• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.61-81
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• 2007

Recently, use of foreign models and foreign language in advertising is a general trend in Korea even though the effect has not been well-known..Most of the previous research shows rather an opposite effect claiming marketing communication is more effective when higher congruity between marketing communication and consumer's cultural values are achieved. However, the introduction of global culture due to the expansion of new media such as Internet or cable television makes the congruity not the best choice of marketing strategy. In addition, use of highly attractive models in advertising to increase the effect of advertising is general. However, recent studies show that targeted women audience tend to compare themselves to the highly attractive models and do experience negative sentiment. Bower (2001) proved the difference between 'comparer' and 'noncomparer' when women face highly attractive models. The results show that a comparer who has an intention to compare highly attractive model (HAM) with herself has a significantly negative effect on model expertise, product argument, product evaluation and buying intention. Therefore, HAM is not always a good choice and model attractiveness plays a role in the processing other cues or changing the advertising effect from result of processing other cues. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the use of foreign language on the advertising response of the audience with regard of the model attractiveness. For the empirical study, the virtual advertising using foreign models (HAM, NAM), brand names and slogans(Korean, English) were used as stimuli. The respondents of each stimulus were 75('HAM-Korean'), 75('NAM-Korean'), 66('HAM-English') and 66 ('NAM-English') respectively. To establish the effect of marketing communication, the attitude for media(AM), the attitude for product(AP), targetedness(TD), overall quality(OQ), and purchase intention(PI) with 7 point likert scale were measured. The manipulation was verified to check the difference between HAM attractiveness assessment (m=3.27) and NAM attractiveness assessment (m=5.12). The mean difference was statiscally significant (p<.05). As a result, all consequences were significantly changed with model attractiveness, and overall quality evaluation(OQ) were significantly changed with language. The interaction effect from model attractiveness and language was significant on attitude toward the product(AP) and purchase intention(PI). To analyze the difference, the mean values and standard deviation of consequences were compared. The result was more positive when model attractiveness was high for all consequences. For language effect, the assessment was more positive when English was used for OQ. Considering model attractiveness and language simultaneously, HAM-Korean was more positive for AP and PI, and NAM-English was more positive for AP and PI. In other words, the interaction effect was confirmed by model attractiveness and language. As mentioned above, use of foreign models and foreign language in advertising was explained by cultural match up hypothesis (Leclerc et al. 1994) which claimed that culture of origin effect. In other words, in advertising, use of same cultural language with the foreign model could make positive assessment for OQ. But this effect was moderated by model attractiveness. When the model attractiveness was low, the use of English makes PI high because of the effect of foreign language which supported the cultural match up hypothesis. When the model attractiveness was low, the use of Korean made AP and PI high because the effect of foreign language was diluted. It was a general notion that the visual cues got processed before (Holbrook and Moore, 1981; Sholl et al, 1995) compared to linguistic cues. Therefore, when consumers were faced HAM, so much perception was already consumed at processing visual cues making their native language of Korean to strongly and positively connected with the advertising concept. On the contrary, when consumers were faced with NAM, less perception was consumed compared to HAM, making English to accompany cultural halo effect which affected more positively. Therefore, when foreign models were employed in advertising, the language must be carefully selected according to the level of model attractiveness.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.129-142
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• 2016

Customer product reviews have become one of the important factors for purchase decision makings. Customers believe that reviews written by others who have already had an experience with the product offer more reliable information than that provided by sellers. However, there are too many products and reviews, the advantage of e-commerce can be overwhelmed by increasing search costs. Reading all of the reviews to find out the pros and cons of a certain product can be exhausting. To help users find the most useful information about products without much difficulty, e-commerce companies try to provide various ways for customers to write and rate product reviews. To assist potential customers, online stores have devised various ways to provide useful customer reviews. Different methods have been developed to classify and recommend useful reviews to customers, primarily using feedback provided by customers about the helpfulness of reviews. Most shopping websites provide customer reviews and offer the following information: the average preference of a product, the number of customers who have participated in preference voting, and preference distribution. Most information on the helpfulness of product reviews is collected through a voting system. Amazon.com asks customers whether a review on a certain product is helpful, and it places the most helpful favorable and the most helpful critical review at the top of the list of product reviews. Some companies also predict the usefulness of a review based on certain attributes including length, author(s), and the words used, publishing only reviews that are likely to be useful. Text mining approaches have been used for classifying useful reviews in advance. To apply a text mining approach based on all reviews for a product, we need to build a term-document matrix. We have to extract all words from reviews and build a matrix with the number of occurrences of a term in a review. Since there are many reviews, the size of term-document matrix is so large. It caused difficulties to apply text mining algorithms with the large term-document matrix. Thus, researchers need to delete some terms in terms of sparsity since sparse words have little effects on classifications or predictions. The purpose of this study is to suggest a better way of building term-document matrix by deleting useless terms for review classification. In this study, we propose neutrality index to select words to be deleted. Many words still appear in both classifications - useful and not useful - and these words have little or negative effects on classification performances. Thus, we defined these words as neutral terms and deleted neutral terms which are appeared in both classifications similarly. After deleting sparse words, we selected words to be deleted in terms of neutrality. We tested our approach with Amazon.com's review data from five different product categories: Cellphones & Accessories, Movies & TV program, Automotive, CDs & Vinyl, Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry. We used reviews which got greater than four votes by users and 60% of the ratio of useful votes among total votes is the threshold to classify useful and not-useful reviews. We randomly selected 1,500 useful reviews and 1,500 not-useful reviews for each product category. And then we applied Information Gain and Support Vector Machine algorithms to classify the reviews and compared the classification performances in terms of precision, recall, and F-measure. Though the performances vary according to product categories and data sets, deleting terms with sparsity and neutrality showed the best performances in terms of F-measure for the two classification algorithms. However, deleting terms with sparsity only showed the best performances in terms of Recall for Information Gain and using all terms showed the best performances in terms of precision for SVM. Thus, it needs to be careful for selecting term deleting methods and classification algorithms based on data sets.

• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.47-58
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• 2009

The marketing environment has become competitive to an extent that requires firms to target their products at markets that span national boundaries. However, competitive clout cannot be achieved in global consumer markets unless firms thoroughly understand and adequately respond to the core values and needs of those consumers. Brand equity is one of the most important assets to a company. Especially in sportswear markets, brand equity is the crucial value added to a product by its brand name. Factors such as country of origin also influence customer's attitude towards brand equity. Therefore, this paper discusses the relationship between country of origin effect and brand equity, and how they influence consumers' loyalty for respective brands. This paper focused on the sports shoes market, because it is an increasing area of opportunity for world manufacturers. The objectives of this study were the following. (1) Test the effect of country of origin on brand equity. (2) Test how brand equity influences consumers' brand loyalty. (3) Find whether there are differences in the effects of country of origin and brand equity among the three countries. (4) Find whether there are differences in the effects of country of origin and brand equity among the different lifestyles. Based on the review of literature results, the hypotheses are concluded as the following: H1-a: Country image has positive influence on country of origin. H1-b: Product perception has positive influence on country of origin. H2-a: Perceived quality has positive effect on brand equity. H2-b: Perceived price has positive effect on brand equity. H3: Country of origin has positive effect on brand equity. H4: Brand equity has a positive impact on brand loyalty. Research model was constructed (see Fig. 1). After data analysis, the following results were concluded: sports shoes purchase behavior showed significant differences among Korean, Chinese, and American consumers for favorite brand, purchased brand, purchased place, information usage, and favorite sports games. The results of this study also extend the research of the relationship among country of origin, brand equity and brand loyalty to the sports shoes market. Brand equity was proven to have a significant relationship with brand loyalty for all countries. The factors which can influence brand equity are different for different countries. The third finding of this paper is that we identified different three lifestyles, adventurer, follower, and laggard, for Korean, Chinese and American consumers. Without the nationality boundary, seeing the emergence of a new group of consumers who have similar preferences and buy similar brands is more important. All of the consumers consider brand equity to keep their brand loyalty. Perceived price is the only factor which can influence brand equity for adventurers; brand is more important for them. The laggards were not influenced by any factor. All of the factors expect perceived price are important for the followers. Marketing managers should consider brand equity when introducing their brand into a new market. Also localization is the basic strategy that all the sports shoes companies should understand. But as a global brand, understanding the same characteristics for each country is more important to build global strategy.