• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.153-169
• /
• 2012

Exhibitions have played a key role of effective marketing activity which directly informs services and products to current and potential customers. Through participating in exhibitions, exhibitors have got the opportunity to make face-to-face contact so that they can secure the market share and improve their corporate images. According to this economic importance of exhibitions, show organizers try to adopt a new IT technology for improving their performance, and researchers have also studied services which can improve the satisfaction of visitors through analyzing visit patterns of visitors. Especially, as smart technologies make them monitor activities of visitors in real-time, they have considered booth recommender systems which infer preference of visitors and recommender proper service to them like on-line environment. However, while there are many studies which can improve their performance in the side of new technological development, they have not considered the choice factor of visitors for booth recommender systems. That is, studies for factors which can influence the development direction and effective diffusion of these systems are insufficient. Most of prior studies for the acceptance of new technologies and the continuous intention of use have adopted Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Extended Technology Acceptance Model (ETAM). Booth recommender systems may not be new technology because they are similar with commercial recommender systems such as book recommender systems, in the smart exhibition environment, they can be considered new technology. However, for considering the smart exhibition environment beyond TAM, measurements for the intention of reuse should focus on how booth recommender systems can provide correct information to visitors. In this study, through literature reviews, we draw factors which can influence the satisfaction and reuse intention of visitors for booth recommender systems, and design a model to forecast adaptation of visitors for booth recommendation in the exhibition environment. For these purposes, we conduct a survey for visitors who attended DMC Culture Open in November 2011 and experienced booth recommender systems using own smart phone, and examine hypothesis by regression analysis. As a result, factors which can influence the satisfaction of visitors for booth recommender systems are the effectiveness, perceived ease of use, argument quality, serendipity, and so on. Moreover, the satisfaction for booth recommender systems has a positive relationship with the development of reuse intention. For these results, we have some insights for booth recommender systems in the smart exhibition environment. First, this study gives shape to important factors which are considered when they establish strategies which induce visitors to consistently use booth recommender systems. Recently, although show organizers try to improve their performances using new IT technologies, their visitors have not felt the satisfaction from these efforts. At this point, this study can help them to provide services which can improve the satisfaction of visitors and make them last relationship with visitors. On the other hands, this study suggests that they managers along the using time of booth recommender systems. For example, in the early stage of the adoption, they should focus on the argument quality, perceived ease of use, and serendipity, so that improve the acceptance of booth recommender systems. After these stages, they should bridge the differences between expectation and perception for booth recommender systems, and lead continuous uses of visitors. However, this study has some limitations. We only use four factors which can influence the satisfaction of visitors. Therefore, we should development our model to consider important additional factors. And the exhibition in our experiments has small number of booths so that visitors may not need to booth recommender systems. In the future study, we will conduct experiments in the exhibition environment which has a larger scale.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Intelligent Systems Conference
• /
• 1993.06a
• /
• pp.1041-1043
• /
• 1993

Fuzzy logic based Control Theory has gained much interest in the industrial world, thanks to its ability to formalize and solve in a very natural way many problems that are very difficult to quantify at an analytical level. This paper shows a solution for treating membership function inside hardware circuits. The proposed hardware structure optimizes the memoried size by using particular form of the vectorial representation. The process of memorizing fuzzy sets, i.e. their membership function, has always been one of the more problematic issues for the hardware implementation, due to the quite large memory space that is needed. To simplify such an implementation, it is commonly [1,2,8,9,10,11] used to limit the membership functions either to those having triangular or trapezoidal shape, or pre-definite shape. These kinds of functions are able to cover a large spectrum of applications with a limited usage of memory, since they can be memorized by specifying very few parameters ( ight, base, critical points, etc.). This however results in a loss of computational power due to computation on the medium points. A solution to this problem is obtained by discretizing the universe of discourse U, i.e. by fixing a finite number of points and memorizing the value of the membership functions on such points [3,10,14,15]. Such a solution provides a satisfying computational speed, a very high precision of definitions and gives the users the opportunity to choose membership functions of any shape. However, a significant memory waste can as well be registered. It is indeed possible that for each of the given fuzzy sets many elements of the universe of discourse have a membership value equal to zero. It has also been noticed that almost in all cases common points among fuzzy sets, i.e. points with non null membership values are very few. More specifically, in many applications, for each element u of U, there exists at most three fuzzy sets for which the membership value is ot null [3,5,6,7,12,13]. Our proposal is based on such hypotheses. Moreover, we use a technique that even though it does not restrict the shapes of membership functions, it reduces strongly the computational time for the membership values and optimizes the function memorization. In figure 1 it is represented a term set whose characteristics are common for fuzzy controllers and to which we will refer in the following. The above term set has a universe of discourse with 128 elements (so to have a good resolution), 8 fuzzy sets that describe the term set, 32 levels of discretization for the membership values. Clearly, the number of bits necessary for the given specifications are 5 for 32 truth levels, 3 for 8 membership functions and 7 for 128 levels of resolution. The memory depth is given by the dimension of the universe of the discourse (128 in our case) and it will be represented by the memory rows. The length of a world of memory is defined by: Length = nem (dm(m)＋dm(fm) Where: fm is the maximum number of non null values in every element of the universe of the discourse, dm(m) is the dimension of the values of the membership function m, dm(fm) is the dimension of the word to represent the index of the highest membership function. In our case then Length=24. The memory dimension is therefore 128*24 bits. If we had chosen to memorize all values of the membership functions we would have needed to memorize on each memory row the membership value of each element. Fuzzy sets word dimension is 8*5 bits. Therefore, the dimension of the memory would have been 128*40 bits. Coherently with our hypothesis, in fig. 1 each element of universe of the discourse has a non null membership value on at most three fuzzy sets. Focusing on the elements 32,64,96 of the universe of discourse, they will be memorized as follows: The computation of the rule weights is done by comparing those bits that represent the index of the membership function, with the word of the program memor . The output bus of the Program Memory (μCOD), is given as input a comparator (Combinatory Net). If the index is equal to the bus value then one of the non null weight derives from the rule and it is produced as output, otherwise the output is zero (fig. 2). It is clear, that the memory dimension of the antecedent is in this way reduced since only non null values are memorized. Moreover, the time performance of the system is equivalent to the performance of a system using vectorial memorization of all weights. The dimensioning of the word is influenced by some parameters of the input variable. The most important parameter is the maximum number membership functions (nfm) having a non null value in each element of the universe of discourse. From our study in the field of fuzzy system, we see that typically nfm 3 and there are at most 16 membership function. At any rate, such a value can be increased up to the physical dimensional limit of the antecedent memory. A less important role n the optimization process of the word dimension is played by the number of membership functions defined for each linguistic term. The table below shows the request word dimension as a function of such parameters and compares our proposed method with the method of vectorial memorization[10]. Summing up, the characteristics of our method are: Users are not restricted to membership functions with specific shapes. The number of the fuzzy sets and the resolution of the vertical axis have a very small influence in increasing memory space. Weight computations are done by combinatorial network and therefore the time performance of the system is equivalent to the one of the vectorial method. The number of non null membership values on any element of the universe of discourse is limited. Such a constraint is usually non very restrictive since many controllers obtain a good precision with only three non null weights. The method here briefly described has been adopted by our group in the design of an optimized version of the coprocessor described in [10].

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.141-173
• /
• 2007

The study examines how the environmental factors of store influence service brand personality and repurchase intention in the service environment. The service industry has been experiencing the intensified competition with the industry's continuous growth and the influence from rapid technological advancement. Under the circumstances, it has become ever more important for the brand competitiveness to be distinctively recognized against competition. A brand needs to be distinguished and differentiated from competing companies because they are all engaged in the similar environment of the service industry. The differentiation of brand achievement has become increasingly important to highlight certain brand functions to include emotional, self-expressive, and symbolic functions since the importance of such functions has been further emphasized in promoting consumption activities. That is the recent role of brand personality that has been emphasized in the service industry. In other words, customers now freely and actively express their personalities or egos in consumption activities, taking an important role in construction of a brand asset. Hence, the study suggests that it is necessary to disperse the recognition and acknowledgement that the maintenance of the existing customers contributes more to boost repurchase intention when it is compared to the efforts to create new customers, particularly in the service industry. Meanwhile, the store itself can offer a unique environment that may influence the consumer's purchase decision. Consumers interact with store environments in the process of,virtually, all household purchase they make (Sarel 1981). Thus, store environments may encourage customers to purchase. The roles that store environments play are to provide informational cues to customers about the store and goods and communicate messages to stimulate consumers' emotions. The store environments differentiate the store from competing stores and build a unique service brand personality. However, the existing studies related to brand in the service industry mostly concentrated on the relationship between the quality of service and customer satisfaction, and they are mostly generalized while the connective studies focused on brand personality. Such approaches show limitations and are insufficient to investigate on the relationship between store environment and brand personality in the service industry. Accordingly, the study intends to identify the level of contribution to the establishment of brand personality made by the store's physical environments that influence on the specific brand characteristics depending on the type of service. The study also intends to identify what kind of relationships with brand personality exists with brand personality while being influenced by store environments. In addition, the study intends to make meaningful suggestions to better direct marketing efforts by identifying whether a brand personality makes a positive influence to induce an intention for repurchase. For this study, the service industry is classified into four categories based on to the characteristics of service: experimental-emotional service, emotional -credible service, credible-functional service, and functional-experimental service. The type of business with the most frequent customer contact is determined for each service type and the enterprise with the highest brand value in each service sector based on the report made by the Korea Management Association. They are designated as the representative of each category. The selected representatives are a fast-food store (experimental-emotional service), a cinema house (emotional-credible service), a bank (credible-functional service), and discount store (functional-experimental service). The survey was conducted for the four selected brands to represent each service category among consumers who are experienced users of the designated stores in Seoul Metropolitan City and Gyeonggi province via written questionnaires in order to verify the suggested assumptions in the study. In particular, the survey adopted 15 scales, which represent each characteristic factor, among the 42 unique characteristics developed by Jennifer Aaker(1997) to assess the brand personality of each service brand. SPSS for Windows Release 12.0 and LISREL were used in the analysis of data verification. The methodology of the structural equation model was used for the study and the pivotal findings are as follows. 1) The environmental factors ware classified as design factors, ambient factors, and social factors. Therefore, the validity of measurement scale of Baker et al. (1994) was proved. 2) The service brand personalities were subdivided as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, which makes the use of the brand personality scales by Jennifer Aaker(1997) appropriate in the service industry as well. 3) One-way ANOVA analysis on the scales of store environment and service brand personality showed that there exist statistically significant differences in each service category. For example, the social factors were highest in discount stores, while the ambient factors and design factors were highest in fast-food stores. The discount stores were highest in the sincerity and excitement, while the highest point for banks was in the competence and ruggedness, and the highest point for fast-food stores was in the sophistication, The consumers will make a different respond to the physical environment of stores and service brand personality that are inherent to the corresponding service interface. Hence, the customers will make a different decision-making when dealing with different service categories. In this aspect, the relationships of variables in the proposed hypothesis appear to work in a different way depending on the exposed service category. 4) The store environment factors influenced on service brand personalities differently by category of service. The factors of store's physical environment are transferred to a brand and were verified to strengthen service brand personalities. In particular, the level of influence on the service brand personality by physical environment differs depending on service category or dimension, which indicates that there is a need to apply a different style of management to a different service category or dimension. It signifies that there needs to be a brand strategy established in order to positively influence the relationship with consumers by utilizing an appropriate brand personality factor depending on different characteristics by service category or dimension. 5) The service brand personalities influenced on the repurchase intention. Especially, the largest influence was made in the sophistication dimension of service brand personality scale; the unique and characteristically appropriate arrangement of physical environment will make customers stay in the service environment for a long time and will lead to give a positive influence on the repurchase intention. 6) The store environment factors influenced on the repurchase intention. Particularly, the largest influence was made on the social factors of store environment. The most intriguing finding is that the service factor among all other environment factors gives the biggest influence to the repurchase intention in most of all service types except fast-food stores. Such result indicates that the customers pay attention to how much the employees try to provide a quality service when they make an evaluation on the service brand. At the same time, it also indicates that the personal factor is directly transmitted to the construction of brand personality. The employees' attitude and behavior are the determinants to establish a service brand personality in the process of enhancing service interface. Hence, there should be a reinforced search for a method to efficiently manage the service staff who has a direct contact with customers in order to make an affirmative improvement of the customers' brand evaluation at the service interface. The findings suggest several managerial implications. 1) Results from the empirical study indicated that store environment factors have a strong positive impact on a service brand personality. To increase customers' repurchase intention of a service brand, the management is required to effectively manage store environment factors and create a friendly brand personality based on the corresponding service environment. 2) Mangers and researchers must understand and recognize that the store environment elements are important marketing tools, and that brand personality influences on consumers' repurchase intention. Based on such result of the study, a service brand could be utilized as an efficient measure to achieve a differentiation by enforcing the elements that are most influential among all other store environments for each service category. Therefore, brand personality established involving various store environments will further reinforce the relationship with customers through the elevated brand identification of which utilization to induce repurchase decision can be used as an entry barrier. 3) The study identified the store environment as a component of service brand personality for the store's effective communication with consumers. For this, all communication channels should be maintained with consistency and an integrated marketing communication should be executed to efficiently approach to a larger number of customers. Mangers and researchers must find strategies for aligning decisions about store environment elements with the retailers' marketing and store personality objectives. All ambient, design, and social factors need to be orchestrated so that consumers can take an appropriate store personality. In this study, the induced results from the previous studies were extended to the service industry so as to identify the customers' decision making process that leads to repurchase intention and a result similar to those of the previous studies. The findings suggested several theoretical and managerial implications. However, the situation that only one service brand served as the subject of analysis for each service category, and the situation that correlations among store environment elements were not identified, as well as the problem of representation in selection of samples should be considered and supplemented in the future when further studies are conducted. In addition, various antecedents and consequences of brand personality must be looked at in the aspect of the service environment for further research.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
• /
• v.18 no.3
• /
• pp.59-88
• /
• 2008

Digital Convergence means integration between industry, technology, and contents, and in marketing, it usually comes with creation of new types of product and service under the base of digital technology as digitalization progress in electro-communication industries including telecommunication, home appliance, and computer industries. One can see digital convergence not only in instruments such as PC, AV appliances, cellular phone, but also in contents, network, service that are required in production, modification, distribution, re-production of information. Convergence in contents started around 1990. Convergence in network and service begins as broadcasting and telecommunication integrates and DMB(digital multimedia broadcasting), born in May, 2005 is the symbolic icon in this trend. There are some positive and negative expectations about DMB. The reason why two opposite expectations exist is that DMB does not come out from customer's need but from technology development. Therefore, customers might have hard time to interpret the real meaning of DMB. Time is quite critical to a high tech product, like DMB because another product with same function from different technology can replace the existing product within short period of time. If DMB does not positioning well to customer's mind quickly, another products like Wibro, IPTV, or HSPDA could replace it before it even spreads out. Therefore, positioning strategy is critical for success of DMB product. To make correct positioning strategy, one needs to understand how consumer interprets DMB and how consumer's interpretation can be changed via communication strategy. In this study, we try to investigate how consumer perceives a new product, like DMB and how AD strategy change consumer's perception. More specifically, the paper segment consumers into sub-groups based on their DMB perceptions and compare their characteristics in order to understand how they perceive DMB. And, expose them different printed ADs that have messages guiding consumer think DMB in specific ways, either cellular phone or personal TV. Research Question 1: Segment consumers according to perceptions about DMB and compare characteristics of segmentations. Research Question 2: Compare perceptions about DMB after AD that induces categorization of DMB in direction for each segment. If one understand and predict a direction in which consumer perceive a new product, firm can select target customers easily. We segment consumers according to their perception and analyze characteristics in order to find some variables that can influence perceptions, like prior experience, usage, or habit. And then, marketing people can use this variables to identify target customers and predict their perceptions. If one knows how customer's perception is changed via AD message, communication strategy could be constructed properly. Specially, information from segmented customers helps to develop efficient AD strategy for segment who has prior perception. Research framework consists of two measurements and one treatment, O1 X O2. First observation is for collecting information about consumer's perception and their characteristics. Based on first observation, the paper segment consumers into two groups, one group perceives DMB similar to Cellular phone and the other group perceives DMB similar to TV. And compare characteristics of two segments in order to find reason why they perceive DMB differently. Next, we expose two kinds of AD to subjects. One AD describes DMB as Cellular phone and the other Ad describes DMB as personal TV. When two ADs are exposed to subjects, consumers don't know their prior perception of DMB, in other words, which subject belongs 'similar-to-Cellular phone' segment or 'similar-to-TV' segment? However, we analyze the AD's effect differently for each segment. In research design, final observation is for investigating AD effect. Perception before AD is compared with perception after AD. Comparisons are made for each segment and for each AD. For the segment who perceives DMB similar to TV, AD that describes DMB as cellular phone could change the prior perception. And AD that describes DMB as personal TV, could enforce the prior perception. For data collection, subjects are selected from undergraduate students because they have basic knowledge about most digital equipments and have open attitude about a new product and media. Total number of subjects is 240. In order to measure perception about DMB, we use indirect measurement, comparison with other similar digital products. To select similar digital products, we pre-survey students and then finally select PDA, Car-TV, Cellular Phone, MP3 player, TV, and PSP. Quasi experiment is done at several classes under instructor's allowance. After brief introduction, prior knowledge, awareness, and usage about DMB as well as other digital instruments is asked and their similarities and perceived characteristics are measured. And then, two kinds of manipulated color-printed AD are distributed and similarities and perceived characteristics for DMB are re-measured. Finally purchase intension, AD attitude, manipulation check, and demographic variables are asked. Subjects are given small gift for participation. Stimuli are color-printed advertising. Their actual size is A4 and made after several pre-test from AD professionals and students. As results, consumers are segmented into two subgroups based on their perceptions of DMB. Similarity measure between DMB and cellular phone and similarity measure between DMB and TV are used to classify consumers. If subject whose first measure is less than the second measure, she is classified into segment A and segment A is characterized as they perceive DMB like TV. Otherwise, they are classified as segment B, who perceives DMB like cellular phone. Discriminant analysis on these groups with their characteristics of usage and attitude shows that Segment A knows much about DMB and uses a lot of digital instrument. Segment B, who thinks DMB as cellular phone doesn't know well about DMB and not familiar with other digital instruments. So, consumers with higher knowledge perceive DMB similar to TV because launching DMB advertising lead consumer think DMB as TV. Consumers with less interest on digital products don't know well about DMB AD and then think DMB as cellular phone. In order to investigate perceptions of DMB as well as other digital instruments, we apply Proxscal analysis, Multidimensional Scaling technique at SPSS statistical package. At first step, subjects are presented 21 pairs of 7 digital instruments and evaluate similarity judgments on 7 point scale. And for each segment, their similarity judgments are averaged and similarity matrix is made. Secondly, Proxscal analysis of segment A and B are done. At third stage, get similarity judgment between DMB and other digital instruments after AD exposure. Lastly, similarity judgments of group A-1, A-2, B-1, and B-2 are named as 'after DMB' and put them into matrix made at the first stage. Then apply Proxscal analysis on these matrixes and check the positional difference of DMB and after DMB. The results show that map of segment A, who perceives DMB similar as TV, shows that DMB position closer to TV than to Cellular phone as expected. Map of segment B, who perceive DMB similar as cellular phone shows that DMB position closer to Cellular phone than to TV as expected. Stress value and R-square is acceptable. And, change results after stimuli, manipulated Advertising show that AD makes DMB perception bent toward Cellular phone when Cellular phone-like AD is exposed, and that DMB positioning move towards Car-TV which is more personalized one when TV-like AD is exposed. It is true for both segment, A and B, consistently. Furthermore, the paper apply correspondence analysis to the same data and find almost the same results. The paper answers two main research questions. The first one is that perception about a new product is made mainly from prior experience. And the second one is that AD is effective in changing and enforcing perception. In addition to above, we extend perception change to purchase intention. Purchase intention is high when AD enforces original perception. AD that shows DMB like TV makes worst intention. This paper has limitations and issues to be pursed in near future. Methodologically, current methodology can't provide statistical test on the perceptual change, since classical MDS models, like Proxscal and correspondence analysis are not probability models. So, a new probability MDS model for testing hypothesis about configuration needs to be developed. Next, advertising message needs to be developed more rigorously from theoretical and managerial perspective. Also experimental procedure could be improved for more realistic data collection. For example, web-based experiment and real product stimuli and multimedia presentation could be employed. Or, one can display products together in simulated shop. In addition, demand and social desirability threats of internal validity could influence on the results. In order to handle the threats, results of the model-intended advertising and other "pseudo" advertising could be compared. Furthermore, one can try various level of innovativeness in order to check whether it make any different results (cf. Moon 2006). In addition, if one can create hypothetical product that is really innovative and new for research, it helps to make a vacant impression status and then to study how to form impression in more rigorous way.