• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.52 no.3
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• pp.46-58
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• 2024

The purpose of this study is to understand the current status of the pet plant kit industry and determine the priorities for support policies to revitalize the industry. SWOT analysis assessed the industry's current state, and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used with industry professionals to prioritize support policies. The SWOT analysis results indicated that SO strategies involve leveraging government support policies to enhance marketing and developing eco-friendly DIY products. WO strategies include launching advertising campaigns to increase market recognition and establishing strategic partnerships to expand distribution. ST strategies focus on strengthening price competitiveness and proposing unique values, while WT strategies involve improving production processes and enhancing product quality based on consumer feedback. The AHP analysis identified 3 top-level and 12 sub-level evaluation items, with data collected from 17 expert surveys. The results showed the 'entry phase' (0.482), 'activation phase' (0.397), and 'advanced phase' (0.121) were prioritized, with 'organizing seminars' (0.181) as the most crucial subcategory and 'support for kit development' (0.020) as the least. The pet plant kit industry is in its early stages, and appropriate policy incubation can help activate the garden industry. This study provides foundational information on the industry's needs for activation.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.173-178
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• 2010

A privately held, third generation family owned company, Boom Technologies, Inc. (BTI), a provider of products and services to the electric utility, telecommunications and contractor markets, continues to make progress in exporting. Although export sales only equaled 5% of total revenue in 2008, BTI has an entire export division. Their export division's Managing Director reveals the trial and errors of a privately held company and their quest for success overseas. From its inception, BTI has always believed its greatest asset is its employees. When export sales struggled due to lack of strategy and direction, BTI hired a Managing Director for its export division. With leadership and guidance from BTI's president and from the Managing Director, they utilized the department's skills and knowledge. Structural changes were made to expand their market presence abroad and increase export sales. As a result, export sales increased four-fold, area managers in new countries were added and distribution networks were successfully cultivated. At times, revenue generation was difficult to determine due to the structure of the company. Therefore, in 1996, the export division was restructured as a limited liability company. This allowed the company to improve the tracking of revenue and expenses. Originally, 80% of BTI's export sales came from two countries; therefore, the initial approach to selling overseas was not reaching their anticipated goals of expanding their foreign market presence. However, changes were made and now the company manages the details of selling to over 80 countries. There were three major export expansion challenges noted by the Managing Director: 1. Product and Shipping - The major obstacle for BTI was product assembly. Originally, the majority of the product was assembled in the United States, which increased shipping and packaging costs. With so many parts specified in the order, many times the order would arrive with parts missing. The missing parts could equate to tens of thousands of dollars. Shipping these missing parts separately in another shipment also cost tens of thousands of dollar, plus a delivery delay time of six to eight weeks; all of which came out of the BTI's pockets. 2. Product Adaptation - Safety and product standards varied widely for each of the 80 countries to which BTI exported. Weights, special licenses, product specification requirements, measurement systems, and truck stability can all differ from country to country and can serve as a type of barrier to entry, making it difficult to adapt products accordingly. Technical and safety standards are barriers that serve as a type of protection for the local industry and can stand in the way of successfully pursuing foreign markets. 3. Marketing Challenges - The importance of distribution creates many challenges for BTI as they attempt to determine how each country prefers to operate with regard to their distribution systems. Some countries have competition from a small competitor that only produces one competing product; whereas BTI manufactures over 100 products. Marketing material is another concern for BTI as they attempt to push marketing costs to the distributors. Adapting the marketing material can be costly in terms of translation and cultural differences. In addition, the size of paper in the United States differs from those in some countries, causing many problems when attempting to copy the same layout and With distribution being one of several challenges for BTI, the company claims their distribution network is one of their competitive advantages, as the location and names of their distributors are not revealed. In addition, BTI rotates two offerings yearly: training to their distributors one year and then the next is a distributor's meeting. With a focus on product and shipping, product adaptation, and marketing challenges, the intricacies of selling overseas takes time and patience. Another competitive advantage noted is BTI's cradle to grave strategy, where they follow the product from sale to its final resting place, whether the truck is leased or purchased new or used. They also offer service and maintenance plans with a detailed cost analysis provided to the company prior to purchasing or leasing the product. Expanding abroad will always create challenges for a company. As the Managing Director stated, "If you don't have patience (in the export business), you better do something else." Knowing how to adapt quickly provides BTI with the skills necessary to adjust to the changing needs of each country and its own unique challenges, allowing them to remain competitive.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.123-137
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• 2007

The advent of the Internet and related Web technologies has created an easily accessible link between a firm and its customers, and has provided opportunities to a firm to use information technology to support supplementary after-sale services associated with a product or service. It has been widely recognized that supplementary services are an important source of customer value and of competitive advantage as the characteristics of the product itself. Many of these supplementary services are information-based and need not be co-located with the product, so more and more companies are delivering these services electronically. Net-based customer service, which is defined as an Internet-based computerized information system that delivers services to a customer, therefore, is the core infrastructure for supplementary service provision. The importance of net-based customer service in delivering supplementary after-sale services associated with product has been well documented. The strategic advantages of well-implemented net-based customer service are enhanced customer loyalty and higher lock-in of customers, and a resulting reduction in competition and the consequent increase in profits. However, not all customers utilize such net-based customer service. The digital divide is the phenomenon in our society that captures the observation that not all customers have equal access to computers. Socioeconomic factors such as race, gender, and education level are strongly related to Internet accessibility and ability to use. This is due to the differences in the ability to bear the cost of a computer, and the differences in self-efficacy in the use of a technology, among other reasons. This concept, applied to e-commerce, has been called the "e-commerce divide." High Internet penetration is not eradicating the digital divide and e-commerce divide as one would hope. Besides, to accommodate personalized support, a customer must often provide personal information to the firm. This personal information includes not only name and address, but also preferences information and perhaps valuation information. However, many recent studies show that consumers may not be willing to share information about themselves due to concerns about privacy online. Due to the e-commerce divide, and due to privacy and security concerns of the customer for sharing personal information with firms, limited numbers of customers adopt net-based customer service. The limited level of customer adoption of net-based customer service affects the firm profits and the customers' welfare. We use a game-theoretic model in which we model the net-based customer service system as a mechanism to enhance customers' loyalty. We model a market entry scenario where a firm (the incumbent) uses the net-based customer service system in inducing loyalty in its customer base. The firm sells one product through the traditional retailing channels and at a price set for these channels. Another firm (the entrant) enters the market, and having observed the price of the incumbent firm (and after deducing the loyalty levels in the customer base), chooses its price. The profits of the firms and the surplus of the two customers segments (the segment that utilizes net-based customer service and the segment that does not) are analyzed in the Stackelberg leader-follower model of competition between the firms. We find that an increase in adoption of net-based customer service by the customer base is not always desirable for firms. With low effectiveness in enhancing customer loyalty, firms prefer a high level of customer adoption of net-based customer service, because an increase in adoption rate decreases competition and increases profits. A firm in an industry where net-based customer service is highly effective loyalty mechanism, on the other hand, prefers a low level of adoption by customers.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.21-28
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• 2012

While recent economic stagnation has left consumers dispirited, rapid growth has been seen in the domestic coffee industry recently. With the growth in coffee consumption, a tremendous increase in the number of specialty coffee shops has been seen in the domestic coffee market. The expectation that markets specializing in coffee will continue to grow for a long time will cause existing enterprises to expand their shops and increase the rate of entry of new shops. Intense competition in the domestic coffee market will force companies to create a competitive advantage through differentiated marketing strategies. This paper focuses on how the shopping value and repatronage intention of customers using coffee shops is affected by service quality. Moreover, this paper intends to examine the service quality that is critical for the successful management of relationships and the values that are important to consumers. For these purposes, the discriminative effect of service quality on shopping value was analyzed and the effect of utilitarian and hedonic value on repatronage intention was reviewed. The results of this study are detailed below. First, interaction and outcome quality can positively affect the hedonic value, whereas environment quality is not meaningful for utilitarian value. Considering the relative effect on utilitarian value outcome, the effect of outcome quality is greater than that of interaction. This result shows that the role of outcome quality is most important for improving utilitarian value. Second, outcome and environment quality positively affect hedonic value; however, interaction quality does not meaningfully increase hedonic value. These results indicate that customers recognize hedonic value on the basis of their evaluation of the service outcomes and the background to delivery service. In particular, it was revealed that the relative effect of outcome quality on hedonic value is greater than that of environment quality. Third, both utilitarian value and hedonic value had a positive effect on repatronage intention. The relative influence of the hedonic value is that the shopping value affects the repatronage intention more than the utilitarian value. These results mean that customers recognize coffee shops as spaces for satisfying utilitarian and hedonic values, and they place more importance on the benefits of the emotional experience than functional needs. Finally, this study suggests that output quality is more important than other service factors, and the results of this paper give some implications to the coffee shop industry that customers seek utilitarian needs based on economic value and place more weight on hedonic value, such as that offered by relationship media.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.199-230
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• 2021

Innovative new products and services are being launched through the convergence between heterogeneous industries, and social interest and investment in convergence industries such as AI, big data-based future cars, and robots are continuously increasing. However, in the process of commercialization of convergence new products and services, there are many cases where they do not conform to the existing regulatory and legal system, which causes many difficulties in companies launching their products and services into the market. In response to these industrial changes, the current government is promoting the improvement of existing regulatory mechanisms applied to the relevant industry along with the expansion of investment in new industries. This study, in these convergence industry trends, aimed to analysis the existing regulatory system that is an obstacle to market entry of innovative new products and services in order to preemptively predict regulatory issues that will arise in emerging industries. In addition, it was intended to establish a regulatory impact analysis system to evaluate adequacy and prepare improvement measures. The flow of this study is divided into three parts. In the first part, previous studies on regulatory impact analysis and evaluation systems are investigated. This was used as basic data for the development direction of the regulatory impact framework, indicators and items. In the second regulatory impact analysis framework development part, indicators and items are developed based on the previously investigated data, and these are applied to each stage of the framework. In the last part, a case study was presented to solve the regulatory issues faced by actual companies by applying the developed regulatory impact analysis framework. The case study included the autonomous/electric vehicle industry and the Internet of Things (IoT) industry, because it is one of the emerging industries that the Korean government is most interested in recently, and is judged to be most relevant to the realization of an intelligent information society. Specifically, the regulatory impact analysis framework proposed in this study consists of a total of five steps. The first step is to identify the industrial size of the target products and services, related policies, and regulatory issues. In the second stage, regulatory issues are discovered through review of regulatory improvement items for each stage of commercialization (planning, production, commercialization). In the next step, factors related to regulatory compliance costs are derived and costs incurred for existing regulatory compliance are calculated. In the fourth stage, an alternative is prepared by gathering opinions of the relevant industry and experts in the field, and the necessity, validity, and adequacy of the alternative are reviewed. Finally, in the final stage, the adopted alternatives are formulated so that they can be applied to the legislation, and the alternatives are reviewed by legal experts. The implications of this study are summarized as follows. From a theoretical point of view, it is meaningful in that it clearly presents a series of procedures for regulatory impact analysis as a framework. Although previous studies mainly discussed the importance and necessity of regulatory impact analysis, this study presented a systematic framework in consideration of the various factors required for regulatory impact analysis suggested by prior studies. From a practical point of view, this study has significance in that it was applied to actual regulatory issues based on the regulatory impact analysis framework proposed above. The results of this study show that proposals related to regulatory issues were submitted to government departments and finally the current law was revised, suggesting that the framework proposed in this study can be an effective way to resolve regulatory issues. It is expected that the regulatory impact analysis framework proposed in this study will be a meaningful guideline for technology policy researchers and policy makers in the future.

• The Korean Journal of Franchise Management
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.95-110
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• 2011

As global economic conditions are getting uneasy and polarization of our economy is intensified, the economic sentiment of small businesses is still low and unstable. The collapse of worldwide banking systems due to sub prime crisis in 2007 became the catalyst that shakes financial industries in each country in the world; the most sentiment people, small businesspersons, also have hard time facing survival way out, facing a great crisis. All organizing powers including manufactures, wholesales and retails are being gradually greater in mutual relations and dependence, and unstable factors about risks are also increasing. For exterior environmental and physical risk factors which cannot make small businesses survive themselves by developing ways out are eventually increasing, those who cannot cope with these factors face a great crisis. Although the government tries hard to overcome this situation conducting many ways, the effect does not continue. It is the real state that independent business markets including overall employment and establishing business have vicious cycle that they cannot be improved, due to increase of employment centered on short-term labors which lack durability in creation of employment and decline of household income. Recently, growth shows indication of slowdown because of multinational risk factors including financial crisis in each country in Europe, the death of Kim Jung-il, relationship with North Korea, and unstability of war situation in the Middle East Asia. Experts expect that growth rate will be about 4%, and independent business that ordinary people feel is still gloomy. It's reality that there is no adequate alternative for lack of jobs, unstable employment and a means of living after retirement. Also, the fact that large companies enter the market which is narrow and in the excessive competition should be an environmental factor that makes the situation worse. The business concept, a franchise, is the part we should think about whether it is the institutional solution that can guarantee independent businessmen stable life. Major companies are frightfully entering the market today, breaking the barrier to entry and shouting of a win-win with independent businesses. It's the small businesspersons who go through painful domestic recession, cannot predict the future and manage confusing and unstable independent business. It's very important to restore the domestic economy through wisely boosting consumption as soon as possible. It's also important to lead the situation by gathering powers of the government and related organizations, agonizing, suggesting solutions, and establishing accurate directions. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to suggest ways to strengthen competitiveness of small businesspersons by examining small business support policies which are currently implemented.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.35-48
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• 2010

Today, the fashion market challenged by a maturing retail market needs a new paradigm in the "evolution of brand" to improve their comparative advantages. An important issue in fashion marketing is lifestyle brand extension with a specific aim to meet consumers' specific needs for their changing lifestyle. For fashion brand extensions into lifestyle product categories, Gen Y and Baby Boomer are emerging as "prospects"-Baby Boomers who are renovating their lifestyle, and generation Y experiencing changes in their life stage-with demands for buying new products. Therefore, it is imperative that apparel companies pay special attention to the consumer cohort for brand extension to create and manage their brand equity in a new product category. The purposes of this study are to (a) evaluate brand equity between parent and extension brands; (b) identify consumers' perceived marketing elements for brand extension; and (c) estimate a structural equation model for examining causative relationship between marketing elements and brand equity for brand extensions in lifestyle product category including home fashion items for the selected two groups (e.g., Gen Y, and Baby boomer). For theoretical frameworks, this study focused on the traditional marketing 4P's mix to identify what marketing element is more importantly related to brand extension equity for this study. It is assumed that comparable marketing capability can be critical to establish "brand extension equity", leads to successfully entering the new categories. Drawing from the relevant literature, this study developed research hypotheses incorporating brand equity factors and marketing elements by focusing on the selected consumers (e.g., Gen Y, Baby Boomer). In the context of brand extension in the lifestyle products, constructs of brand equity consist of brand awareness/association, brand perceptions (e.g., perceived quality, emotional value) and brand resonance adapted from CBBE factors (Keller, 2001). It is postulated that the marketing elements create brand extension equity in terms of brand awareness/association, brand perceptions by the brand extension into lifestyle products, which in turn influence brand resonance. For data collection, the sample was comprised of Korean female consumers in Gen Y and Baby Boomer consumer categories who have a high demand for lifestyle products due to changing their lifecycles. A total of 651 usable questionnaires were obtained from female consumers of Gen Y (n=326) and Baby Boomer (n=325) in South Korea. Structural and measurement models using a correlation matrix was estimated using LISREL 8.8. Findings indicated that perceived marketing elements for brand extension consisted of three factors: price/store image, product, and advertising. In the model of Gen Y consumers, price/store image had a positive effect on brand equity factors (e.g., brand awareness/association, perceived quality), while product had positive effect on emotional value in the brand extensions; and the brand awareness/association was likely to increase the perceived quality and emotional value, leading to brand resonance for brand extensions in the lifestyle products. In the model of Baby Boomer consumers, price/store image had a positive effect on perceived quality, which created brand resonance of brand extension; and product had a positive effect on perceived quality and emotional value, which leads to brand resonance for brand extension in the lifestyle products. However, advertising was negatively related to brand equity for both groups. This study provides an insight for fashion marketers in developing a successful brand extension strategy, leading to a sustainable competitive advantage. This study complements and extends prior works in the brand extension through critical factors of marketing efforts that affect brand extension success. Findings support a synergy effect on leveraging of fashion brand extensions (Aaker and Keller, 1990; Tauber, 1988; Shine et al., 2007; Pitta and Katsanis, 1995) in conjunction with marketing actions for entering into the new product category. Thus, it is recommended that marketers targeting both Gen Y and Baby Boomer can reduce marketing cost for entering the new product category (e.g., home furnishings) by standardized marketing efforts; fashion marketers can (a) offer extension lines with premium ranges of price; (b) place an emphasis on upscale features of store image positioning by a retail channel (e.g., specialty department store) in Korea, and (c) combine apparel with lifestyle product assortments including innovative style and designer’s limited editions. With respect to brand equity, a key to successful brand extension is consumers’ brand awareness or association that ensures brand identity with new product category. It is imperative for marketers to have knowledge of what contributes to more concrete associations in a market entry into new product categories. For fashion brands, a second key of brand extension can be a "luxury" lifestyle approach into new product categories, in that higher price or store image had impact on perceived quality that established brand resonance. More importantly, this study increases the theoretical understanding of brand extension and suggests directions for marketers as they establish marketing program at Gen Y and Baby Boomers.

• The Journal of Small Business Innovation
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.19-39
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• 2016

With increasing adoption of smart products and complexity, companies have shifted their strategies from stand alone and competitive strategies to business ecosystem oriented and cooperative strategies. The win-win growth of business refers to corporate efforts undertaken by companies to pursue the healthiness of business between conglomerates and partnering companies such as suppliers for mutual prosperity and a long-term corporate soundness based on their business ecosystem and cooperative strategies. This study is designed to validate a theoretical proposition that the win-win growth strategy of Samsung Electronics and cooperative efforts among companies can create a healthy business ecosystem, based on results of case studies and surveys. In this study, a level of global market access of small and mid-sized companies is adopted as the key achievement index. The foreign market entry is considered as one of vulnerabilities in the ecosystem of small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs). For SMEs, the global market access based on the research and development (R&D) has become the critical component in the process of transforming them into global small giants. The results of case studies and surveys are analyzed mainly based on a model of a virtuous cycle of Creativity, Opportunity, Productivity, and Proactivity (the COPP model) that features the characteristics of the healthiness of a business ecosystem. In the COPP model, a virtuous circle of profits made by the first three factors and Proactivity, which is the manifestation of entrepreneurship that proactively invests and reacts to the changing business environment of the future, enhances the healthiness of a given business ecosystem. With the application of the COPP model, this study finds major achievements of the win-win growth of Samsung Electronics as follows. First, Opportunity plays a role as a parameter in the relations of Creativity, Productivity, and creating profits. Namely, as companies export more (with more Opportunity), they are more likely to link their R&D efforts to Productivity and profitability. However, companies that do not export tend to fail to link their R&D investment to profitability. Second, this study finds that companies with huge investment on R&D for the future, which is the result of Proactivity, tend to hold a large number of patents (Creativity). And companies with significant numbers of patents tend to be large exporters as well (Opportunity), and companies with a large amount of exports tend to record high profitability (Productivity and profitability), and thus forms the virtuous cycle of the COPP model. In addition, to access global markets for sustainable growth, SMEs need to build and strengthen their competitiveness. This study concludes that companies with a high level of proactivity to invest for the future can create a virtuous circle of Creativity, Opportunity, Productivity, and Proactivity, thereby providing a strategic implication that SMEs should invest time and resources in forming such a virtuous cycle which is a sure way for the SMEs to grow into global small giants.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.245-276
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• 2008

Brand equity is one of the most important concepts in business practice as well as in academic research. Successful brands can allow marketers to gain competitive advantage (Lassar et al.,1995), including the opportunity for successful extensions, resilience against competitors' promotional pressures, and the ability to create barriers to competitive entry (Farquhar, 1989). Branding plays a special role in service firms because strong brands increase trust in intangible products (Berry, 2000), enabling customers to better visualize and understand them. They reduce customers' perceived monetary, social, and safety risks in buying services, which are obstacles to evaluating a service correctly before purchase. Also, a high level of brand equity increases consumer satisfaction, repurchasing intent, and degree of loyalty. Brand equity can be considered as a mixture that includes both financial assets and relationships. Actually, brand equity can be viewed as the value added to the product (Keller, 1993), or the perceived value of the product in consumers' minds. Mahajan et al. (1990) claim that customer-based brand equity can be measured by the level of consumers' perceptions. Several researchers discuss brand equity based on two dimensions: consumer perception and consumer behavior. Aaker (1991) suggests measuring brand equity through price premium, loyalty, perceived quality, and brand associations. Viewing brand equity as the consumer's behavior toward a brand, Keller (1993) proposes similar dimensions: brand awareness and brand knowledge. Thus, past studies tend to identify brand equity as a multidimensional construct consisted of brand loyalty, brand awareness, brand knowledge, customer satisfaction, perceived equity, brand associations, and other proprietary assets (Aaker, 1991, 1996; Blackston, 1995; Cobb-Walgren et al., 1995; Na, 1995). Other studies tend to regard brand equity and other brand assets, such as brand knowledge, brand awareness, brand image, brand loyalty, perceived quality, and so on, as independent but related constructs (Keller, 1993; Kirmani and Zeithaml, 1993). Walters(1978) defined information search as, "A psychological or physical action a consumer takes in order to acquire information about a product or store." But, each consumer has different methods for informationsearch. There are two methods of information search, internal and external search. Internal search is, "Search of information already saved in the memory of the individual consumer"(Engel, Blackwell, 1982) which is, "memory of a previous purchase experience or information from a previous search."(Beales, Mazis, Salop, and Staelin, 1981). External search is "A completely voluntary decision made in order to obtain new information"(Engel & Blackwell, 1982) which is, "Actions of a consumer to acquire necessary information by such methods as intentionally exposing oneself to advertisements, taking to friends or family or visiting a store."(Beales, Mazis, Salop, and Staelin, 1981). There are many sources for consumers' information search including advertisement sources such as the internet, radio, television, newspapers and magazines, information supplied by businesses such as sales people, packaging and in-store information, consumer sources such as family, friends and colleagues, and mass media sources such as consumer protection agencies, government agencies and mass media sources. Understanding consumers' purchasing behavior is a key factor of a firm to attract and retain customers and improving the firm's prospects for survival and growth, and enhancing shareholder's value. Therefore, marketers should understand consumer as individual and market segment. One theory of consumer behavior supports the belief that individuals are rational. Individuals think and move through stages when making a purchase decision. This means that rational thinkers have led to the identification of a consumer buying decision process. This decision process with its different levels of involvement and influencing factors has been widely accepted and is fundamental to the understanding purchase intention represent to what consumers think they will buy. Brand equity is not only companies but also very important asset more than product itself. This paper studies brand equity model and influencing factors including information process such as information searching and information resources in the fashion market in Asia and Europe. Information searching and information resources are influencing brand knowledge that influences consumers purchase decision. Nine research hypotheses are drawn to test the relationships among antecedents of brand equity and purchase intention and relationships among brand knowledge, brand value, brand attitude, and brand loyalty. H1. Information searching influences brand knowledge positively. H2. Information sources influence brand knowledge positively. H3. Brand knowledge influences brand attitude. H4. Brand knowledge influences brand value. H5. Brand attitude influences brand loyalty. H6. Brand attitude influences brand value. H7. Brand loyalty influences purchase intention. H8. Brand value influence purchase intention. H9. There will be the same research model in Asia and Europe. We performed structural equation model analysis in order to test hypotheses suggested in this study. The model fitting index of the research model in Asia was $X^2$=195.19(p=0.0), NFI=0.90, NNFI=0.87, CFI=0.90, GFI=0.90, RMR=0.083, AGFI=0.85, which means the model fitting of the model is good enough. In Europe, it was $X^2$=133.25(p=0.0), NFI=0.81, NNFI=0.85, CFI=0.89, GFI=0.90, RMR=0.073, AGFI=0.85, which means the model fitting of the model is good enough. From the test results, hypotheses were accepted. All of these hypotheses except one are supported. In Europe, information search is not an antecedent of brand knowledge. This means that sales of global fashion brands like jeans in Europe are not expanding as rapidly as in Asian markets such as China, Japan, and South Korea. Young consumers in European countries are not more brand and fashion conscious than their counter partners in Asia. The results have theoretical, practical meaning and contributions. In the fashion jeans industry, relatively few studies examining the viability of cross-national brand equity has been studied. This study provides insight on building global brand equity and suggests information process elements like information search and information resources are working differently in Asia and Europe for fashion jean market.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.83-108
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• 2007

Since the 1992 UN Conference for Environment and Development held in Rio de Jaineiro, Sustainable Development has become the global thesis. More than 170 countries signed the Agenda 21 for the sustainable action plan, and adopted the sustainability concept as the key concept of dealing with the environmental, social, ethical, and economic problem. Sustainability is one of the main marketing challenges in the 21st century. By integrating social and ecological criteria, marketing may can make valuable contributions to sustainable development. Regarding the sustainability marketing, it is difficult to find the domestic marketing research on the thesis of sustainable development, and this is the definite evidence that the Korean marketing researchers do not realize the importance of the thesis of sustainable development which is internationally suggested as the new paradigm of change. The purpose of this study is to build the conceptual background and explore the research direction in order to introduce and adopt the concept of sustainable development in the domestic marketing research field. The present paper proposes a comprehensive conception of sustainability marketing, defined by six step: analysis of social-ecological problems; analysis of consumer behavior; normative sustainability marketing; strategic sustainability marketing; instrumental sustainability marketing; and transformative sustainability marketing. The aim of the paper are to clarify the concept of sustainability marketing. To accomplish this research purpose we discuss the sustainable development which is the conceptual background of sustainability marketing, analyze the characteristics of the sustainability marketing, and finally summarize the research results and present the suggestions for further research. Sustainability marketing embraces the idea of sustainable development, a development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs. Sustainability Marketing goes beyond conventional marketing thinking. If marketing is about satisfying customer needs and building profitable relationships with customers, sustainability marketing may be defined as building and maintaining sustainable relationships with customers, the social environment and natural environment. By creating social and environmental value, sustainability marketing tries to deliver and increase customer value. Sustainability Marketing aims at creating customer value, social value and environmental value. Sustainability marketing integrates social and ecological criteria into the whole process of marketing, and can be differentiated in six steps: (1) Analysis of the social and ecological problems, generally and specifically with respect to products which satisfy customer needs and wants; (2) Analysis of customer behavior with special aspect to social and ecological concerns; (3) Corporate commitments to sustainable development in the mission statement, development of sustainability visions, formulation of sustainable principles and guideline, setting of socio-ecological marketing objectives and goals (normative aspects of sustainability marketing); (4) Sustainability segmentation, targeting and positioning, and timing of market entry(strategic aspects of sustainability marketing); (5)Integration of social and ecological criteria into the marketing-mix, i.e. products, services and brands, pricing, distribution and communication(instrumental aspects of sustainability marketing); (6) Participation in public and political change processes, which transform existing institutions towards sustainability(transformative aspects of sustainability marketing). The first two steps begin with an analysis of the company situation. In sustainability marketing it is crucial not just to know consumer needs and wants, but also to find out about the ecological and social problems of products along their whole life cycle. The intersection of socio-ecological problems and consumer wants sets the ground for sustainability marketing. Step three to five describe the implementation of sustainability marketing. Social and ecological criteria are fully integrated into the mission statement, strategies and marketing-mix. Step six is one of the specifics of sustainability marketing. It is about the commitment of company to sustainable development and their active participation in public and political processes in order to change the existing framework in favor of sustainability.