• Journal of Fashion Business
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• v.28 no.2
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• pp.1-14
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• 2024

Within the metaverse platform, users engage in communication with others through 'avatars' reflecting their own identities. Users experience various virtual fashion items through avatars, and the fashion industry anticipates avatars wearing virtual fashion items as an emerging business opportunity. Many fashion brands are currently releasing virtual fashion items specifically designed for avatars. In this study, we examined the impact of user identification with their avatar on their perception of the attributes of virtual fashion items (investment attractiveness, scarcity, playfulness, and aesthetics) and its influence on behavioral intentions. The research involved a survey of 250 females with prior knowledge of the metaverse. Structural equation modeling analysis was conducted to examine research hypotheses and validate the model. The results confirmed that as users within the metaverse perceive greater identification with their avatar, they also perceive the attributes of virtual fashion items more favorably. This finding affirms the self-reference effect, where users positively evaluate objects associated with themselves. Additionally, perceiving the attributes of virtual fashion items was found to be positively linked to purchase intentions for virtual products and actual interest in the brand. Lastly, a higher intention to purchase virtual fashion items was associated with forming a more favorable attitude toward the respective brand. Consequently, this study provides academic and practical implications for marketing strategies within the metaverse, emphasizing the active utilization of avatars and elements that facilitate user-avatar identification for effective engagement.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.18-36
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• 2024

This study delved into the complex nature of medical services as experience goods and trust services, investigating the profound impact of online word-of-mouth on medical consumers' decisions to visit hospitals. Considering the restrictive legal framework for medical advertising, consumers are increasingly dependent on unrestricted sources of information like online reviews. This research aimed to provide empirical evidence for the significant role online word-of-mouth plays in hospital selection. Utilizing data from Naver reviews, hospital choice factors were classified based on the Kano model, revealing the subtle yet significant influence that word-of-mouth has on consumers' hospital visit intentions beyond merely positive or negative messages. In particular, the study provided insights into how the categorized positive and negative information, along with the presence or absence of emotional expression, affects the efficacy of word-of-mouth. The experiment targeted medical consumers aged over 20 and, through analysis using the SPSS statistical program, yielded important findings. The direction of online word-of-mouth, the presence of emotional expression, and the interaction of Kano attributes all created significant differences in hospital visit intentions. Notably, emotional expression included in negative word-of-mouth concerning one-dimensional attributes markedly decreased visit intentions, whereas the absence of emotional expression in attractive attributes actually enhanced reliability and increased visit intentions. These findings offer critical implications for redefining strategies in medical marketing and online review management. The discoveries of this study underscore the importance of active engagement and strategic management of online reviews by medical service providers, urging careful consideration of the various elements of online word-of-mouth that influence medical consumers' hospital visit intentions.

• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.198-207
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• 2024

As men's interest in grooming increases, YouTube videos teaching men about natural makeup that could help them look more presentable are becoming popular. An increasing amount of beauty content on YouTube now targets men. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the features of male-targeted beauty videos with the highest number of views and likes in order to help beauty influencers understand what subscribers want and apply effective marketing strategies. The research method set criteria for YouTuber characteristics, editing elements, and content through prior research, and analyzed through the YouTube website. The video upload date range was set from January 1, 2022 to January 1, 2024. The search keywords "male beauty YouTuber" and "male makeup" were used to find the 10 most viewed videos. The results showed that technical terms, standard words, and loanwords were generally used, and the age group was in their 30s, and the proportion of famous experts was high. The video duration of 10-15 minutes was most common, and the ratio of sound effects, background music, and subtitles was high. Makeup tips and product reviews or recommendations was the most common type of content. Especially, demonstrations of make-up application and product reviews had higher number of views. The findings of this study could provide new ideas and references to YouTubers who aspire to specialize in male beauty content, and help them produce videos that sufficiently satisfy the needs and desires of subscribers.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.11
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• pp.147-163
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• 2003

Recently it is necessary that Hotel business introduce Information Technology to enhance competitive advantage and cope with changeable business promptly in management. Thus in an effort of using Information Technology strategically, Many Hotel business tries to install CRM system (Customer Relationship Management). This study tries to analyze the effects on customer performance by installing CRM system if it is in charge of major strategic system, it can get successful customer performance. I hypothesize to resolve the problem, and search preceding study results concerning the elements of CRM Installment and Customer performance. The survey was taken to emplyees in the field of CRM installment in Luxury hotel to test the hypothesis. To summarize the results, first, CRM intallment affects CRM customer performance. in short, systematic feature, management environment, information intention, and technologic element affect it. Through this study, facing the limitation and future study are below. first, additional parameter should be considered though I reviewed the elements affecting CRM customer performance by searching and abstracting preceding studies. Second, There are lack of preceding studies because it has passed only a couple of years since Korean businesses deal with CRM system and there is the limitation to compare this result with others due to few empirical analysisses. Especilly, I can hardly find the preceding study concerning hotel industry but tries to search preceding parameter as to the customer performance of CRM system. Until now, It is needed to continual study its measurement later. I believe that more specific study and precise theoretical test be performed and they deal with current CRM system installment and facing problems in all of the korean hotels.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing Administration
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.169-191
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• 2002

As the tendency of the society is centralized into consumers and services, patients are getting to ask better medical services. The consumers influenced from various social surroundings became to have some expectation of nursing service. Compared with their expectation, the quality of the services which they virtually get may be recognized and evaluated. So it is necessary to know exactly what the consumers want in nursing services. The purpose of this study is to examine the determinants which can evaluate the quality of nursing services by researching into consumers' expectation and perception of the nursing services depending on the consumer-oriented attributions on the basis of the model of SERVQUAL. 1,144 of outpatients were selected as the subjects for this research. They used to continuously visit the same hospital after being hospitalized and nursed in 9 hospitals randomly selected among the second-level medical organizations in Seoul from January to February, 2001. The collected data are analyzed into the Descriptive Statistics, t-test, GLM and Multiple Regression through the SAS program. Delphi was used for the research tool and the results of the research are as follows; the determinants in evaluating the quality of nursing services consist of 5 categories such as Tangibility, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance, Empathy. The values of Cronbach' $\alpha$ appeared to be 0.96 in the expectation of nursing services, 0.94 in the perception of nursing services and 0.96 in the importance of nursing services. The determinants in the expectation of nursing services were ranged in the order of Assurance, Empathy, Reliability, Responsiveness and Tangibility. And those in the perception of nursing services were in the order of Assurance, Empathy, Reliability, Tangibility and Responsiveness. Those in the importance of nursing service were in the order of Empathy, Assurance, Reliability, Tangibility and Responsiveness. Finally, those in the quality of nursing service were in the order of Tangibility, Responsiveness, Empathy, Reliability and Assurance. Each expectation of nursing services appeared different depending on the subjects' age, gender, clinical department and reason for hospitalization. The hypothesis examined in this research shows that the group having higher personal needs shows meaningful differences in the expectation of nursing services, and the subjects who have had external communication show higher perception of nursing service than uncommunicative ones. After all, we can see that the statistical differences in the perception of nursing services depend on whether the subjects have external communications or not. The determinants in the expectation of nursing services can explain the quality of nursing service up to 14.96%. The statistically meaningful determinants in the expectation could be arranged in the order of Reliability, Assurance and Tangibility. And the more expectation brings about the lower evaluation of the quality of nursing services. The determinants in the perception of nursing service can explain the quality of nursing services up to 29.85%. The statistically meaningful determinants in the perception could be arranged in the order of Responsiveness, Reliability, Tangibility, Empathy, and Assurance. And the more perception brings about the higher evaluation of the quality of nursing services. According to the result of the above research, I would like to propose as follows. As long as this research is oriented to get knowledge of the consumer-oriented nursing services, it should be continued to draw the other elements determining the quality of the nursing services. Furthermore, this research is based upon the Parasuraman, A., et al.'s SERVQUAL Model(1991), which deals only expectation, perception and quality of consumer-oriented nursing services, so it will be necessary to inspect and verify it through the other models containing the offerers of nursing services in the future. On the other hand, as this research evaluates the actual quality of nursing services based on the expectation and perception of nursing services, it can be utilized as fundamental data to develop the marketing strategies and to estimate the qualities as well. I hope this research will be periodically estimated to be the useful data to develop the marketing strategies in the nursing service area.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.179-200
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• 2019

Word-of-mouth (WoM) is defined by consumer activities that share information concerning consumption. WoM activities have long been recognized as important in corporate marketing processes and have received much attention, especially in the marketing field. Recently, according to the development of the Internet, the way in which people exchange information in online news and online communities has been expanded, and WoM is diversified in terms of word of mouth, score, rating, and liking. Social media makes online users easy access to information and online WoM is considered a key source of information. Although various studies on WoM have been preceded by this phenomenon, there is no meta-analysis study that comprehensively analyzes them. This study proposed a method to extract major researches by applying text mining techniques and to grasp the main issues of researches in order to find the trend of WoM research using scholarly big data. To this end, a total of 4389 documents were collected by the keyword 'Word-of-mouth' from 1941 to 2018 in Scopus (www.scopus.com), a citation database, and the data were refined through preprocessing such as English morphological analysis, stopwords removal, and noun extraction. To carry out this study, we adopted main path analysis (MPA) and word co-occurrence network analysis. MPA detects key researches and is used to track the development trajectory of academic field, and presents the research trend from a macro perspective. For this, we constructed a citation network based on the collected data. The node means a document and the link means a citation relation in citation network. We then detected the key-route main path by applying SPC (Search Path Count) weights. As a result, the main path composed of 30 documents extracted from a citation network. The main path was able to confirm the change of the academic area which was developing along with the change of the times reflecting the industrial change such as various industrial groups. The results of MPA revealed that WoM research was distinguished by five periods: (1) establishment of aspects and critical elements of WoM, (2) relationship analysis between WoM variables, (3) beginning of researches of online WoM, (4) relationship analysis between WoM and purchase, and (5) broadening of topics. It was found that changes within the industry was reflected in the results such as online development and social media. Very recent studies showed that the topics and approaches related WoM were being diversified to circumstantial changes. However, the results showed that even though WoM was used in diverse fields, the main stream of the researches of WoM from the start to the end, was related to marketing and figuring out the influential factors that proliferate WoM. By applying word co-occurrence network analysis, the research trend is presented from a microscopic point of view. Word co-occurrence network was constructed to analyze the relationship between keywords and social network analysis (SNA) was utilized. We divided the data into three periods to investigate the periodic changes and trends in discussion of WoM. SNA showed that Period 1 (1941~2008) consisted of clusters regarding relationship, source, and consumers. Period 2 (2009~2013) contained clusters of satisfaction, community, social networks, review, and internet. Clusters of period 3 (2014~2018) involved satisfaction, medium, review, and interview. The periodic changes of clusters showed transition from offline to online WoM. Media of WoM have become an important factor in spreading the words. This study conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on scholarly big data regarding WoM. The main contribution of this study is that it provides a micro perspective on the research trend of WoM as well as the macro perspective. The limitation of this study is that the citation network constructed in this study is a network based on the direct citation relation of the collected documents for MPA.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.61-118
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• 2008

The purpose of this research is to construct research framework for international franchising based on existing literature and to identify research components in the framework. Franchise can be defined as management styles that allow franchisee use various management assets of franchisor in order to make or sell product or service. It can be divided into product distribution franchise that is designed to sell products and business format franchise that is designed for running it as business whatever its form is. International franchising can be defined as a way of internationalization of franchisor to foreign country by providing its business format or package to franchisee of host country. International franchising is growing fast for last four decades but academic research on this is quite limited. Especially in Korea, research about international franchising is carried out on by case study format with single case or empirical study format with survey based on domestic franchise theory. Therefore, this paper tries to review existing literature on international franchising research, providing research framework, and then stimulating new research on this field. International franchising research components include motives and environmental factors for decision of expanding to international franchising, entrance modes and development plan for international franchising, contracts and management strategy of international franchising, and various performance measures from different perspectives. First, motives of international franchising are fee collection from franchisee. Also it provides easier way to expanding to foreign country. The other motives including increase total sales volume, occupying better strategic position, getting quality resources, and improving efficiency. Environmental factors that facilitating international franchising encompasses economic condition, trend, and legal or political factors in host and/or home countries. In addition, control power and risk management capability of franchisor plays critical role in successful franchising contract. Final decision to enter foreign country via franchising is determined by numerous factors like history, size, growth, competitiveness, management system, bonding capability, industry characteristics of franchisor. After deciding to enter into foreign country, franchisor needs to set entrance modes of international franchising. Within contractual mode, there are master franchising and area developing franchising, licensing, direct franchising, and joint venture. Theories about entrance mode selection contain concepts of efficiency, knowledge-based approach, competence-based approach, agent theory, and governance cost. The next step after entrance decision is operation strategy. Operation strategy starts with selecting a target city and a target country for franchising. In order to finding, screening targets, franchisor needs to collect information about candidates. Critical information includes brand patent, commercial laws, regulations, market conditions, country risk, and industry analysis. After selecting a target city in target country, franchisor needs to select franchisee, in other word, partner. The first important criteria for selecting partners are financial credibility and capability, possession of real estate. And cultural similarity and knowledge about franchisor and/or home country are also recognized as critical criteria. The most important element in operating strategy is legal document between franchisor and franchisee with home and host countries. Terms and conditions in legal documents give objective information about characteristics of franchising agreement for academic research. Legal documents have definitions of terminology, territory and exclusivity, agreement of term, initial fee, continuing fees, clearing currency, and rights about sub-franchising. Also, legal documents could have terms about softer elements like training program and operation manual. And harder elements like law competent court and terms of expiration. Next element in operating strategy is about product and service. Especially for business format franchising, product/service deliverable, benefit communicators, system identifiers (architectural features), and format facilitators are listed for product/service strategic elements. Another important decision on product/service is standardization vs. customization. The rationale behind standardization is cost reduction, efficiency, consistency, image congruence, brand awareness, and competitiveness on price. Also standardization enables large scale R&D and innovative change in management style. Another element in operating strategy is control management. The simple way to control franchise contract is relying on legal terms, contractual control system. There are other control systems, administrative control system and ethical control system. Contractual control system is a coercive source of power, but franchisor usually doesn't want to use legal power since it doesn't help to build up positive relationship. Instead, self-regulation is widely used. Administrative control system uses control mechanism from ordinary work relationship. Its main component is supporting activities to franchisee and communication method. For example, franchisor provides advertising, training, manual, and delivery, then franchisee follows franchisor's direction. Another component is building franchisor's brand power. The last research element is performance factor of international franchising. Performance elements can be divided into franchisor's performance and franchisee's performance. The conceptual performance measures of franchisor are simple but not easy to obtain objectively. They are profit, sale, cost, experience, and brand power. The performance measures of franchisee are mostly about benefits of host country. They contain small business development, promotion of employment, introduction of new business model, and level up technology status. There are indirect benefits, like increase of tax, refinement of corporate citizenship, regional economic clustering, and improvement of international balance. In addition to those, host country gets socio-cultural change other than economic effects. It includes demographic change, social trend, customer value change, social communication, and social globalization. Sometimes it is called as westernization or McDonaldization of society. In addition, the paper reviews on theories that have been frequently applied to international franchising research, such as agent theory, resource-based view, transaction cost theory, organizational learning theory, and international expansion theories. Resource based theory is used in strategic decision based on resources, like decision about entrance and cooperation depending on resources of franchisee and franchisor. Transaction cost theory can be applied in determination of mutual trust or satisfaction of franchising players. Agent theory tries to explain strategic decision for reducing problem caused by utilizing agent, for example research on control system in franchising agreements. Organizational Learning theory is relatively new in franchising research. It assumes organization tries to maximize performance and learning of organization. In addition, Internalization theory advocates strategic decision of direct investment for removing inefficiency of market transaction and is applied in research on terms of contract. And oligopolistic competition theory is used to explain various entry modes for international expansion. Competency theory support strategic decision of utilizing key competitive advantage. Furthermore, research methodologies including qualitative and quantitative methodologies are suggested for more rigorous international franchising research. Quantitative research needs more real data other than survey data which is usually respondent's judgment. In order to verify theory more rigorously, research based on real data is essential. However, real quantitative data is quite hard to get. The qualitative research other than single case study is also highly recommended. Since international franchising has limited number of applications, scientific research based on grounded theory and ethnography study can be used. Scientific case study is differentiated with single case study on its data collection method and analysis method. The key concept is triangulation in measurement, logical coding and comparison. Finally, it provides overall research direction for international franchising after summarizing research trend in Korea. International franchising research in Korea has two different types, one is for studying Korean franchisor going overseas and the other is for Korean franchisee of foreign franchisor. Among research on Korean franchisor, two common patterns are observed. First of all, they usually deal with success story of one franchisor. The other common pattern is that they focus on same industry and country. Therefore, international franchise research needs to extend their focus to broader subjects with scientific research methodology as well as development of new theory.

• 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.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.65-96
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• 2012

Brand has received much attention from considerable marketing research. When consumers consume product or services, they are exposed to a lot of brand related stimuli. These contain brand personality, brand experience, brand identity, brand communications and so on. A special kind of new crisis occasionally confronting companies' brand management today is the brand related rumor. An important influence on consumers' purchase decision making is the word-of-mouth spread by other consumers and most decisions are influenced by other's recommendations. In light of this influence, firms have reasonable reason to study and understand consumer-to-consumer communication such as brand rumor. The importance of brand rumor to marketers is increasing as the number of internet user and SNS(social network service) site grows. Due to the development of internet technology, people can spread rumors without the limitation of time, space and place. However relatively few studies have been published in marketing journals and little is known about brand rumors in the marketplace. The study of rumor has a long history in all major social science. But very few studies have dealt with the antecedents and consequences of any kind of brand rumor. Rumor has been generally described as a story or statement in general circulation without proper confirmation or certainty as to fact. And it also can be defined as an unconfirmed proposition, passed along from people to people. Rosnow(1991) claimed that rumors were transmitted because people needed to explain ambiguous and uncertain events and talking about them reduced associated anxiety. Especially negative rumors are believed to have the potential to devastate a company's reputation and relations with customers. From the perspective of marketer, negative rumors are considered harmful and extremely difficult to control in general. It is becoming a threat to a company's sustainability and sometimes leads to negative brand image and loss of customers. Thus there is a growing concern that these negative rumors can damage brands' reputations and lead them to financial disaster too. In this study we aimed to distinguish antecedents of brand rumor transmission and investigate the effects of brand rumor characteristics on rumor spread intention. We also found key components in personal acceptance of brand rumor. In contextualist perspective, we tried to unify the traditional psychological and sociological views. In this unified research approach we defined brand rumor's characteristics based on five major variables that had been found to influence the process of rumor spread intention. The five factors of usefulness, source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness, encompass multi level elements of brand rumor. We also selected product involvement as a control variable. To perform the empirical research, imaginary Korean 'Kimch' brand and related contamination rumor was created and proposed. Questionnaires were collected from 178 Korean samples. Data were collected from college students who have been experienced the focal product. College students were regarded as good subjects because they have a tendency to express their opinions in detail. PLS(partial least square) method was adopted to analyze the relations between variables in the equation model. The most widely adopted causal modeling method is LISREL. However it is poorly suited to deal with relatively small data samples and can yield not proper solutions in some cases. PLS has been developed to avoid some of these limitations and provide more reliable results. To test the reliability using SPSS 16 s/w, Cronbach alpha was examined and all the values were appropriate showing alpha values between .802 and .953. Subsequently, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted successfully. And structural equation modeling has been used to analyze the research model using smartPLS(ver. 2.0) s/w. Overall, R² of adoption of rumor is .476 and R² of intention of rumor transmission is .218. The overall model showed a satisfactory fit. The empirical results can be summarized as follows. According to the results, the variables of brand rumor characteristic such as source credibility, message credibility, worry, and vividness affect argument strength of rumor. And argument strength of rumor also affects rumor intention. On the other hand, the relationship between perceived usefulness and argument strength of rumor is not significant. The moderating effect of product involvement on the relations between argument strength of rumor and rumor W.O.M intention is not supported neither. Consequently this study suggests some managerial and academic implications. We consider some implications for corporate crisis management planning, PR and brand management. This results show marketers that rumor is a critical factor for managing strong brand assets. Also for researchers, brand rumor should become an important thesis of their interests to understand the relationship between consumer and brand. Recently many brand managers and marketers have focused on the short-term view. They just focused on strengthen the positive brand image. According to this study we suggested that effective brand management requires managing negative brand rumors with a long-term view of marketing decisions.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-22
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• 2013

This case focuses on Shanghai Tang, the first truly Chinese luxury brand that appeals to both Westerners and, more recently, to Chinese consumers worldwide. A visionary and wealthy businessman Sir David Tang created this company from scratch in 1994 in Hong Kong. Its story, spanned over almost two decades, has been fascinating. It went from what best a Chinese brand could be in the eyes of Westerners who love the Chinese culture, to a nearly-bankrupted company in 1998, before being acquired by Richemont, the second largest luxury group in the world. Since then, its turnaround has been spectacular with a growing appeal among Chinese luxury consumers who represent the core segment of the luxury industry today. The main objective of this case study is to formally examine how Shanghai Tang overcame its downfall and re-emerged as one the very few well- known Chinese luxury brands. More specifically, this case highlights the ways with which Shanghai Tang made a transitional change from a brand for Westerners who love the Chinese culture, to a brand for both, Westerners who love the Chinese culture and Chinese who love luxury. A close examination reveals that Shanghai Tang has followed the brand identity concept that consists of two major components: functional and emotional. The functional component for developing a luxury brand concerns all product characteristics that will make a product 'luxurious' in the eyes of the consumer, such as premium quality of cachemire from Mongolia, Chinese silk, lacquer, finest leather, porcelain, and jade in the case of Shanghai Tang. The emotional component consists of non-functional symbolic meanings of a brand. The symbolic meaning marks the major difference between a premium and a luxury brand. In the case of Shanghai Tang, its symbolic meaning refers to the Chinese culture and the brand aims to represent the best of Chinese traditions and establish itself as "the ambassador of modern Chinese style". It touches the Chinese heritage and emotions. Shanghai Tang has reinvented the modern Chinese chic by drawing back to the stylish decadence of Shanghai in the 1930s, which was then called the "Paris of the East", and this is where the brand finds inspiration to create its own myth. Once the functional and emotional components assured, Shanghai Tang has gone through a four-stage development to become the first global Chinese luxury brand: introduction, deepening, expansion, and revitalization. Introduction: David Tang discovered a market gap and had a vision to launch the first Chinese luxury brand to the world. The key success drivers for the introduction and management of a Chinese luxury brand are a solid brand identity and, above all, a creative mind, an inspired person. This was David Tang then, and this is now Raphael Le Masne de Chermont, the current Executive Chairman. Shanghai Tang combines Chinese and Western elements, which it finds to be the most sustainable platform for drawing consumers. Deepening: A major objective of the next phase is to become recognized as a luxury brand and a fashion or design authority. For this purpose, Shanghai Tang has cooperated with other well-regarded luxury and lifestyle brands such as Puma and Swarovski. It also expanded its product lines from high-end custom-made garments to music CDs and restaurant. Expansion: After the opening of his first store in Hong Kong in 1994, David Tang went on to open his second store in New York City three years later. However this New York retail operation was a financial disaster. Barely nineteen months after the opening, the store was shut down and quietly relocated to a cheaper location of Madison Avenue. Despite this failure, Shanghai Tang products found numerous followers especially among Western tourists and became "souvenir-like" must-haves. However, despite its strong brand DNA, the brand did not generate enough repeated sales and over the years the company cumulated heavy debts and became unprofitable. Revitalizing: After its purchase by Richemont in 1998, Le Masne de Chermont was appointed to lead the company, reposition the brand and undertake some major strategic changes such as revising the "Shanghai Tang" designs to appeal not only to Westerners but also to Chinese consumers, and to open new stores around the world. Since then, Shanghai Tang has become synonymous to a modern Chinese luxury lifestyle brand.