• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.131-142
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• 2011

In recent years, Social Network Service, which is defined as a web-based service that allows an individual to construct a public or a semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulates a list of other users with whom they share connections, and traverses their list of connections. For example, Facebook and Twitter are the representative sites of Social Network Service, and these sites are the big issue in the world. A lot of people use Social Network Services to connect and maintain social relationship. Recently the users of Social Network Services have increased dramatically. Accordingly, many organizations become interested in Social Network Services as means of marketing, media, communication with their customers, and so on, because social network services can offer a variety of benefits to organizations such as companies and associations. In other words, organizations can use Social Network Services to respond rapidly to various user's behaviors because Social Network Services can make it possible to communicate between the users more easily and faster. And marketing cost of the Social Network Service is lower than that of existing tools such as broadcasts, news papers, and direct mails. In addition, Social network Services are growing in market place. So, the organizations such as companies and associations can acquire potential customers for the future. However, organizations uniformly communicate with users through Social Network Service without consideration of the characteristics of the networks although networks have different effects on information deliveries. For example, members' cohesion in an offline communication is higher than that in an online communication because the members of the offline communication are very close. that is, the network of the offline communication has a strong tie. Accordingly, information delivery is fast in the network of the offline communication. In this study, we compose two networks which have different characteristic of communication in Twitter. First network is constructed with data based on an offline communication such as friend, family, senior and junior in school. Second network is constructed with randomly selected data from users who want to associate with friends in online. Each network size is 250 people who divide with three groups. The first group is an ego which means a person in the center of the network. The second group is the ego's followers. The last group is composed of the ego's follower's followers. We compare the networks through social network analysis and follower's reaction analysis. We investigate density and centrality to analyze the characteristic of each network. And we analyze the follower's reactions such as replies and retweets to find differences of information delivery in each network. Our experiment results indicate that density and centrality of the offline communicationbased network are higher than those of the online-based network. Also the number of replies are larger than that of retweets in the offline communication-based network. On the other hand, the number of retweets are larger than that of replies in the online based network. We identified that the effect of information delivery in the offline communication-based network was different from those in the online communication-based network through experiments. So, you configure the appropriate network types considering the characteristics of the network if you want to use social network as an effective marketing tool.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.1-22
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• 2007

Customer satisfaction is important in an increasingly competitive and global marketplace. This implies that customer service is a critical factor for many organizations. In service encounter context, customer satisfaction is affected by employees' attitudes and behaviors. Accordingly, service firms have been focusing on selecting high quality of service employees, which resulted the ability to identify and select quality service- or customer- oriented employees to become critical for an organization's success. It was suggested that customer service orientation links to performance and subsequent organizational revenue. Moreover, it was found that service encounter failures were among the major reasons for customers' service switch. Therefore, the selection of customer service oriented employees is a key factor in establishing customer service - a potential source of sustained competitive advantage. However, the measurement of employee service orientation is more confusing than that of definitive answers. The difficulty of measuring service orientation is attributed to the use of broad versus narrow measures of personality. Advocates for the broad perspective prefer using basic personality constructs, such as the Big Five personality traits. On the contrary, the latter prefer a construct-oriented approach of personality research that provides a better measure of job performance because it requires the specification of the relationship of the personality traits with multiple dimensions of job performance. The customer service orientation was defined as "a set of basic individual predispositions and an inclination to provide service, to be courteous and to be helpful in dealing with customers and associates." Similarly, it is a fact that the Big five personality traits are predictors of customer orientation, and employee's self- and supervisor performance. They propose that basic personality traits may be too far removed from focal service behaviors to be able to predict specific service behaviors (customer orientation) and service worker performance. Also, customer orientation is defined as "an employee's tendency or predisposition to meet customer needs in an on-the-job context." This means that people who have job-relevant personality traits such as concern, empathy, and conscientiousness will be more adept at customer service than people who do not possess these traits. However, little attention has been given to the exploration of the service orientation of customer-contact employees who play a key role in creating satisfactory service encounters in the hospitality industry except for Kim, McCahon, & Miller (2003)'s study, especially in family restaurants context. Thus, the purposes of this study are to examine and validate the customer service orientation of customer-contact employees using the instrument developed by Donavan (1999) in Korean family restaurants, because the scale was developed to measure the personality traits related job behaviors. And this study explores the relationships between customer service orientation, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and self service performance using structural equation modeling (SEM). And this study explores the relationships between customer service orientation, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and self service performance using structural equation modeling (SEM). For these purposes the author developed several hypotheses as follows: H1: Employee's service orientation is associated with service performance. H2: Employee's service orientation is positively associated with job satisfaction. H3: Employee's service orientation is positively associated with organizational commitment. H4: Service performance is positively associated with job satisfaction. H5: Service performance is positively associated with organizational commitment. H6: Job satisfaction is negatively associated with organizational commitment. The data were collected from 278 employees in 5 deluxe hotels located in Pusan, Korea. The researcher contacted the manager of the restaurants, and managers consented to administer surveys to their employees. The survey was executed during one month period in the October of 2007. The data were analyzed with structural equation modeling with LISREL 8.7 W. The result of the overall model analysis appeared as follows: $X^2$=122.638 (p = 0.00), df=59, GFI=.936, AGFI=.901, NFI=.948, CFI=.971, RMSEA=.0625. Since the result of the overall model analysis demonstrated a good fit, we could further analyze our data. The findings can be summarized as follows: First, the greater the employee service orientation, the greater the service performance. Second, the greater the employee service orientation, the greater the job satisfaction. Third, the greater the employee service orientation, the greater the organizational commitment. Fourth, the greater the service performance, the greater the job satisfaction. Fifth, the greater the service performance, the greater the organizational commitment. Finally, the greater the job satisfaction, the greater the organizational commitment. Seventh, the greater the customer satisfaction, the greater the customer loyalty.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.75-86
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• 2017

The development of web technologies and the generalization of smartphones have dramatically increased the number of social media users using the Internet. As a result, companies are perceived social media as a major marketing tool and operate a variety of SNS channels. In particular, start-ups conducting businesses with limited resources, social media is being used as an effective marketing tool to meet many potential customers at a low cost. Among them, facebook is the most used channel in the world and plays an important promotional tool not only in overseas but also in marketing activities of domestic start-ups. The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between satisfaction and purchase intention according to four personal characteristics of users who use social media contents and to measure the mediating effect of satisfaction on the relationship between content type and purchase intention. To this end, we classified into three types based on the previous research, and social media content is provided to 200 fans of Minbak Danawa(Minda), one of representative start-ups related to accommodation, The questionnaires were conducted for 3 weeks, and a total of 145 copies were collected. All the collected questionnaires were used for statistical analysis through SPSS 18.0. The empirical results show that all three types of content, such as task-oriented, self-oriented, and interaction-oriented, have a significant effect on the satisfaction level. Among them, it is confirmed that the satisfaction level plays a mediating role on the relationship between task-oriented contents and purchase intention. And the user 's personal characteristics showed a partially moderate effect on the satisfaction according to the content type. Therefore, social media content provided by corporations has an important effect on consumer satisfaction and purchasing, in order for start-up to prevail in the market, it is necessary to have an operational strategy to communicate with customers continuously through systematic contents analysis and planning. The result of this study suggests effective ways to build a social media marketing strategy for start-ups and suggests ways to utilize contents considering the characteristics of internet users.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.237-255
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• 2010

The Korean Pharmacist Law has limited the sales of medicine to pharmacies. This has caused difficulty in purchasing medicine late at night or on holidays, which has limited the range of customers' selections and accelerated customers' discomfort, accordingly. Also, the rapid progress of aging has quickly boosted medical expenses for seniors, and has served as a factor that aggravates the budget of national medical insurance. Meanwhile, advanced countries, including the USA and Japan, have allowed the sales of general medicine, of which the safety and efficacy have been tested, in general retail stores such as convenience stores or super markets from the perspective of supporting self-medication. In particular, Japan, which has a strong tendency of pursuing safety in the world, diversified sales channels for general medicine in order to control quickly rising medical expenses. As a result, Japan has achieved the effect of easing various regulations as follows in the economic and social fields. First, the increasing distribution channels of general medicine from pharmacies to general retail stores provoked a potential demand, which also expanded related markets. Second, the competition between sales channels resulted in the reduction of the price of medicine. Third, the growing sales channels of medicine have extended the options of consumers and, subsequently, the convenience in the use of consumers has increased. Fourth, the creation of a competitive environment owing to the diversification of sales channels has accelerated an effort to enhance corporate competitiveness. Fifth, the foundation of enhancing the financial soundness of medical expenses has been prepared through the formation of a self-medication environment. In 2000, the Korean population aged 65 or over exceeded 7%, and it is anticipated to be over 14% by 2018; thus, the increase of national medical expenses will be sped up. As a way of being prepared for the era of aging, we, just as other advanced countries, need to create a self-treatment environment by diversifying the sellers of general medicine, and, thus, reduce spending on personal medical expenses, enhance the financial soundness of national medical insurance, and, further, promote the welfare of consumers.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.43-65
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• 2010

Facing a complex environment driven by a decade, many companies are adopting new strategic frameworks such as Customer Relationship Management system to achieve sustainable profitability as well as overcome serious competition for survival. In many business areas, CRM system advanced a great deal in a matter of continuous compensating the defect and overall integration. However, pharmaceutical companies in Korea were slow to accept them for usesince they still have a tendency of holding fast to traditional way of sales and marketing based on individual networks of sales representatives. In the circumstance, this article tried to empirically address current status of CRM system as well as the effects of the system on the performance of pharmaceutical companies by applying BSC method's four perspectives, from financial, customer, learning and growth and internal process. Survey by e-mail and post to employers and employees who were working in pharma firms were undergone for the purpose. Total 113 cases among collected 140 ones were used for the statistical analysis by SPSS ver. 15 package. Reliability, Factor analysis, regression were done. This study revealed that CRM system had a significant effect on improving financial and non-financial performance of pharmaceutical companies as expected. Proposed regression model fits well and among them, CRM marketing information system shed the light on substantial impact on companies' outcome given profitability, growth and investment. Useful analytical information by CRM marketing information system appears to enable pharmaceutical firms to set up effective marketing and sales strategies, these result in favorable financial performance by enhancing values for stakeholderseventually, not to mention short-term profit and/or mid-term potential to growth. CRM system depicted its influence on not only financial performance, but also non-financial fruit of pharmaceutical companies. Further analysis for each component showed that CRM marketing information system were able to demonstrate statistically significant effect on the performance like the result of financial outcome. CRM system is believed to provide the companies with efficient way of customers managing by valuable standardized business process prompt coping with specific customers' needs. It consequently induces customer satisfaction and retentionto improve performance for long period. That is, there is a virtuous circle for creating value as the cornerstone for sustainable growth. However, the research failed to put forward to evidence to support hypothesis regarding favorable influence of CRM sales representative's records assessment system and CRM customer analysis system on the management performance. The analysis is regarded to reflect the lack of understanding of sales people and respondents between actual work duties and far-sighted goal in strategic analysis framework. Ordinary salesmen seem to dedicate short-term goal for the purpose of meeting sales target, receiving incentive bonus in a manner-of-fact style, as such, they tend to avail themselves of personal network and sales and promotional expense rather than CRM system. The study finding proposed a link between CRM information system and performance. It empirically indicated that pharmaceutical companies had been implementing CRM system as an effective strategic business framework in order for more balanced achievements based on the grounded understanding of both CRM system and integrated performance. It suggests a positive impact of supportive CRM system on firm performance, especially for pharmaceutical industry through the initial empirical evidence. Also, it brings out unmet needs for more practical system design, improvement of employees' awareness, increase of system utilization in the field. On the basis of the insight from this exploratory study, confirmatory research by more appropriate measurement tool and increased sample size should be further examined.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.5-14
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• 2011

One of the new roles of modern retail stores is to supply consumers with a memorable experience. In Korea, enhancing a store's environment so that customers remember a unique shopping experience is recognized as a sound strategy for strengthening the store's competitiveness. Motivated by this incentive, awareness of the experience-store concept is starting to increase in various categories of the retail industry. However, many experience stores, except in a few cases, have yet to derive a significant profit, explaining why Korean consumers are somewhat unfamiliar with, yet fascinated by, the experience stores that now exist in the country. Consumer satisfaction directly, and indirectly, affects a company's future profit and potential financial gain; customer satisfaction also affects loyalty. Therefore, knowing the significant factors that increase satisfaction and loyalty is essential for any company, in any field, to be able to effectively differentiate itself from the competition. Intrigued by increased competition opportunities, most Korean companies have adopted experience-store marketing strategies. When establishing the most effective processes for increasing sales and achieving a sustainable competitive advantage of a new concept, companies should consider certain factors that influence consumers' ability to accept new concepts and ideas. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is a theory that models how people accept new concepts. TAM proposes the following two factors that influence a person's decisions about how, and when, he or she will use a new product: "perceived usefulness" and "perceived ease of use." Much of the existing research has suggested that a person's character also affects the process for accepting new ideas. Such personal character attributes as individual preferences, self-confidence, and a person's values, traits, and/or skills affect the process for willingly consenting to try something new. It will be meaningful to establish how the TAM theory's components, as well as personal character, affect individuals accepting the experience-store concept. To that end, as it pertains to an experience store, the first goal of the study is to examine the influence of innovative factors (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) on satisfaction and loyalty. The second objective is to define the moderate effect of consumers' personal characteristics on the model. The proposed model was tested on 149 respondents who were engaged in leisure sports activities and bought sports outdoor garments and equipment. According to the study's findings, the satisfaction and loyalty of an experience store can be explained by perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, with the study's results demonstrating the stronger of the two factors being "perceived ease of use." The study failed to explain the effects of a person's character on the model. In conclusion, when the companies that operate the experience stores execute their marketing and promotion strategies, they should stress the stores' "ease of use" product components. Additionally, it can be extrapolated from the study data that since the experience-store idea is still relatively unfamiliar to Korean consumers, most customers are not yet able to evaluate, nor take a position regarding, their respective attitudes toward experience stores.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.42 no.3
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• pp.51-69
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• 2017

TVarious studies in different industries have proven the effectiveness of nanotechnology, which is considered as a representative technology that makes lives faster and more convenient and economical. However, as nanomaterials are tiny, consumers are concerned on whether they can do any physical harm. Therefore, based on the perceived usefulness and ease of use from the generally used Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study added additional variables including perceived risk. Moreover, this study introduced three kinds of trust (institution, people, and technology trust) as moderating variables, which can reduce the negative effect of perceived risk. Based on the analysis using the Structural Equation Model, we determined that perceived usefulness and ease of use positively influenced the intention to adopt nanotechnology products. Thus, when consumers regarded nanotechnology products as efficient and convenient, they showed increased intention to adopt the technology. Furthermore, perceived risk negatively affected the intention to adopt nanotechnology products, that is, when customers' perceived risk increased, the adoption intention of nanotechnology product decreases because of the potential risk from nanotechnology. On the one hand, the negative effect of perceived risk on adoption intention decreased when trust in nanotechnology washigh and when consumers highlytrust experts or administrators. On the other hand, trust in government, public institutions, and companies which produce nanotechnology products showed no significant moderating effect. This study is meaningful as it generalized TAM by applying the model to new nanotechnology products and extended existing studies by the addition of perceived risk and various trust factors to the model.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.89-110
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• 2013

Affiliate marketing is classified as a type of online advertising, where merchants share a percentage of sales revenue generated by each customer, who visited the company's website via a content provider. Content provider, referred to as an affiliate, usually places an online advertisement at its website. For the past few years, there have been a lot of companies or individuals who participate in affiliate marketing. Generally speaking, most of them have websites and post the merchant's ads on their own websites. However, building and maintaining websites have some technology requirements. The widespread use of Social Network Service (SNS), especially microblog-based SNS such as Twitter and Sina Weibo, provides opportunities for individuals who want to be content providers of affiliate marketing. Since information spreads quickly on microblog-based SNS and the easy in targeting customers, it is both an effective and an efficient tool to do affiliate marketing. The relationship between a content provider and the potential customer, which is referred as "tie strength", is quite an important issue in such situation. This paper proved that service characteristics of the microblog-based SNS (security, community drivenness and navigability) and content quality all had positive influence on click-through intention, while tie strength played a moderating role. For the group with strong tie, tie strength is crucial in influencing click-through intention. While for the weak tie group, content quality was very important. Finally, we proposed some implications for both academics and practitioners.

• Proceedings of the Korean Operations and Management Science Society Conference
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• 1999.04a
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• pp.426-426
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• 1999

;There are many sources of uncertainty in a typical production and inventory system. There is uncertainty as to how many items customers will demand during the next day, week, month, or year. There is uncertainty about delivery times of the product. Uncertainty exacts a toll from management in a variety of ways. A spurt in a demand or a delay in production may lead to stockouts, with the potential for lost revenue and customer dissatisfaction. Firms typically hold inventory to provide protection against uncertainty. A cushion of inventory on hand allows management to face unexpected demands or delays in delivery with a reduced chance of incurring a stockout. The proposed strategies are used for the design of a probabilistic inventory system. In the traditional approach to the design of an inventory system, the goal is to find the best setting of various inventory control policy parameters such as the re-order level, review period, order quantity, etc. which would minimize the total inventory cost. The goals of the analysis need to be defined, so that robustness becomes an important design criterion. Moreover, one has to conceptualize and identify appropriate noise variables. There are two main goals for the inventory policy design. One is to minimize the average inventory cost and the stockouts. The other is to the variability for the average inventory cost and the stockouts The total average inventory cost is the sum of three components: the ordering cost, the holding cost, and the shortage costs. The shortage costs include the cost of the lost sales, cost of loss of goodwill, cost of customer dissatisfaction, etc. The noise factors for this design problem are identified to be: the mean demand rate and the mean lead time. Both the demand and the lead time are assumed to be normal random variables. Thus robustness for this inventory system is interpreted as insensitivity of the average inventory cost and the stockout to uncontrollable fluctuations in the mean demand rate and mean lead time. To make this inventory system for robustness, the concept of utility theory will be used. Utility theory is an analytical method for making a decision concerning an action to take, given a set of multiple criteria upon which the decision is to be based. Utility theory is appropriate for design having different scale such as demand rate and lead time since utility theory represents different scale across decision making attributes with zero to one ranks, higher preference modeled with a higher rank. Using utility theory, three design strategies, such as distance strategy, response strategy, and priority-based strategy. for the robust inventory system will be developed.loped.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.10
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• pp.101-108
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• 2015

Purpose - The convenience store business sector in South Korea has contributed to economic growth and job creation, and the growth potential of this market segment remains very high. In addition, service value is a more important factor than price in determining purchase intention. Research in the convenience store market is relatively very low compared to other retail sectors. In particular, research on service quality for the convenience of retailers who examine and analyze customer behavior and service quality factors used in the convenience store side of the situation is very inadequate. We have investigated the relationship of store service quality, service satisfaction, and store loyalty. In addition, we have examined the way service value moderates the relationship among these variables. Research design, data, and methodology - The questionnaire was developed using modified and supplementary questions based on the KD-SQS and RSQS models. The study suggested a theoretical model composed of 15 hypotheses on the relations between theoretic variables, and surveys conducted with consumers in discount stores in the Seoul and Gyunggi Metropolitan area in order to verify the hypotheses. We used the SPSS/PC statistical packages to analyze the results. The number of surveys used was 227. Moreover, a structural equating model was also used to analyze the reliability and validity of the composing elements and to verify the suggested hypotheses. Results - The overall results of this study are as follows. First, all service quality elements have a significant effect on service satisfaction. Second, all service quality elements have a significant effect on store loyalty. Third, service satisfaction has a significant effect on store loyalty. Finally, when the participants were divided into high and low service value the results of the multiple regression analyses showed that only the relationship between policy of service quality and satisfaction, and human interaction and policy of service quality and loyalty were significant. The implications are discussed based on the findings of the study. Conclusions - First, through direct hypotheses testing, we confirmed that the convenience service quality positively impacts the service satisfaction and loyalty of buyers. In particular, the reliability, origin benefit, and promotion were found to have more influence on satisfaction and loyalty of consumers of a convenience store. Further, for the service quality of the convenience for the consumer loyalty, greater human interaction was a high-value and statistically significantly higher than the degree of improvement in consumer loyalty. This underscores the importance of education and human services management of employees working in a convenience store. In particular, frequent changes in personnel generate results that negatively impact loyalty with customers. These results may lead to a serious problem in the economics of the store. Therefore, it should enhance the value of services through the establishment of training and compensation for employees. In addition, a certain educational level is required as well as a basis for compensation and retention.