• Journal of Global Scholars of Marketing Science
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.141-173
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• 2007

The study examines how the environmental factors of store influence service brand personality and repurchase intention in the service environment. The service industry has been experiencing the intensified competition with the industry's continuous growth and the influence from rapid technological advancement. Under the circumstances, it has become ever more important for the brand competitiveness to be distinctively recognized against competition. A brand needs to be distinguished and differentiated from competing companies because they are all engaged in the similar environment of the service industry. The differentiation of brand achievement has become increasingly important to highlight certain brand functions to include emotional, self-expressive, and symbolic functions since the importance of such functions has been further emphasized in promoting consumption activities. That is the recent role of brand personality that has been emphasized in the service industry. In other words, customers now freely and actively express their personalities or egos in consumption activities, taking an important role in construction of a brand asset. Hence, the study suggests that it is necessary to disperse the recognition and acknowledgement that the maintenance of the existing customers contributes more to boost repurchase intention when it is compared to the efforts to create new customers, particularly in the service industry. Meanwhile, the store itself can offer a unique environment that may influence the consumer's purchase decision. Consumers interact with store environments in the process of,virtually, all household purchase they make (Sarel 1981). Thus, store environments may encourage customers to purchase. The roles that store environments play are to provide informational cues to customers about the store and goods and communicate messages to stimulate consumers' emotions. The store environments differentiate the store from competing stores and build a unique service brand personality. However, the existing studies related to brand in the service industry mostly concentrated on the relationship between the quality of service and customer satisfaction, and they are mostly generalized while the connective studies focused on brand personality. Such approaches show limitations and are insufficient to investigate on the relationship between store environment and brand personality in the service industry. Accordingly, the study intends to identify the level of contribution to the establishment of brand personality made by the store's physical environments that influence on the specific brand characteristics depending on the type of service. The study also intends to identify what kind of relationships with brand personality exists with brand personality while being influenced by store environments. In addition, the study intends to make meaningful suggestions to better direct marketing efforts by identifying whether a brand personality makes a positive influence to induce an intention for repurchase. For this study, the service industry is classified into four categories based on to the characteristics of service: experimental-emotional service, emotional -credible service, credible-functional service, and functional-experimental service. The type of business with the most frequent customer contact is determined for each service type and the enterprise with the highest brand value in each service sector based on the report made by the Korea Management Association. They are designated as the representative of each category. The selected representatives are a fast-food store (experimental-emotional service), a cinema house (emotional-credible service), a bank (credible-functional service), and discount store (functional-experimental service). The survey was conducted for the four selected brands to represent each service category among consumers who are experienced users of the designated stores in Seoul Metropolitan City and Gyeonggi province via written questionnaires in order to verify the suggested assumptions in the study. In particular, the survey adopted 15 scales, which represent each characteristic factor, among the 42 unique characteristics developed by Jennifer Aaker(1997) to assess the brand personality of each service brand. SPSS for Windows Release 12.0 and LISREL were used in the analysis of data verification. The methodology of the structural equation model was used for the study and the pivotal findings are as follows. 1) The environmental factors ware classified as design factors, ambient factors, and social factors. Therefore, the validity of measurement scale of Baker et al. (1994) was proved. 2) The service brand personalities were subdivided as sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness, which makes the use of the brand personality scales by Jennifer Aaker(1997) appropriate in the service industry as well. 3) One-way ANOVA analysis on the scales of store environment and service brand personality showed that there exist statistically significant differences in each service category. For example, the social factors were highest in discount stores, while the ambient factors and design factors were highest in fast-food stores. The discount stores were highest in the sincerity and excitement, while the highest point for banks was in the competence and ruggedness, and the highest point for fast-food stores was in the sophistication, The consumers will make a different respond to the physical environment of stores and service brand personality that are inherent to the corresponding service interface. Hence, the customers will make a different decision-making when dealing with different service categories. In this aspect, the relationships of variables in the proposed hypothesis appear to work in a different way depending on the exposed service category. 4) The store environment factors influenced on service brand personalities differently by category of service. The factors of store's physical environment are transferred to a brand and were verified to strengthen service brand personalities. In particular, the level of influence on the service brand personality by physical environment differs depending on service category or dimension, which indicates that there is a need to apply a different style of management to a different service category or dimension. It signifies that there needs to be a brand strategy established in order to positively influence the relationship with consumers by utilizing an appropriate brand personality factor depending on different characteristics by service category or dimension. 5) The service brand personalities influenced on the repurchase intention. Especially, the largest influence was made in the sophistication dimension of service brand personality scale; the unique and characteristically appropriate arrangement of physical environment will make customers stay in the service environment for a long time and will lead to give a positive influence on the repurchase intention. 6) The store environment factors influenced on the repurchase intention. Particularly, the largest influence was made on the social factors of store environment. The most intriguing finding is that the service factor among all other environment factors gives the biggest influence to the repurchase intention in most of all service types except fast-food stores. Such result indicates that the customers pay attention to how much the employees try to provide a quality service when they make an evaluation on the service brand. At the same time, it also indicates that the personal factor is directly transmitted to the construction of brand personality. The employees' attitude and behavior are the determinants to establish a service brand personality in the process of enhancing service interface. Hence, there should be a reinforced search for a method to efficiently manage the service staff who has a direct contact with customers in order to make an affirmative improvement of the customers' brand evaluation at the service interface. The findings suggest several managerial implications. 1) Results from the empirical study indicated that store environment factors have a strong positive impact on a service brand personality. To increase customers' repurchase intention of a service brand, the management is required to effectively manage store environment factors and create a friendly brand personality based on the corresponding service environment. 2) Mangers and researchers must understand and recognize that the store environment elements are important marketing tools, and that brand personality influences on consumers' repurchase intention. Based on such result of the study, a service brand could be utilized as an efficient measure to achieve a differentiation by enforcing the elements that are most influential among all other store environments for each service category. Therefore, brand personality established involving various store environments will further reinforce the relationship with customers through the elevated brand identification of which utilization to induce repurchase decision can be used as an entry barrier. 3) The study identified the store environment as a component of service brand personality for the store's effective communication with consumers. For this, all communication channels should be maintained with consistency and an integrated marketing communication should be executed to efficiently approach to a larger number of customers. Mangers and researchers must find strategies for aligning decisions about store environment elements with the retailers' marketing and store personality objectives. All ambient, design, and social factors need to be orchestrated so that consumers can take an appropriate store personality. In this study, the induced results from the previous studies were extended to the service industry so as to identify the customers' decision making process that leads to repurchase intention and a result similar to those of the previous studies. The findings suggested several theoretical and managerial implications. However, the situation that only one service brand served as the subject of analysis for each service category, and the situation that correlations among store environment elements were not identified, as well as the problem of representation in selection of samples should be considered and supplemented in the future when further studies are conducted. In addition, various antecedents and consequences of brand personality must be looked at in the aspect of the service environment for further research.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
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• v.32 no.1
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• pp.36-63
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• 1976

The purpose of this study is to elucidate the genetic variation of the natural forest of Pinus densiflora. Three natural populations of the species, which are considered to be superior quality phenotypically, were selected. The locations and conditions of the populations are shown in table 1 and 2. The morphological traits of tree and needle and some other characteristics were presented already in our first report of this series in which population and family differences according to observed characteristics were statistically analyzed. Twenty trees were sampled from each populations, i.e., 60 trees in total. During the autumn of 1974, matured cones were collected from each tree and open-pollinated seeds were extracted in laboratory. Immediately after cone collection, in closed condition, the morphological characteristics were measured. Seed and seed-wing dimensions were also studied. In the spring of 1975, the seeds were sown in the experimental tree nursery located in Suweon. And in the April of 1976, the 1-0 seedlings were transplanted according to the predetermined experimental design, randomized block design with three replications. Because of cone setting condition. the number of family from which progenies were raised by populations were not equal. The numbers of family were 20 in population 1. 18 in population 2 and 15 in population 3. Then, each randomized block contained seedlings of 53 families from 3 populations. The present paper is mainly concerned with the variation of some characteristics of cone, seed, needle, growth performance of seedlings, and chlorophyll and monoterpene compositions of needles. The results obtained are summerized as follows. 1. The meteorological data obtained by averaging the records of 30 year period, observed from the nearest station to each location of populations, are shown in Fig. 3, 4, and 5. The distributional pattern of monthly precipitation are quite similar among locations. However, the precipitation density on population 2, Seosan area, during growing season is lower as compared to the other two populations. Population 1. Cheong-song area, and population 3, Pyong-chang area, are located in inland, but population 2 in the western seacoast. The differences on the average monthly air temperatures and the average monthly lowest temperatures among populations can hardly be found. 2. Available information on the each mother trees (families) studied, such as age, stem height, diameter at breast height, clear-bole-length, crown conditions and others are shown in table 6,7, and 8. 3. The measurements of fresh cone weight, length and the widest diameter of cone are given in Tab]e 9. All these traits arc concerned with the highly significant population differences and family differences within population. And the population difference was also found in the cone-index, that is, length-diameter ratio. 4. Seed-wing length and seed-wing width showed the population differences, and the family differences were also found in both characteristics. Not discussed in this paper, however, seed-wing colours and their shapes indicate the specificity which is inherent to individual trees as shown in photo 3 on page 50. The colour and shape are fully the expression of genetic make up of mother tree. The little variations on these traits are resulted from this reason. The significant differences among populations and among families were found in those characteristics, such as 1000-seed weight, seed length, seed width, and seed thickness as shown in table 11. As to all these dimensions, the values arc always larger in population 1 which is younger in age than that of the other two. The population differences evaluated by cone, seed and seed-wing sizes could partly be attributed to the growth vigorousity. 5. The values of correlation between the characteristics of cone and seed are presented in table 12. As shown, the positive correlations between cone diameter and seed-wing width were calculated in all populations studied. The correlation between seed-wing length and seed length was significantly positive in population 1 and 3 but not in population 2, that is, the r-value is so small as 0.002. in the latter. The correlation between cone length and seed-wing length was highly significant in population 1, but not in population 2. 6. Differences among progenies in growth performances, such as 1-0 and 1-1 seedling height and root collar diameter were highly singificant among populations as well as families within population(Table 13.) 7. The heritability values in narrow sense of population characteristics were estimated on the basis of variance components. The values based on seedling height at each age stage of 1-1 and 1-0 ranged from 0.146 to 0.288 and the values of root collar diameter from 0.060 to 0.130. (Table 14). These heritability values varied according to characteristics and seedling ages. Here what must be stated is that, for calculation of heritability values, the variance values of population was divided by the variance value of environment (error) and family and population. The present authors want to add the heritability values based on family level in the coming report. It might be considered that if the tree age is increased in furture, the heritability value is supposed to be altered or lowered. Examining the heritability values studied previously by many authors, in pine group at age of 7 to 15, the values of height growth ranged from 0.2 to 0.4 in general. The values we obtained are further below than these. 8. The correlation between seedling growth and seed characteristics were examined and the values resulted are shown in table 16. Contrary to our hypothetical premise of positive correlation between 1-0 seedling height and seed weight, non-significance on it was found. However, 1-0 seedling height correlated positively with seed length. And significant correlations between 1-0 and 1-1 seedling height are calculated. 9. The numbers of stomata row calculated separately by abaxial and adaxial side showed highly significant differences among populations, but not in serration density. On serration density, the differences among families within population were highly significant. (Table 17) A fact must be noted is that the correlation between stomata row on abaxial side and adaxial side was highly significant in all populations. Non-significances of correlation coefficient between progenies and parents regarding to stomata row on abaxial side were shown in all populations studied.(Table 18). 10. The contents of chhlorophyll b of the needle were a little more than that of chlorophyll a irrespective of the populations examined. The differences of chlorophyll a, b and a plus b contents were highly significant but not among families within populations as shown in table 20. The contents of chlorophyll a and b are presented by individual trees of each populations in table 21. 11. The occurrence of monoterpene components was examined by gas liquid chromatography (Shimazu, GC-1C type) to evaluate the population difference. There are some papers reporting the chemical geography of pines basing upon monoterpene composition. The number of populations studied here is not enough to state this problem. The kinds of monoterpene observed in needle were ${\alpha}$-pinene, camphene, ${\beta}$-pinene, myrcene, limonene, ${\beta}$-phellandrene and terpinolene plus two unknowns. In analysis of monoterpene composition, the number of sample trees varied with population, I.e., 18 families for population 1, 15 for population 2 and 11 for population3. (Table 22, 23 and 24). The histograms(Fig. 6) of 7 components of monoterpene by population show noticeably higher percentages of ${\alpha}$-pinene irrespective of population and ${\beta}$-phellandrene in the next order. The minor Pinus densiflora monoterpene composition of camphene, myrcene, limonene and terpinolene made up less than 10 percent of the portion in general. The average coefficients of variation of ${\alpha}$-pinene and ${\beta}$-phellandrene were 11 percent. On the contrary to this, the average coefficients of variation of camphene, limonene and terpinolene varied from 20 to 30 percent. And the significant differences between populaiton were observed only in myrcene and ${\beta}$-phellandrene. (Table 25).