• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.37-63
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• 2012

In franchise business, exclusive sales territory (sometimes EST in table) protection is a very important issue from an economic, social and political point of view. It affects the growth and survival of both franchisor and franchisee and often raises issues of social and political conflicts. When franchisee is not familiar with related laws and regulations, franchisor has high chance to utilize it. Exclusive sales territory protection by the manufacturer and distributors (wholesalers or retailers) means sales area restriction by which only certain distributors have right to sell products or services. The distributor, who has been granted exclusive sales territories, can protect its own territory, whereas he may be prohibited from entering in other regions. Even though exclusive sales territory is a quite critical problem in franchise business, there is not much rigorous research about the reason, results, evaluation, and future direction based on empirical data. This paper tries to address this problem not only from logical and nomological validity, but from empirical validation. While we purse an empirical analysis, we take into account the difficulties of real data collection and statistical analysis techniques. We use a set of disclosure document data collected by Korea Fair Trade Commission, instead of conventional survey method which is usually criticized for its measurement error. Existing theories about exclusive sales territory can be summarized into two groups as shown in the table below. The first one is about the effectiveness of exclusive sales territory from both franchisor and franchisee point of view. In fact, output of exclusive sales territory can be positive for franchisors but negative for franchisees. Also, it can be positive in terms of sales but negative in terms of profit. Therefore, variables and viewpoints should be set properly. The other one is about the motive or reason why exclusive sales territory is protected. The reasons can be classified into four groups - industry characteristics, franchise systems characteristics, capability to maintain exclusive sales territory, and strategic decision. Within four groups of reasons, there are more specific variables and theories as below. Based on these theories, we develop nine hypotheses which are briefly shown in the last table below with the results. In order to validate the hypothesis, data is collected from government (FTC) homepage which is open source. The sample consists of 1,896 franchisors and it contains about three year operation data, from 2006 to 2008. Within the samples, 627 have exclusive sales territory protection policy and the one with exclusive sales territory policy is not evenly distributed over 19 representative industries. Additional data are also collected from another government agency homepage, like Statistics Korea. Also, we combine data from various secondary sources to create meaningful variables as shown in the table below. All variables are dichotomized by mean or median split if they are not inherently dichotomized by its definition, since each hypothesis is composed by multiple variables and there is no solid statistical technique to incorporate all these conditions to test the hypotheses. This paper uses a simple chi-square test because hypotheses and theories are built upon quite specific conditions such as industry type, economic condition, company history and various strategic purposes. It is almost impossible to find all those samples to satisfy them and it can't be manipulated in experimental settings. However, more advanced statistical techniques are very good on clean data without exogenous variables, but not good with real complex data. The chi-square test is applied in a way that samples are grouped into four with two criteria, whether they use exclusive sales territory protection or not, and whether they satisfy conditions of each hypothesis. So the proportion of sample franchisors which satisfy conditions and protect exclusive sales territory, does significantly exceed the proportion of samples that satisfy condition and do not protect. In fact, chi-square test is equivalent with the Poisson regression which allows more flexible application. As results, only three hypotheses are accepted. When attitude toward the risk is high so loyalty fee is determined according to sales performance, EST protection makes poor results as expected. And when franchisor protects EST in order to recruit franchisee easily, EST protection makes better results. Also, when EST protection is to improve the efficiency of franchise system as a whole, it shows better performances. High efficiency is achieved as EST prohibits the free riding of franchisee who exploits other's marketing efforts, and it encourages proper investments and distributes franchisee into multiple regions evenly. Other hypotheses are not supported in the results of significance testing. Exclusive sales territory should be protected from proper motives and administered for mutual benefits. Legal restrictions driven by the government agency like FTC could be misused and cause mis-understandings. So there need more careful monitoring on real practices and more rigorous studies by both academicians and practitioners.

• Journal of Distribution Research
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.1-36
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• 2012

Service failure is one of the major reasons for customer defection. As the business environment gets tougher and more competitive, a single service failure might bring about fatal consequences to a service provider or a firm. Sometimes a failure won't end up with an unsatisfied customer's simple complaining but with a wide-spread animosity against the service provider or the firm, leading to a threat to the firm's survival itself in the society. Therefore, we are in need of comprehensive understandings of complainants' attitudes and behaviors toward service failures and firm's recovery efforts. Even though a failure itself couldn't be fixed completely, marketers should repair the mind and heart of unsatisfied customers, which can be regarded as an successful recovery strategy in the end. As the outcome of recovery efforts exerted by service providers or firms, recovery of the relationship between customer and service provider need to put on the top in the recovery goal list. With these motivations, the study investigates how service failure and recovery makes the changes in dynamics of fundamental elements of customer-firm relationship, such as customer affection, customer trust and loyalty intention by comparing two time points, before the service failure and after the recovery, focusing on the effects of recovery satisfaction and the failure severity. We adopted La & Choi (2012)'s framework for development of the research model that was based on the previous research stream like Yim et al. (2008) and Thomson et al. (2005). The pivotal background theories of the model are mainly from relationship marketing and social relationships of social psychology. For example, Love, Emotional attachment, Intimacy, and Equity theories regarding human relationships were reviewed. As the results, when recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust that were established before the service failure are carried over to the future after the recovery. However, when recovery satisfaction is low, customer-firm relationship that had already established in the past are not carried over but broken up. Regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, once a failure occurs loyalty intention is not carried over to the future and the impact of customer trust on loyalty intention becomes stronger. Such changes imply that customers become more prudent and more risk-aversive than the time prior to service failure. The impact of severity of failure on customer affection and customer trust matters only when recovery satisfaction is low. When recovery satisfaction is high, customer affection and customer trust become severity-proof. Interestingly, regardless of the degree of recovery satisfaction, failure severity has a significant negative influence on loyalty intention. Loyalty intention is the most fragile target when a service failure occurs no matter how severe the failure criticality is. Consequently, the ultimate goal of service recovery should be the restoration of customer-firm relationship and recovery of customer trust should be the primary objective to accomplish for a successful recovery performance. Especially when failure severity is high, service recovery should be perceived highly satisfied by the complainants because failure severity matters more when recovery satisfaction is low. Marketers can implement recovery strategies to enhance emotional appeals as well as fair treatments since the both impacts of affection and trust on loyalty intention are significant. In the case of high severity of failure, recovery efforts should be exerted to overreach customer expectation, designed to directly repair customer trust and elaborately designed in the focus of customer-firm communications during the interactional recovery process to affect customer trust rebuilding indirectly. Because it is a longer and harder way to rebuild customer-firm relationship for high severity cases, low recovery satisfaction cannot guarantee customer retention. To prevent customer defection due to service failure of high severity, unexpected rewards as a recovery will be likely to be useful since those will lead to customer delight or customer gratitude toward the service firm. Based on the results of analyses, theoretical and managerial implications are presented. Limitations and future research ideas are also discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.608-614
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• 2005

The object of this research is to analyze and classify the dining-out behavior and preference on Korean food by age groups and to make counter proposals for better marketing and planning strategies. Major dining out motives were lack of time, the easiness of preparation, and schedule. For lunch, the schedule was the major dining-out motive. For dinner, the respondents in their 30s and below answered social gathering was their major dining-out motive (40.7% and 31.3% respectively). On the other hand, for the respondents in their 40s and 50s, the family gathering was the major dining motive (50.4% and 55.3% respectively) (${\chi}^{2}=68.081,\;p<0.001$). For dining out frequency, 1-2 dining out per a week had the highest percentage, among which the respondents in their 30s was 42.9% (the highest) and the respondents in their 50s was 18% (the lowest). For the dining-out cost, the respondents in their 30s and below spent more on dinner rather than breakfast or lunch. For the menu preference of Korean foods, Doenjangjigae had the highest percentage. In case of Kimchi, the respondents in their 40s showed higher preference than the respondents in their 30s. Interestingly, the preference for Kimchi was higher in the respondents younger than 30 rather than in the respondents in their 30s. and the respondents older than 40 (p<0.05). Preference for Jangachi was considerably low in the respondents younger than 40, which implies that younger people don't incline to traditional Korean Mitbanchan. The dining-out motive was different in each age group. Now, the dining out motive is not restricted to home meal replacement. Social gatherings are increasing and the consumers of dining-out industry are being diversified. These suggest the increased need for classifying and analyzing the consumers by age groups to get more information on consumer behavior and tastes.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.149-161
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• 2014

The export of domestic public services to overseas markets contains many potential obstacles, stemming from different export procedures, the target services, and socio-economic environments. In order to alleviate these problems, the business incubation platform as an open business ecosystem can be a powerful instrument to support the decisions taken by participants and stakeholders. In this paper, we propose an ontology model and its implementation processes for the business incubation platform with an open and pervasive architecture to support public service exports. For the conceptual model of platform ontology, export case studies are used for requirements analysis. The conceptual model shows the basic structure, with vocabulary and its meaning, the relationship between ontologies, and key attributes. For the implementation and test of the ontology model, the logical structure is edited using Prot$\acute{e}$g$\acute{e}$ editor. The core engine of the business incubation platform is the simulator module, where the various contexts of export businesses should be captured, defined, and shared with other modules through ontologies. It is well-known that an ontology, with which concepts and their relationships are represented using a shared vocabulary, is an efficient and effective tool for organizing meta-information to develop structural frameworks in a particular domain. The proposed model consists of five ontologies derived from a requirements survey of major stakeholders and their operational scenarios: service, requirements, environment, enterprise, and county. The service ontology contains several components that can find and categorize public services through a case analysis of the public service export. Key attributes of the service ontology are composed of categories including objective, requirements, activity, and service. The objective category, which has sub-attributes including operational body (organization) and user, acts as a reference to search and classify public services. The requirements category relates to the functional needs at a particular phase of system (service) design or operation. Sub-attributes of requirements are user, application, platform, architecture, and social overhead. The activity category represents business processes during the operation and maintenance phase. The activity category also has sub-attributes including facility, software, and project unit. The service category, with sub-attributes such as target, time, and place, acts as a reference to sort and classify the public services. The requirements ontology is derived from the basic and common components of public services and target countries. The key attributes of the requirements ontology are business, technology, and constraints. Business requirements represent the needs of processes and activities for public service export; technology represents the technological requirements for the operation of public services; and constraints represent the business law, regulations, or cultural characteristics of the target country. The environment ontology is derived from case studies of target countries for public service operation. Key attributes of the environment ontology are user, requirements, and activity. A user includes stakeholders in public services, from citizens to operators and managers; the requirements attribute represents the managerial and physical needs during operation; the activity attribute represents business processes in detail. The enterprise ontology is introduced from a previous study, and its attributes are activity, organization, strategy, marketing, and time. The country ontology is derived from the demographic and geopolitical analysis of the target country, and its key attributes are economy, social infrastructure, law, regulation, customs, population, location, and development strategies. The priority list for target services for a certain country and/or the priority list for target countries for a certain public services are generated by a matching algorithm. These lists are used as input seeds to simulate the consortium partners, and government's policies and programs. In the simulation, the environmental differences between Korea and the target country can be customized through a gap analysis and work-flow optimization process. When the process gap between Korea and the target country is too large for a single corporation to cover, a consortium is considered an alternative choice, and various alternatives are derived from the capability index of enterprises. For financial packages, a mix of various foreign aid funds can be simulated during this stage. It is expected that the proposed ontology model and the business incubation platform can be used by various participants in the public service export market. It could be especially beneficial to small and medium businesses that have relatively fewer resources and experience with public service export. We also expect that the open and pervasive service architecture in a digital business ecosystem will help stakeholders find new opportunities through information sharing and collaboration on business processes.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.19-42
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• 2012

Consumer consumption patterns are shifting rapidly as buyers migrate from offline markets to e-commerce routes, such as shopping channels on TV and internet shopping malls. In the offline markets consumers go shopping, see the shopping items, and choose from them. Recently consumers tend towards buying at shopping sites free from time and place. However, as e-commerce markets continue to expand, customers are complaining that it is becoming a bigger hassle to shop online. In the online shopping, shoppers have very limited information on the products. The delivered products can be different from what they have wanted. This case results to purchase cancellation. Because these things happen frequently, they are likely to refer to the consumer reviews and companies should be concerned about consumer's voice. E-commerce is a very important marketing tool for suppliers. It can recommend products to customers and connect them directly with suppliers with just a click of a button. The recommender system is being studied in various ways. Some of the more prominent ones include recommendation based on best-seller and demographics, contents filtering, and collaborative filtering. However, these systems all share two weaknesses : they cannot recommend products to consumers on a personal level, and they cannot recommend products to new consumers with no buying history. To fix these problems, we can use the information which has been collected from the questionnaires about their demographics and preference ratings. But, consumers feel these questionnaires are a burden and are unlikely to provide correct information. This study investigates combining collaborative filtering with the centrality of social network analysis. This centrality measure provides the information to infer the preference of new consumers from the shopping history of existing and previous ones. While the past researches had focused on the existing consumers with similar shopping patterns, this study tried to improve the accuracy of recommendation with all shopping information, which included not only similar shopping patterns but also dissimilar ones. Data used in this study, Movie Lens' data, was made by Group Lens research Project Team at University of Minnesota to recommend movies with a collaborative filtering technique. This data was built from the questionnaires of 943 respondents which gave the information on the preference ratings on 1,684 movies. Total data of 100,000 was organized by time, with initial data of 50,000 being existing customers and the latter 50,000 being new customers. The proposed recommender system consists of three systems : [+] group recommender system, [-] group recommender system, and integrated recommender system. [+] group recommender system looks at customers with similar buying patterns as 'neighbors', whereas [-] group recommender system looks at customers with opposite buying patterns as 'contraries'. Integrated recommender system uses both of the aforementioned recommender systems to recommend movies that both recommender systems pick. The study of three systems allows us to find the most suitable recommender system that will optimize accuracy and customer satisfaction. Our analysis showed that integrated recommender system is the best solution among the three systems studied, followed by [-] group recommended system and [+] group recommender system. This result conforms to the intuition that the accuracy of recommendation can be improved using all the relevant information. We provided contour maps and graphs to easily compare the accuracy of each recommender system. Although we saw improvement on accuracy with the integrated recommender system, we must remember that this research is based on static data with no live customers. In other words, consumers did not see the movies actually recommended from the system. Also, this recommendation system may not work well with products other than movies. Thus, it is important to note that recommendation systems need particular calibration for specific product/customer types.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.127-141
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• 2017

Advances in Internet technologies and the proliferation of mobile devices enabled consumers to approach a wide range of goods and services, while causing an adverse effect that they have hard time reaching their congenial items even if they devote much time to searching for them. Accordingly, businesses are using the recommender systems to provide tools for consumers to find the desired items more easily. Association Rule Mining (ARM) technology is advantageous to recommender systems in that ARM provides intuitive form of a rule with interestingness measures (support, confidence, and lift) describing the relationship between items. Given an item, its relevant items can be distinguished with the help of the measures that show the strength of relationship between items. Based on the strength, the most pertinent items can be chosen among other items and exposed to a given item's web page. However, the diversity of the measures may confuse which items are more recommendable. Given two rules, for example, one rule's support and confidence may not be concurrently superior to the other rule's. Such discrepancy of the measures in distinguishing one rule's superiority from other rules may cause difficulty in selecting proper items for recommendation. In addition, in an online environment where a web page or mobile screen can provide a limited number of recommendations that attract consumer interest, the prudent selection of items to be included in the list of recommendations is very important. The exposure of items of little interest may lead consumers to ignore the recommendations. Then, such consumers will possibly not pay attention to other forms of marketing activities. Therefore, the measures should be aligned with the probability of consumer's acceptance of recommendations. For this reason, this study proposes a model-based approach to combine those measures into one unified measure that can consistently determine the ranking of recommended items. A regression model was designed to describe how well the measures (independent variables; i.e., support, confidence, and lift) explain consumer's acceptance of recommendations (dependent variables, hit rate of recommended items). The model is intuitive to understand and easy to use in that the equation consists of the commonly used measures for ARM and can be used in the estimation of hit rates. The experiment using transaction data from one of the Korea's largest online shopping malls was conducted to show that the proposed model can improve the hit rates of recommendations. From the top of the list to 13th place, recommended items in the higher rakings from the proposed model show the higher hit rates than those from the competitive model's. The result shows that the proposed model's performance is superior to the competitive model's in online recommendation environment. In a web page, consumers are provided around ten recommendations with which the proposed model outperforms. Moreover, a mobile device cannot expose many items simultaneously due to its limited screen size. Therefore, the result shows that the newly devised recommendation technique is suitable for the mobile recommender systems. While this study has been conducted to cover the cross-selling in online shopping malls that handle merchandise, the proposed method can be expected to be applied in various situations under which association rules apply. For example, this model can be applied to medical diagnostic systems that predict candidate diseases from a patient's symptoms. To increase the efficiency of the model, additional variables will need to be considered for the elaboration of the model in future studies. For example, price can be a good candidate for an explanatory variable because it has a major impact on consumer purchase decisions. If the prices of recommended items are much higher than the items in which a consumer is interested, the consumer may hesitate to accept the recommendations.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.129-144
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• 2013

The consumption of coffee has been drastically increased last two decades. Now almost all the Korean adult people enjoy the coffee and diverse cultures related coffee have been spread widely in Korea. Therefore new marketing strategies are necessary to satisfy consumers according to ages, attitudes, and other characters. It has been continuously discussed whether the coffee gives negative impacts to health. Regardless of the discussions of the effects to health, now coffee became a part of modern daily lives. In this study the motivations of coffee consumption were classified to five; wellbeing motivation, refreshment motivation, social motivation, habitual motivation, and emotional motivation. Future intention of coffee consumption were also classified to five factors: sound mental intention, addictive intention, side-effect recovery intention, economic intention, and psychological intention. The survey was conducted in Seoul City and Kyeongki Province from January 3 to February 2, 2013. Total 500 questionaries were distributed and 450 were collected and 428 samples were used for the analysis of this study. The data were analyzed by SPSS Win 18 Version. The methods used in this study were factors analysis test, reliability test, validity test, t-testy, One-Way ANOVA, and regression analysis. The hypnosis in this study were as follows. First, The motivations of coffee consumption would influence to the intention of coffee consumption. Second, there would be statistical differences to the intention of coffee consumption according to the demographic characteristics. According to the result of the study, the motivation of coffee partially affected to the intention of coffee consumption. And there were statistical differences according to age, occupations, educational levels, and monthly incomes. The implications of this study were the factors related health and emotional feeling were considered more important than tastes and characters of coffee-shop that people thought more important before.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.75-83
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• 2017

Purpose - With the rise of the fourth industrial revolution, it has converged with the existing industrial revolution to give shape to increased accessibility of knowledge and information. As a result, it has become easier for scholars to actively persue and compile research in various fields. This current study aims to focus and assess the current standing of KODISA: the Journal of Distribution Science (JDS), International Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business(IJIDB), the East Asian Journal of Business Management (EAJBM), the Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business (JAFEB) in a rapidly evolving era. Novel strategies for creating the future vision of KODISA 2020 will also be examined. Research design, data, and methodology - The current research will analyze published journals of KODISA in order to offer a vision for the KODISA 2020 future. In part 1, this paper will observe the current address of the KODISA journal and its overview of past achievements. Next, part 2 will discuss the activities that will be needed for journals of KODISA, JDS, IJIDB, EAJBM, JAFEB to branch out internationally and significant journals will be statistically analyzed in part 3. The last part 4 will offer strategies for the continued growth of KODISA and visions for KODISA 2020. Results - Among the KODISA publications, IJIDB was second, JDS was 23rd (in economic publications of 54 journals), and EAJBM was 22nd (out of 79 publications in management field journals). This shows the high quality of the KODISA publication journals. According to 2016 publication analysis, JDS, IJIDB, etc. each had 157 publications, 15 publications, 16 publications, and 28 publications. In the case of JDS, it showed an increase of 14% compared to last year. Additionally, JAFEB showed a significant increase of 68%. This shows that compared to other journals, it had a higher rate of paper submission. IJIDB and EAJBM did not show any significant increases. In JDS, it showed many studies related to the distribution, management of distribution, and consumer behavior. In order to increase the status of the KODISA journal to a SCI status, many more international conferences will open to increase its international recognition levels. Second, the systematic functions of the journal will be developed further to increase its stability. Third, future graduate schools will open to foster future potential leaders in this field and build a platform for innovators and leaders. Conclusions - In KODISA, JDS was first published in 1999, and has been registered in SCOPUS February 2017. Other sister publications within the KODISA are preparing for SCOPUS registration as well. KODISA journals will prepare to be an innovative journal for 2020 and the future beyond.

• Journal of the Society of Cosmetic Scientists of Korea
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• v.30 no.4 s.48
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• pp.571-582
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• 2004

Recently the well-being, which is regarded as the new cultural code, has brought a new change in the cosmetic industry. The application of the functional products is getting mere and lots of functional cosmetics are now diversifying from the skin-care into the make-up as well as the herbal products. So the future in the market of functional cosmetic products is prospected to be positive. Therefore, cosmetic companies need an approach bases on the concept of the well-being. So to speak, they need to understand the needs of customers accurately from the customers point of view. Also it is a crucial issue that how the unique characteristics of functional cosmetic products as well as the development of products base on the concept of well-being make in balance. In this study, we attempt to inspect the advanced domestic market of the functional products due to the well-being trend and try to propose an option of making an advance it through the customers survey (for example, their need and their satisfaction on the functional products, etc) on the functional cosmetic products. For this purpose, it has been surveyed on adult female customers aged 19 to 60 located in Seoul and Gyeonggi province. 379 questionnaires among 510 were used in the final analysis. Collected data was analyzed using the statistical package for the social science (SPSS) program that can give the information about the general characteristics of the subjects like the frequency and percentage. And we used Cronbach's u reliability test, $x^2\;(chi-square)$ frequency analysis, t-test, and one-wat ANOVA to investigate the customers need, their degree of the satisfaction on the functional products of their own, factors of their perception on the quality on them. We think that the results of our study can act not only as the fundamental data on the customers need, their usage pattern, and their degree of the satisfaction, but also as the important tips of planning the marketing strategies.

• Journal of dental hygiene science
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.61-67
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• 2009

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the lifestyle of dental consumers and their hospital satisfaction level in an attempt to lay the foundation for successful dental marketing strategy setting. The subjects in this study were 720 medical consumers who visited dental institutions in Jeolla buk-do province. A survey was conducted from October 1 to December 1, 2006, with self-administered questionnaires. The collected data were analyzed with SPSS(Statistical Package for the Social Science) 12.0 program to find out their lifestyle and hospital satisfaction level. Concerning the impact of lifestyle on satisfaction with dental institutions, lifestyle made a difference to the satisfaction level of the hospital users with promptness and economicality(p < 0.001). As to connections between hospital-reuse intention and satisfaction level, those who were willing to reuse the dental institutions they had visited expressed better satisfaction with promptness(p < 0.05). As for links between health-related lifestyle and hospital satisfaction level, health conscious style, health promoting style health unconscious styles had a statistically significantly positive relationship to hospital satisfaction level, which showed a significant relationship between the three lifestyles and hospital satisfaction level. As for factors affecting reuse of dental institutions, it's found that their intention to reuse the same dental institution they had visited was linked to their satisfaction level with it, what made them choose it and their health-related lifestyle. In the future, more precise and in-depth questionnaires should be developed to analyze the health-related lifestyle of medical consumers.