KOREASCHOLAR

One of the top tourist destinations in Korea during 2014 was Dongdaemun market, which is a representative traditional market that provides reasonably priced, fashionable products. Already constituting 43.1% of Korea’s foreign tourists, the number of Chinese tourists is expected to reach 14.88 million by 2020 at an average annual growth rate of 19.8%. The most important way to improve customer equity is by understanding a store’s attributes, so this study aims to investigate the effects of Dongdaemun fashion market’s store attributes on customer equity. A survey was conducted among Chinese tourists and structural equation modeling were used to test the hypotheses. The main findings of this study are: Store attributes appear to have an impact on all of the three drivers of customer equity. Value equity has a positive impact on the customer lifetime value (CLV). Also, brand equity and relationship equity were identified as having positive impacts on revisiting intention, regardless of the type of shopping mall. Based on these findings, we discuss implications for developing the customer equity of Dongdaemun’s traditional markets.

• Ting Zhang(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Eunju Ko(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Jinghe Han(Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)
• Wei Jiang( Yonsei University, Republic of Korea)