• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.88-98
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• 2024

With the growing preference among Chinese consumers for purchasing beauty products through social media networks (SNS), influencer marketing has recently emerged as a crucial strategy for maximizing word-of-mouth effects. This study aims to ascertain the impact of SNS beauty influencers' characteristics on trustworthiness and consumers' intentions to engage in word-of-mouth promotion. Furthermore, the study seeks to explore the moderating role of consumer involvement in the relationship between SNS beauty influencer characteristics and the trust consumers place in them. As part of an empirical analysis, an online survey was administered to 259 Chinese female consumers who had previously purchased beauty products through influencers on SNS. The data gathered were scrutinized by conducting multiple and hierarchical regression analysis to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings indicated that the attributes of "expertise,"' "intimacy," and "homogeneity" in SNS beauty influencers significantly affect influencer trust, whereas "charm" does not have a significant impact. Moreover, consumer involvement was found to moderate the relationship between SNS beauty influencer characteristics (expertise, intimacy, charm, and homogeneity) and influencer trust. Additionally, influencer trust positively influenced the intention to engage in word-of-mouth activities. These findings signify that leveraging influencers possessing qualities such as expertise, intimacy, and homogeneity can help enhance product exposure, popularity, and sales of the beauty industry. This study contributes valuable insights into the strategic utilization of influencer characteristics in the beauty industry and digital marketing, highlighting their pivotalrole in consumer engagement and the success of marketing strategies.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.216-222
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• 2024

Objectives: To compare the levels of anxiety on GAD-7 scale among undergraduates of dental, medical and engineering students during COVID-19. The secondary objectives were to correlate the factors influencing level of anxiety and to assess the coping strategies practiced by undergraduates' students of Karachi duri.ng COVID-19 outbreak. Methodology: The cross-sectional based survey was conducted online among the medical, dental and engineering undergraduates' university students of private sector in Karachi through purposive sampling technique during COVID-19 lock down period. The GAD-7 validated tool was used along with the demographic variables, related stress factors and the coping skills practiced during this outbreak. Total 571 questionnaires were found completed in all sections. The data was analyzed on SPSS version 23. P-value <0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results: The mental health of the students was assessed on GADS-7 scale as normal, mild, moderate and severe levels. From the total (n=18-3.2%) were normal, (n=132-23.1%) had mild, (n=343-60.1%) had moderate and (n=78-13.7%) had severe anxiety level on GADS-7. The levels of anxiety on GAD-7 scale were all positively associated with the related stressors at p-value of 0.000. Moreover the results depicted that there was a moderate and positive correlation found (0.456, 0.447, 0.512 and 0.452) for all related stressors and GAD-7 scale. Taking breaks from watching, reading news regarding the outbreak of COVID-19, meditation and engaging in some other activities were the most frequently used coping strategies for all levels of anxiety among three cohorts of undergraduates'. Conclusion: Undergraduates has shown 96.9% drastically increased level of anxiety during the outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic. Taking breaks from watching, reading news regarding the outbreak of COVID-19 was the most frequent behavior practiced by the students.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.143-153
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• 2024

This study aims to analyze both the current utilization of e-learning in the scuba diving education sector and the possible improvements by using Delphi analysis. The study administered three rounds of Delphi surveys with 25 specialists, including business executives and educational leaders from scuba diving centers and resorts affiliated with organizations that conduct scuba diving education through e-learning. The comparative analysis of the state of e-learning utilization and factors for improvement revealed significant insights. In terms of expected benefits, the analysis highlighted an increase in user convenience, temporal flexibility in learning activities, and easy access to products. However, it identified major issues such as the simplistic mandatory exams, inadequate professional depth in the feedback provided, and a lack of bidirectional communication between learners and instructors. Recommendations for improvements included enhancing communication through various online communities, conducting mandatory exams offline, and developing a variety of content. Conducting regular program quality evaluations, integrating with various diving communities, and assigning dedicated tutors were deemed crucial factors for future development.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.5769-5775
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• 2014

This paper reports the political supporting platform, and the outcome evaluation model, which was developed for the Korean on-line game companies that have started to go abroad to publish their games. When they begin to sell their games, they have many difficulties in promoting in other countries including the USA & EU. They try to find solutions to solve these problems, but on-line games still do not have a successful business model because of their unique attributes and environmental features, even though they spent a lot of money and time to enter the international on line game market. Thus far, the local on-line game supporting policy has tried to improve the world competitiveness of local companies by doing diverse activities, such as Global Service Platform(GSP) service, international game competition, and globalization, marketing. On the other hand, there has been only a small number of fruitful results except for GSP. Therefore, in this paper, the result of GSP was verified using the Global on-line game Supporting Chain Model(GoGSCM), which is the new political supporting and evaluation model through survey targeting GSP participations. As a result, GSP was evaluated based on the compatibility, efficiency, effectiveness, and continuity.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.7-14
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• 2012

As a new format of retailing, social shopping on SNS has rapidly grown in recent. Although there is much literature associated with customer behaviours in the academic world, little attention has been paid to identifying the shopping patterns of SNS shoppers. This paper will, thus, identify how perceived value has an impact on the buying intention of SNS shoppers, after illustrating what kind of factor influences the formation process of perceived value in the Korean marketplace. Given that SNS shoppers are for the most part 20s as well as 30s, the authors handed out questionnaires to them. Furthermore, based on literature review results, the conceptualised research model was developed. Despite lack of literature, the authors developed five constructs like price reduction, quantity- and time-limited message, product ranges, information-sharing, and required number of shoppers. The researchers made a considerable effort to identify the relationship between research concepts and each variable, based on a few research analysis methods such as frequency analysis, the Varimax rotation technique used orthogonal rotation, Cronbach's Alpha, PCA (Principle Component Analysis), and the like. Amongst the 5 variables used to measure the degree of influences on the perceived value as a social shopping characteristic, it has been evident that price cut, required minimum shoppers, product variety, and information-sharing have a positive impact on the perceived value formation processes of SNS customers. Also, this research implies that SNS retailers can differentiate themselves from other retailers by differently using the above factors. From a practitioner's point of view, these factors should be strategically used to increase the social shopping opportunities of SNS users. It is, furthermore, evident that the perceived value formed by the above 4 factors have played an important role in the buying decision process of SNS customers. In a sense, whether customers are aware of higher price cut rates, information-sharing, required minimum shoppers, and product variety has a positive impact on making buying decisions. From a retailer's point of view, online shopping mall operators are able to use blog as well as twitter to improve the buying intention as a marketing tool of social network, because the business activities provided by social shopping retailers, like the rapid, accurate responses to customer requirements, the provision of a variety of information, and the communications between customers are closely related to buying intentions. There are a few research limitations to conduct this empirical research. It was not easy to review prior papers, due to its lack. In spite of the increasing number of SNS shoppers in Korea, little research attention has been paid to this kind of research topic by academicians, because buying products or services through SNS is in its infancy. With regard to research populations, it would be difficult to generalise the research findings in Korea, owing to unbalanced respondent distribution. Considering the above research limitations as well as the growth of social shopping, many authors should pay considerable attention to SNS-related issues in the future, and develop the more sophisticated criteria to measure the characteristics of SNS shoppers.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.101-123
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• 2012

Currently, Social Media, it has widely a renown keyword and its related social trends and businesses have been fastly applied into various contexts. Social media has become an important research area for scholars interested in online technologies and cyber space and their social impacts. Social media is not only including web-based services but also mobile-based application services that allow people to share various style information and knowledge through online connection. Social media users have tendency to common identity- and bond-attachment through interactions such as 'thumbs up', 'reply note', 'forwarding', which may have driven from various factors and may result in delivering information, sharing knowledge, and specific experiences et al. Even further, almost of all social media sites provide and connect unknown strangers depending on shared interests, political views, or enjoyable activities, and other stuffs incorporating the creation of contents, which provides benefits to users. As fast developing digital devices including smartphone, tablet PC, internet based blogging, and photo and video clips, scholars desperately have began to study regarding diverse issues connecting human beings' motivations and the behavioral results which may be articulated by the format of antecedents as well as consequences related to contents that people create via social media. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or Cyworld users are more and more getting close each other and build up their relationships by a different style. In this sense, people use social media as tools for maintain pre-existing network, creating new people socially, and at the same time, explicitly find some business opportunities using personal and unlimited public networks. In terms of theory in explaining this phenomenon, social capital is a concept that describes the benefits one receives from one's relationship with others. Thereby, social media use is closely related to the form and connected of people, which is a bridge that can be able to achieve informational benefits of a heterogeneous network of people and common identity- and bonding-attachment which emphasizes emotional benefits from community members or friend group. Social capital would be resources accumulated through the relationships among people, which can be considered as an investment in social relations with expected returns and may achieve benefits from the greater access to and use of resources embedded in social networks. Social media using for their social capital has vastly been adopted in a cyber world, however, there has been little explaining the phenomenon theoretically how people may take advantages or opportunities through interaction among people, why people may interactively give willingness to help or their answers. The individual consciously express themselves in an online space, so called, common identity- or bonding-attachments. Common-identity attachment is the focus of the weak ties, which are loose connections between individuals who may provide useful information or new perspectives for one another but typically not emotional support, whereas common-bonding attachment is explained that between individuals in tightly-knit, emotionally close relationship such as family and close friends. The common identify- and bonding-attachment are mainly studying on-offline setting, which individual convey an impression to others that are expressed to own interest to others. Thus, individuals expect to meet other people and are trying to behave self-presentation engaging in opposite partners accordingly. As developing social media, individuals are motivated to disclose self-disclosures of open and honest using diverse cues such as verbal and nonverbal and pictorial and video files to their friends as well as passing strangers. Social media context, common identity- and bond-attachment for self-presentation seems different compared with face-to-face context. In the realm of social media, social users look for self-impression by posting text messages, pictures, video files. Under the digital environments, people interact to work, shop, learn, entertain, and be played. Social media provides increasingly the kinds of intention and behavior in online. Typically, identity and bond social capital through self-presentation is the intentional and tangible component of identity. At social media, people try to engage in others via a desired impression, which can maintain through performing coherent and complementary communications including displaying signs, symbols, brands made of digital stuffs(information, interest, pictures, etc,). In marketing area, consumers traditionally show common-identity as they select clothes, hairstyles, automobiles, logos, and so on, to impress others in any given context in a shopping mall or opera. To examine these social capital and attachment, we combined a social capital theory with an attachment theory into our research model. Our research model focuses on the common identity- and bond-attachment how they are formulated through social capitals: cognitive capital, structural capital, relational capital, and individual characteristics. Thus, we examined that individual online kindness, self-rated expertise, and social relation influence to build common identity- and bond-attachment, and the attachment effects make an impact on both the willingness to help, however, common bond seems not to show directly impact on information sharing. As a result, we discover that the social capital and attachment theories are mainly applicable to the context of social media and usage in the individual networks. We collected sample data of 256 who are using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Cyworld and analyzed the suggested hypotheses through the Structural Equation Model by AMOS. This study analyzes the direct and indirect relationship between the social network service usage and outcomes. Antecedents of kindness, confidence of knowledge, social relations are significantly affected to the mediators common identity-and bond attachments, however, interestingly, network externality does not impact, which we assumed that a size of network was a negative because group members would not significantly contribute if the members do not intend to actively interact with each other. The mediating variables had a positive effect on toward willingness to help. Further, common identity attachment has stronger significant on shared information.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.73-80
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• 2015

Purpose - This study's objective is to analyze the content of the communications between users and producers based on the construal level theory. User generated content refers to content created in an online-based service where users and producers communicate interactively with each other. In a user generated content platform, the messages sent and received between the many players, the users and producers who use the content, may be analyzed at the psychological level based on construal level theory. Research design, data, and methodology - This study gathered user and producer participation through a snow-bowling sampling method. The data analyzed includes 125 video clips and 2,912 comments. The period of the data collection was from September 2014 to December 2014. The collected data was analyzed using a t-test and two-way ANOVA. Results - This study obtained the following research results. First, users who were a short social distance from producers responded to user participatory activities stated in concrete language rather than abstract language. In contrast, users who were at a longer social distance from producers tended to respond to the content requesting user participation through abstract language. Second, if users and producers were at a short social distance from each other, user preference increased more when a producer response to user participation was expressed concretely rather than when it was expressed abstractly. In contrast, if the users were at a longer social distance, users' preferences increased more when producer response was expressed abstractly rather than when it was expressed concretely. Conclusion - This study found that the effect of suitability, in which the social distance and the content were in congruence at the construal level, could be observed. Therefore, based on this, academic and practical implications were drawn. The three main insights of the study are as follows. First, firms can use psychological factors to analyze the message content of users in their distribution platforms. This study reveals managerial implications for marketing managers who want to take make use of this analysis of user and producer communications. This study indicates that the main factors include the concrete and abstract scores and social distance between users and producers. Second, we also provide the strategic guidelines to maximizing user preferences and other outcomes. The main dependent variable in this study is the user preference shift; the variable increases through the congruence effect; and the construal level is determined by the social distance between the users and producers and the type of producer response. The outcomes here from users can be utilized to develop several systemic strategies. One process to use the outcomes could be: (1) firms could measure the users and producers social distance; (2) calculate the concreteness or abstractness of the messages; and, (3) predict the user preference outcomes by the congruence between user and producer social distance and the abstractness or concreteness of the message content.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.65-77
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• 2018

Purpose - A trading area is very closely related to consumer life. A trading area is a cultural and social space that consumes culture and promotes human relationships as well as an economic space where consumers live their daily lives. In this context, a trading area research should be conducted objectively and empirically because it deals with the activities of consumer's life. The purpose of this study is to identify the intrinsic psychological motivation(push motivation) caused when consumers visit a trading area and to demonstrate how the push motivation for a trading area influence on consumer's flow, satisfaction, revisit intention. Research design, data, and methodology - In order to develop research hypotheses for this study, the development procedures for push motivation scale are as follows; (1) generating initial pool of items based on previous studies, (2) expert judgement to evaluate content and face validity, and (3) assessing convergent and discriminant validity using confirmatory factor analysis. In order to achieve these purposes, online surveys were conducted on frequent or familiar visitors to the trading areas around the Gangnam, Kunkuk University and Hongik University Station. Among the 1,343 questionnaires collected, 1,157 cases were analyzed by using SPSS 22.0 and SmartPLS 3.0 statistical package program, except for 186 responses in which responses were judged to be unfaithful. Results - The push motivation was classified into five sub-dimensions of excitement/stimulus, rest/relaxation, exit/refreshing, knowledge/learning and human relationship promotion as multidimensional and complex factors composed of individual and social-related dimensions. The excitement/stimulus and human relationship promotion of push motivation have positive effects on satisfaction. However, all dimensions of the push motivation have positive effects on flow. And flow has a positive effect on satisfaction and revisit intention. Meanwhile, the mediation test using boostrapping shows that flow plays a full mediating role in the relationship between rest/relaxation, exit/refreshing, knowledge/learning and satisfaction, but a partial mediating rol e between excitement/stimulus, human relationship promotion and satisfaction. Finally, satisfaction plays a partial mediating role between flow and revisit intention. Conclusions - This study shows that the push motivation is multidimensional and compositive depending on the situation of a consumer. In addition, it is found that the human relationship promotion(a social-related motivation) has a much more important effect on flow and satisfaction than other push motivations of individual dimensions. It also shows that satisfaction increases when consumers are being flowed at their visit and degree of revisit intention also grows as satisfaction increases. As implications of this study, a marketer should try to understand consumer's visit motivation at first and then develop factors that increase their flow, satisfaction, revisit intention. It also requires a marketer to approach subjects on a trading area more objectively and empirically based on the psychology and behavior of consumers, in order to establish a proper and efficient strategy on development of a trading area.

• Information Systems Review
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.71-90
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• 2003

Virtual communities have been suggested to play important roles such as attracting customers, building customer loyalty, and leading to commercial transactions. Little research in marketing has focused on virtual communities in spite of its importance indicated by many practitioners and conceptual studies. More specifically, little research has empirically examined factors of customer participation and its consequences. This research investigate if customers' participation motives in virtual communities affect their sense of community and if sense of community affects customers' loyalty towards and purchase intentions from the website offering the community service. One hundred ninety six questionnaires were collected from individuals who have participated in and have been involved in online activities in various virtual communities. Major results of this research can be summarized as follows. First, participation motives employed significantly affected customers' sense of community and more specifically, perceived ease of use and perceived playfulness had a large influence on the customers' sense of community. Second, customers' sense of community positively affected their loyalty toward the community and more specifically, membership and emotional connection had a large influence on loyalty. Third, customers' sense of community did not affect directly their purchase intentions. Fourth, customers' loyalty toward virtual communities had a significant, positive, although marginal, influence on their purchase intentions.

• Journal of Service Research and Studies
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.39-56
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• 2023

Due to restrictions on offline activities caused by COVID-19, the use of mobile applications is increasing along with interest in online shopping, which are non-face-to-face commerce. Accordingly, mobile applications and various industries are combined, and the number of cases of using mobile applications in the fashion industry is increasing. In this study, the effect of e-service quality of fashion mobile applications on user's flow, user satisfaction, and service loyalty was examined. To conduct this study, a survey of 274 people who experienced the 'ABLY' fashion mobile application was used for analysis to verify the hypothesis. As a result of the analysis, it was found that informativity and responsiveness among the e-service quality of fashion mobile applications had a positive (+) effect on flow. And it has been confirmed that informativity, reliability, and responsiveness affect user satisfaction. In addition, flow has a positive (+) (+) effect on user satisfaction, and user satisfaction has a positive (+) effect on service loyalty. However, among the e-service quality of fashion mobile applications, reliability did not have a positive (+) effect on flow. And ease of use did not have a positive (+) effect on both flow and user satisfaction. Finally, it was confirmed that flow did not directly affect service loyalty. Through this study, we intend to contribute to the establishment of marketing strategies for fashion mobile application users, who are increasing with the development of mobile technology, and provide practical implications for the post-COVID-19 era.