful regulatory policies.

• The Journal of Society for e-Business Studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.111-136
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• 2012

The global recession has made it more difficult for companies to invest in IT, and they are increasingly aware of the environmental costs of so doing. In these circumstances, cloud computing has emerged as a new paradigm in the business IT sector. Governments, institutes and companies around the world, as well as specifically in Korea since 2009, have turned to this model of providing IT resources. This study is concerned to identify those characteristics of cloud computing that affect its introduction on a company's part; it offers a theoretical framework describing cloud services and seeks to establish causal linkages between antecedent factors and a company's introduction and application of this form of IT provision. The features of cloud computing in particular contexts that the study selected for analysis were its scalability, speed, security, potential compatibility with existing services, efficiency, economic feasibility, dependency and credibility. The study thus related these to whether or not cloud computing was adopted, verifying adjustment effects for cloud services. On the basis of a survey of enterprise IT decision-makers, it emerged through a statistical analysis of correlations that cloud computing's efficiency, economic feasibility and credibility had an effect on its introduction. This study's results should be of use to vendors and potential purchasers of cloud computing services. It is one of the first pieces of research on cloud computing from the customer perspective, based on the perceived characteristics of cloud services as they are seen and valued by users.

• CRM연구
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.1-18
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• 2011

The consumer's expectation of companies' social responsibilities has been continuously getting higher as the consumerism has been matured. So, the company has faced the shift to move forward to the positive social activity such as charity, donation, and sponsorship. In addition, the company which does make a success needs to reach goals not only to maximize profits but also to make justices of social and cultural boundaries. Thus, success of an enterprise aims at the maximization of profits as the economic objective and the creation of competitive, powerful brands. Accordingly, as enterprises consider social responsibility as the concept of effective investment to enhance the asset value of corporation, they seek to extend their brands in order to pursue cause-related marketing, which accomplishes and complements two objectives each other the performance of social responsibility and the pursuit of powerful brand assets. In Korea, there are traditional ritual ceremonies such as ceremonies of coming-of-age, marriage, funeral, and ancestor worship and they consider those ceremony occasions as very important. Moreover, social positional grade of rank like the two upper classes of old Korea made people pretend to be noble and sensitive to other people around themselves. This old custom could influence Korean people's way of life, especially, consumer-action. This deep rooted custom also could influence consumption life considerably. Through this study, we can understand the consumer behaviors of Korean who consider ritual ceremonies and saving face as essential and are influenced by this culture. on another hand, we intend to check the effects on buying luxury brands.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.119-133
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• 2012

Recent rise of social media channel is changing social and economic paradigm and is being used as an effective communication in marketing. The following research analyzes the most employed social marketing tools such as portal advertisement, blogs, and SNS channels to effectively execute social media marketing from performance indicator and ICSI perspective, analyzes each channel's characteristics and results based on Korea distribution companies' case studies and suggests a framework to effectively use each channel. Portal site advertisements are the most effective channel to draw customers with new information and are thus linked to profit by corporations with excessive budget and workforce. Blogs target a specific range of customers providing quality information and knowledge thus improving a corporation's and its product's trustworthiness, spread the word by allowing customers to scrap the information, form social groups and synthesize ideas, events, new contents and social involvement with loyal customers. SNS channels allow customers to get involved in real time information and events, grow through network by the power of customers, react immediately to customers' needs, and execute real-time market and customer reports. Though national corporations currently rely heavily on portal site advertisements, insightful marketing professionals are showing financial results with blog and SNS. In the future, based on a precise understanding of each channel's benefits and expected results, and with a focus on flexibility, timeliness and integrated use of each channel, a portfolio of dynamic marketing as a maximizing strategy could be synthesized.