• The Research Journal of the Costume Culture
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.272-286
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• 2013

Mass customization is a marketing strategy to meet consumer needs for variation and uniqueness of products. Although there are quite a few studies quantitatively investigated the options provided by mass customization process, scholarly work related to mass customization has provided mixed results on consumer perception of complexity and their responses. The purpose of the study is to derive the factors that influence consumer complexity perception in online apparel mass customization process and consumers' needs to enhance mass customization services. Data were collected by conducting focus group interviews of which 29 participations in 4 groups. The results of the study suggested that consumers perceived complexity through mass customization process due to too many choice options. However, the effect of number of options on respondents' complexity perception was different depending on consumer characteristics such as consumer expertise and fashion involvement, and the characteristics of consumer preference development. Shopping context such as shopping purpose is another moderating factor. This study also suggests that a variety of marketing strategies which can enhance mass customization services affect the relationship between the number of options and consumers' complexity perception. The findings of the study provide academic and managerial implications.

• The International Journal of Costume Culture
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.34-57
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• 2002

It appears our global society and economy are here to stay, despite current events. Mass communications including The Internet, increased world travel, and more and more consumers developing the ability to afford consumer goods, are all helping to bring world cultures closer together. Indeed, the world is rapidly changing and the fashion consumer, is especially affected. Despite the increased commonalities of peoples of the world, culture is a concept crucial to the understanding of consumer behavior. Marketers must understand the values, ethics, and customs of societies around the world to be successful in the global marketplace.

• Proceedings of the Costume Culture Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.15-41
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• 2001

It appears our global society and economy are here to stay, despite current events. Mass communications including The Internet, increased world travel, and more and more consumers developing the ability to afford consumer goods, are all helping to bring world cultures closer together. Indeed, the world is rapidly changing and the fashion consumer, is especially affected. Despite the increased commonalities of peoples of the world, culture is a concept crucial to the understanding of consumer behavior. Marketers must understand the values, ethics, an customs of societies around the world to be successful in the global marketplace.

• Korean Journal of Culture and Social Issue
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.67-89
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• 2005

This overview study of mass culture is based on an academic point of view and based thereon an investigation of mass culture from a psychological standpoint follows. This study reviewed previous studies of mass culture that have been done so far divided into Producer-oriented, Text Decoding-oriented, and Recipient Theory, according to subjects of the study. The studies were also reviewed from the viewpoints of industry, consumer science, education, and developmental psychology. Further, it was discussed how trends and limitations in research were covered according to each viewpoint on mass culture. Based on the analysis, this study aims to promote overall psychological interest in studies of mass culture; to present the necessity of analysis and measurement of emotional experience on mass culture; to increase the roles of industrial and consumer science approaches in terms of planning and culture; to change the viewpoint of developmental psychology that accepts youth culture positively; and, to present interdisciplinary studies related to mass culture. Mass culture has already penetrated deeply into real life but there are few analyses and interpretations of mass culture in terms of psychology. This study is meaningful from the aspect that discussion of mass culture has been placed in a position that recognizes the entity of and interest in mass culture. Through this study, I hope that the scope of interest in psychology will expand and that approaches to mass culture will become more diversified.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.47
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• pp.143-160
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• 1999

The purpose of this dissertation is to interpret fashion through a socio-cultural phenomenon called kitsch by understanding its aesthetic characteristics and clarifying its significance in the modern consumer society and analyzing the examples of kitsch appearing in modern fashion. The following are the arguments and conclusion of this dissertation. First kitsch has negative meanings such as aesthetic inadequacy or bad tastes implying vulgar popular tastes of faked sensations just imitating elite culture and using things indiscriminately for inferior reproduction or at best the philosophical and aesthetic category that expresses the mass of people's attitudes toward life in accepting the consumer culture of the industrial society. It started from the art of romanticism accompanied by th commercializing of art with the bourgeois society background formed in the mid-19th century. Though kitsch started to prevail following the socio-cultural changes caused by the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century it is only in the late 20th century that kitsch has come tc our everyday life and has become an object of aesthetic arguments. Second formative characteristics of kitsch appearin in fashion have a cumulative inadequate romantic pleasure-seeking satirizing and multicomplex nature. Third the socio-cultural meanings of kitsch appearing in fashion are as follows: The extension of commercialism which gratifies the pleasure-seeking mass consumers the enlargement of the aesthetic category by inclining to everyday commonplace aesthetic sense the expression of one's identity through the gratification of desire and the new aesthetics of resistance and deviance by an anti-traditional and anti-elite tendency towards the traditional society and aesthetic values.

• The International Journal of Costume Culture
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• v.2 no.2
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• pp.31-44
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• 1999

The purpose of this study was to investigate the level of environmentally conscious consumer behavior, and to identify the influencing variables and causal relationship. Data were collected from questionnaires with 275 housewives who were residents of Seoul and Kyunggi-do. The major findings were as follows : (1) The level of environmentally conscious behavior differed significantly according to occupation, income, averaged monthly clothing expenses, residence type and residential area. (2) The consumer's clothing behavior related to the environmental consciousness differed significantly according to age, education, matrimonial status, income, average monthly clothing expenses, residence type and residential area. (3) The use of mass media differed significantly in the consumer's environmental consciousness.

• Journal of Family Resource Management and Policy Review
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.45-58
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• 2008

The purpose of this study is to determine how the culture of modern mass consumption is understood in determining a decent lifestyle. This study examined a variety of literature on this problem. The important results are as follows. The culture of consumption has evolved through the increase of productivity in modern industry. People's desires have instigated a developing consumption culture: the concepts of advertising, fashion, over-consumption, and conspicuous consumption. The dissemination of this new consumption culture in an information-rich society, facilitated by the popularization of the Internet, has started to influence every nook and comer of our lives. This change of lifestyle has resulted not only in positive effects, but also in negative ones, such as distortion of information, and inequality. Thus the culture of modern mass consumption has created a new concept of class order and has reinforced the unbalance between opinion-leaders and opinion-followers. It has also increased the ratio of needs to wants. Consumption makes escape and sensual pleasure possible. The conclusion of this study is that the culture of modern mass consumption has not upheld its original purpose, that is, the qualitative enrichment of life through consumption. It has only caused the disintegration of individuality.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.13-18
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• 2020

Going shopping would be a very reasoned and well-planned activity, however, at the same time, it would not. People may go shopping just for fun and as their leisure. The motivations for going shopping and their experiences cannot be fully explained with the economic utility or the information-processing model. Thus, this study explored the hedonic aspect of the experiences of shopping as an alternative explanation to consumers' motivations of shopping and discussed retail advertising and marketing plans. An in-depth interview was conducted to obtain a better understanding about hedonic value, and it was found that hedonic value affects a consumer's shopping experience and that understanding consumers' motivations for shopping and establishing competitive advertising and marketing plans is important in drawing more consumers. Strategic implications for establishing further retail advertising and marketing plans obtained from the findings were also suggested.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.20
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• pp.241-274
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• 2010

Due to the remarkable changes in the early twentieth century, the new invention and technology impacted peoples' everyday lives and people started to use the word, modern, to apply specifically to what pertained to present times and to designate a movement in what was new and not old-fashioned-a condition of newness. In the present day, however, the fantastic cultural changes of a century ago have now become commonplace, and what was once considered radically new is no longer a reason to marvel. This paper considers what it mean to be modern, once the new is no longer new. This question seems to remain as complicated and inappropriate to ponder because the consideration and impact of modernity cannot simply end with the end of an era. This paper investigates how the interconnected nature of popular culture provides apt illustrations to reveal the ambivalent nature of modernity and postmodernity. In doing so, first of all, this paper pays attentions to the notion of modernity and popular culture which emerged together in the early twentieth century when technology and mass consumer culture were promoted over the world. Also, it examines how popular culture represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways as the image of modernity continues to build in a postmodern era. That is, popular culture is identified as a large amount of intertextuality or collective experiences due to its intermingling of complementary distribution sources and techonology. Thus, this paper explores that popular culture devotes itself other images or narratives instead of referring to the real world and its output revisits the contemporary or past times in other places, being a means to produce and reproduce the accumulated images of the modern which shapes ceaseless simulacra of modernity over complexities of modernity. In order to find a critical juncture of the complex networks of modernity and popular culture, this paper considers two places, Chicago and Gyeongsung in the 1920s and 1930s in which the rapid modern experience took place and the modern movement forced the two societies to join the mass consumer culture whether willingly or not. Next, this paper considers two movies released in 2002 and 2008 that exemplify the complexities of modernity in Chicago and Gyeongung of the 1920s and 30s: Chicago and Modern Boy. Both films have common themes of the 1920s and 30s such as violence, adultery, femme fatal, and criminal themes with the forms of musical, dance, drama, and romance. Through the textual analysis of both Chicago and Modern Boy, two films are compared in observing the similar and different ways in which two films deal with the theme of modernity when they are represented from the contemporary perspectives. More specifically, this paper questions how modernity is present in contemporary cultural forms such as commercial and hybrid genre films; and how these movies create a new image of modern by embodying the double coding. Ultimately, this paper aims at realizing the paradox of double edged modernity and its ongoing discourse that controls people's consciousness through the medium of popular culture.

• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.62
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• pp.119-139
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• 2013

Star is riddled with myth while they form the star power and support advertisers for profit realization. Their influence on society and audiences grows day by day. In particular, advertisers depend on star power when they sell their products. This article analyzed the nature of the star power dominating media resources and offering the distorted picture of consumer culture. I take a political economic view of consumer capitalism and star. The article shows how stars contribute to the accumulation of capital and defense of class relations in the consumer culture.