• 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.

• 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 the Korean Society for information Management
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.257-280
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• 2022

In this study, we analyzed comments on news articles of representative companies of the three industries (i.e., semiconductor, secondary battery, and bio industries) that had been listed as national strategic technology projects of South Korea to identify public opinions towards them. In addition, we analyzed the relationship between changes in public opinion and stock price. 'Samsung Electronics' and 'SK Hynix' in the semiconductor industry, 'Samsung SDI' and 'LG Chem' in the secondary battery industry, and 'Samsung Biologics' and 'Celltrion' in the bio-industry were selected as the representative companies and 47,452 comments of news articles about the companies that had been published from January 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020, were collected from Naver News. The comments were grouped into positive, neutral, and negative emotions, and the dynamic topics of comments over time in each group were analyzed to identify the trends of public opinion in each industry. As a result, in the case of the semiconductor industry, investment, COVID-19 related issues, trust in large companies such as Samsung Electronics, and mention of the damage caused by changes in government policy were the topics. In the case of secondary battery industries, references to investment, battery, and corporate issues were the topics. In the case of bio-industries, references to investment, COVID-19 related issues, and corporate issues were the topics. Next, to understand whether the sentiment of the comments is related to the actual stock price, for each company, the changes in the stock price and the sentiment values of the comments were compared and analyzed using visual analytics. As a result, we found a clear relationship between the changes in the sentiment value of public opinion and the stock price through the similar patterns shown in the change graphs. This study analyzed comments on news articles that are highly related to stock price, identified changes in public opinion trends in the COVID-19 era, and provided objective feedback to government agencies' policymaking.