• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.1-32
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• 2014

The purpose of this paper is to investigate upon a diversification strategy through market creation of CJ Group, which has contributed in positioning of the firm as one of the leading conglomerates in South Korea. With such objective, the background of CJ Group, followed by its business diversification strategies were explored, with reference to several case studies. The history of CJ Group began with establishment of CheilJedang Industrial Corporation in 1953, as the first domestic sugar producer and exporter of South Korea. The corporation gradually expanded its business ever since at both national and global level, to include the fields of food production, pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and life chemicals. Later, CheilJedang (CJ) Group was established as an affiliate of CheilJedang Industrial Corporation. With such independence, extension of business has been witnessed across the industries of media, entertainment, finance, information technology and distribution. Thus, the current CJ Group pursues to define itself as a progressive global living culture company with four major business categories from food and food service, biotechnology, entertainment and media, and logistics. Despite its success in today's market, CJ Group underwent hardships in its business diversification in 1990s due to indiscreet management, along with the Asian financial crisis. Here, many firms overcame the financial difficulties by taking advantage of the exchange rate for overseas expansion. Though, CJ Group tried to differentiate itself by focusing on the domestic market by creating something out of nothing. Hence, CJ Group takes a unique position among many cases of business diversification and their categorization. In an effort to identify and classify the types of growth experienced by the top 30 companies in South Korea, the firms were categorized into four groups according to their diversification strategies adapted after the Asian financial crisis. Based on the mode and time of entry, corporations were identified either as the 'Explorer', 'Invader', 'Venture Capitalist', or 'Assimilator'. Here, the majority of the firms showed the qualities of Invader, entering mature markets through large-scaled mergers and acquisitions. However, CJ Group was the only firm that was categorized as an Explorer, for its focus on the newly emerging service sector in culture-contents industry. This diversification strategy through market creation is worth examining, due to its contribution in generating simultaneous growth between the market and the company itself. Diverse brands of CJ Group have been referred to as case studies in this regard, from 'Hatban', 'Cine de Chef', 'VIPS' to 'CJ GLS'. These four businesses, each to represent processed food, film, restaurant service, and logistics industries respectively, show CJ Group's effectiveness in creating a whole new category of goods and services that are innovative. In fact, such businesses not only contributed in advancement of consumers' wellbeing, but toward generating additional value and employment. It is true that the diversification strategy of CJ Group requires long-term capital investment with high risk, compared to the other strategies mentioned in the paper. However, this model does create high employment and additional values that are positive to both the society and the firm itself. Therefore, the paper comes to a conclusion that the diversification strategy through market creation conveys the most positive impact relative to the others.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.71-81
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• 2016

Purpose - Because creativity, which is an intangible resource embedded within the company, can offer a competitive advantage, most companies have an interest in promoting creativity among their employees and division(e.g., marketing organization). Creativity renders a sustainable competitive advantage to a firm because it is a strategic resource that is valuable, flexible, rare, and imperfectly imitable or substitutable. Although most companies broadly recognize the importance of creativity, the methods for developing creativity remain elusive. Therefore, the present study investigates how to structure incentives to motivate employees to be more creative and how to develop tools to facilitate creativity. In detail, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between the regulatory focus of marketing organizations(e.g., promotion focus vs prevention focus) and creativity of marketing organizations. In addition, the present study set out to examine the moderating role of interaction of financial reward and creative training in addition to investigating the direct relationship between creativity and regulatory focus in New Product Development(NPD) context. Research design, data, and methodology - The data used to test the hypotheses are drawn from a survey of full time NPD project members(including project manager, designer, engineer, and marketer). The present study utilized data obtained mainly from a database compiled by the Korea Investors Service-Financial Analysis System which provides comprehensive corporate and financial information on firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange. A study population comprising 1,000 South Korean firms was obtained from this database. We selected 864 firms from the database, and the firms have experiences of new product development project. We collected a total of 162 responses, for a 18.8% response rate. After we excluded 14 questionnaire because of incomplete responses, a total of 148 questionnaire remained(final response rate: 17.1%). Working with a sample of 148 responses in South Korea, hierarchical moderated regression is employed to test research hypotheses(

The relationship between promotion focus and creativity of marketing organization,

The relationship between prevention focus and creativity of marketing organization,

The moderating effect of joint influences(interaction between financial rewards and creativity training) on the relationship between promotion focus creativity of marketing organization,

The moderating effect of joint influences(interaction between financial rewards and creativity training) on the relationship between prevention focus creativity of marketing organization). SPSS 18.0 and AMOS software were used in the data analysis. Results - The empirical study confirmed that promotion focus of marketing organization is positively related to creativity of marketing organization. Also, prevention focus of marketing organization is positively affected to creativity of marketing organization. In addition, the interaction between financial rewards and creativity training moderated the relationship between regularity focus(e.g.), promotion focus vs prevention focus) and creativity of marketing organization. These results suggest that managers can improve the performances of their creative efforts by providing the use of financial rewards and creativity training in combination. Conclusion - Based on results of this study that examine the effects of regulatory focused creative efforts on creativity of marketing organization, promotion focus is helpful with marketing organizations to enhance their service innovation and performance. Prevention focused organization should allow monetary rewards and creativity training to increase their creativity for innovation of new products.

• Journal of Soil and Groundwater Environment
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.62-69
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• 2014

In the results of monitoring nitrate concentration in more than 8,000 groundwater wells around agro-livestock, the average and maximum nitrate concentration was 9.4 mg/L and 101.2 mg/L, respectively. Since about 31% of the monitoring wells was exceed the quality standard for drinking water, nitrate control such as remediation or source regulation is required to conserve safe-groundwater in South Korea. Typical nitrate-treatment technologies include ion exchange, reverse osmosis, and biological denitrification. Among the treatment methods, biological denitrification by indigenous microorganism has environmental and economic advantages for the complete elimination of nitrate because of lower operating costs compared to other methods. Major mechanism of the process is microbial reduction of nitrate to nitrite and nitrogen gas. Three functional genes (nosZ, nirK, nirS) that encode for the enzyme involved in the pathway. In this work, we tried to develop simple process to determine possibility of natural denitrification reaction by monitoring the functional gene. For the work, the functional genes in nitrate-contaminated groundwater were monitored by using PCR with specific target primers. In the result, functional genes (nosZ and nirK) encoding denitrification enzymes were detected in the groundwater samples. This method can help to determine the possibility of natural-nitrate degradation in target groundwater wells without multiplex experimental process. In addition, for field-remediation application we selected nitrate-contaminated site where 200~600 mg/L of nitrate is continuously detected. To determine the possibility of nitrate-degradation by stimulated-natural attenuation, groundwater was sampled in two different wells of the site and nitrate concentration of the samples was 300 mg/L and 616 mg/L, respectively. Fumarate for different C/N ratio was added into microcosm bottles containing the groundwater to examine denitrification rate depending on carbon concentration. In the result, once 1.5 times more than amount of fumarate stoichiometry required was added, the 616 mg/L of nitrate and 300 mg/L of nitrate were completely degraded in 8 days and 30 days. The nitrite, byproduct of denitrification process, was also completely degraded during the experimental period.

• International Commerce and Information Review
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.317-337
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• 2012

This study has investigated shipping finance systems in Korea and China, and extracted negative factors based on it to propose a way to develop the shipping financial system in Korea for shipbuilding industry and marine transportation. From after the global financial crisis in 2008 to right before the Lehman Brothers Holdings bankruptcy, shipping finance has been dominated by the major industrialized countries in Europe. However, the weight point is moving to the countries in Asia region such as Korea, Japan, and China based on relatively strong banking system and low interests rate. This study focused on the alternatives the current situation that the starter of shipping finance among three countries in Northeast Asia, South Korea is facing China's challenges. In the paper, shipping finance in Korea presented its defectives such as the limits of ship financing, lack of professional workforces, ever-present foreign exchange risks, and lack of understandings of the parties. As the countermeasures of them, it proposed establishing professional institute for ship financing, training professionals in financial industry, raising foreign credentials of won, and continuing associations between the parties. Even though we are the first Asian country introduced ship funds, the ship funds growth in China shall be under our eyes while we keep systemic networks between shipping, ship building, and ship financing.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.53-74
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• 2018

Since South Korea has an economic structure that has a characteristic which market-dependent on overseas, the tourism industry is considered as a very important industry for the national economy, such as improving the country's balance of payments or providing income and employment increases. Accordingly, the necessity of more accurate forecasting on the demand in the tourism industry has been raised to promote its industry. In the related research, economic variables such as exchange rate and income have been used as variables influencing tourism demand. As information technology has been widely used, some researchers have also analyzed the effect of media on tourism demand. It has shown that the media has a considerable influence on traveler's decision making, such as choosing an outbound destination. Furthermore, with the recent availability of online information searches to obtain the latest information and two-way communication in social media, it is possible to obtain up-to-date information on travel more quickly than before. The information in online media such as blogs can naturally create the Word-of-Mouth effect by sharing useful information, which is called eWOM. Like all other service industries, the tourism industry is characterized by difficulty in evaluating its values before it is experienced directly. And furthermore, most of the travelers tend to search for more information in advance from various sources to reduce the perceived risk to the destination, so they can also be influenced by online media such as online news. In this study, we suggested that the number of online media posting, which causes the effects of Word-of-Mouth, may have an effect on the number of outbound travelers. We divided online media into public media and private media according to their characteristics and selected online news as public media and blog as private media, one of the most popular social media in tourist information. Based on the previous studies about the eWOM effects on online news and blog, we analyzed a relationship between the volume of eWOM and the outbound tourism demand through the panel model. To this end, we collected data on the number of national outbound travelers from 2007 to 2015 provided by the Korea Tourism Organization. According to statistics, the highest number of outbound tourism demand in Korea are China, Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines, which are selected as a dependent variable in this study. In order to measure the volume of eWOM, we collected online news and blog postings for the same period as the number of outbound travelers in Naver, which is the largest portal site in South Korea. In this study, a panel model was established to analyze the effect of online media on the demand of Korean outbound travelers and to identify that there was a significant difference in the influence of online media by each time and countries. The results of this study can be summarized as follows. First, the impact of the online news and blog eWOM on the number of outbound travelers was significant. We found that the number of online news and blog posting have an influence on the number of outbound travelers, especially the experimental result suggests that both the month that includes the departure date and the three months before the departure were found to have an effect. It is shown that online news and blog are online media that have a significant influence on outbound tourism demand. Next, we found that the increased volume of eWOM in online news has a negative effect on departure, while the increase in a blog has a positive effect. The result with the country-specific models would be the same. This paper shows that online media can be used as a new variable in tourism demand by examining the influence of the eWOM effect of the online media. Also, we found that both social media and news media have an important role in predicting and managing the Korean tourism demand and that the influence of those two media appears different depending on the country.