The economic recession and changes in purchasing habits of young adults (aged 18–25) has led to a decline in the sales of Japanese fashion apparel. This younger generation’s choice of fashion items is primarily based on price. They are not devoted to a favourite brand with a frequent purchase history. Thus, developing customer loyalty and strengthening brand value are essential for the fashion industry. This study explores the improvement in fashion companies’ financial performance (FP) through young generation’s behavioural brand loyalty (BBL) from two aspects: social media brand engagement (BE) and loyalty programmes (LPs). This study listed 14 popular Japanese fashion brands which belonged to 14 publicly traded companies in Japan. Further, we surveyed 183 consumers about their brand related behaviours. The findings reveal the positive and negative effects of the same variable (BE and LPs) on the outcome (short- and long-term FP), indicating that not all activities related to BE and LPs boost FP. FP is influenced by various combinations of these causal factors and complex situations, such as consumers’ demographics and shopping characteristics. The results deepen our understanding of brand loyalty formation and the linkage among BE, LPs, and FP in a realistic marketplace, and offer multiple practical solutions to achieve high levels of short- and long-term FP by targeting the right consumers based on their specific characteristics.

Consumers are increasingly using their smartphones for making purchases, with the other modes being traditional offline and online channels (Kim et al., 2017). In light of the growing number of smartphone users worldwide, many e-commerce companies have responded by launching mobile apps that offer more convenient and flexible shopping experiences to smartphone users (Bang et al., 2013). A number of e-commerce related studies have identified crucial differences between mobile shopping (m-shopping) and online shopping. They find that m-shopping provides greater flexibility in terms of time and place as well as multi-tasking capabilities (for instance, a mobile shopper can communicate with others and even post a picture of an item to social media asking for others’ opinions and comments, all while shopping via a mobile app). These types of apps simultaneously cater to consumers’ shopping and social affiliation needs (Yang et al., 2012). Current research has shown that this type of shopping has gradually become habitual or automatic (Shankar et al., 2016). This new type of e-commerce has brought about a change in the shopping behavior of customers, thereby challenging companies to develop specific strategies to attract this new breed of shoppers.

Despite the plethora of articles and research in marketing and retailing literatures focused on enhancing customer loyalty, the topic of how to best allocate resources to various loyalty-building efforts has always attracted interest from both academics and practitioners (Kamran-Disfani, et al., 2017). Much research has examined that satisfaction is a strong relative factor of loyalty. However, Kumar, et al. (2012) and Kamran-Disfani, et al. (2017) stressed that the satisfaction-loyalty link could depend on various moderators and mediators. And they pointed out the difference between two types of loyalty—attitudinal and behavioral, and the mediating effect of attitudinal loyalty within the satisfaction-behavioral loyalty link. Thus, there is a need for more studies empirically investigating the satisfaction-loyalty link and how satisfaction effects loyalty in different contexts. On the other hand, many companies have recently been building a greater variety of store formats and attempting to provide a superior shopping experience through their stores in order to increase the possibility of customer revisitation and customer loyalty. Also, consumers not only switch to different retailers in the same product categories but also change to different store formats for the same product purchasing (Anand and Sinha, 2009). The reasons can be considered as customers’ attitudes toward stores and preference of store atmosphere and environment (Wakefield and Baker, 1998). However, few research pays attention to the issue of how, and to what extent, the different store formats have on impacting customer satisfaction and loyalty building. This is especially true of retailers having entered a new overseas market, and how its loyalty building is effected by its store format choice during its developing stages. This study adopts a conceptual model from Kamran-Disfani, et al. (2017) and aims to examine the satisfaction-loyalty link and test if attitudinal loyalty could be a mediator between satisfaction and behavioral loyalty. And if so, do store formats matter to the satisfaction-loyalty link. In short, we develop hypotheses of how store atmosphere, customer satisfaction, attitudinal loyalty, behavioral loyalty are related, and how store format moderates these relationships. In order to improve the understanding of the satisfaction-loyalty link in the context of retail internationalization, we survey a Japanese fashion company — Nice Claup who segmented the Chinese market by operating multiple retail stores, and each retail store plays a discrete role of cultivating customer loyalty. In our analysis, we compare two store formats of Nice Claup, which are the single brand specialty store and the multi-brand store (defined as ―house brand store‖ in this paper). House brand stores aim to offer novel shopping experiences by gathering several Japanese fashion brands into one large store, with each brand having their own detached areas for keeping each brand’s identity separate and recognizable, but are connected to each other by an integrated store design. Both of these two types of stores are named ―Nice Claup‖, and operated by the same retailer. We choose a 388-customer survey data as our sample. All of these customers have purchased clothes at Nice Claup’s stores over 5 times per year and have been given special member’s card by Nice Claup in Shanghai, China. This 388-customer data obtains 180 consumers who always purchase at house brand stores, and 208 consumers who always purchase at single-brand specialty stores. Hypotheses are tested using an ordinary least squares regression model with a cross-store format comparative analysis. The results suggest that while attitudinal loyalty positively and directly influences behavioral loyalty, satisfaction indirectly drives behavioral loyalty through the mediating effects of attitudinal loyalty. This implies that we should focus on the process of building loyalty and there might be a potential stage before gaining customers’ behavioral loyalty. We also find that there are some important differences between the two store formats, i.e., (1) the effect of store atmosphere (ambience cue, design cue, social cue (Kumar and Kim, 2014)) on satisfaction; (2) the moderating effect of store formats on the relationship between attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. The findings explore different perception of the two types of stores and influencing factor on building loyalty from an emerging market perspective. By extension, it also shows an application of implementing retail internationalization with adopting multiple store formats on different developing stages, and customer loyalty can be enhanced by offering store novelty in the Chinese market.

In recent years, with the improvement of Internet infrastructure and the construction of a global logistics network, cross-border e-commerce has entered a stage of rapid development, and the scale of transactions has been expanding, becoming a vital force in the development of my country’ s foreign trade. As a major coastal economic province in my country, Guangdong Province has taken the lead in developing cross-border e-commerce by virtue of policy dividends, location advantages and its own sound foreign trade foundation, and has achieved remarkable achievements. Although the development space of cross-border e-commerce in Guangdong Province is good and the momentum is strong, as an emerging e-commerce model, its development is not smooth sailing, and there are still some hidden worries under the appearance of prosperity. From the perspective of healthy and sustainable development, Guangdong cross-border e-commerce should face up to its lack of independent brands in the international market, imperfect cross-border e-commerce logistics system, insufficient policy guidance strategies, imperfect payment system, and professional cross-border e-commerce talents. This paper will propose corresponding optimization measures based on these problems, in order to improve the development level of cross-border e-commerce in Guangdong Province, and provide certain inspiration for the development of cross-border e-commerce in other provinces in my country.

In recent years, cultural and creative industries have broken the constraints of resource and environmental pressure on sustainable economic development, become a new engine of economic growth and drive a new round of economic growth in advanced countries. The cultural industry with ‘knowledge’, ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ as its main contents relies on Internet technology. Combined with trade, it shows strong economic potential. From the practice of South Korea, the success of cultural industry export trade has overcome the bottleneck of local resources, achieved sustained high-speed economic growth and greatly improved the country’s comprehensive competitiveness. Theoretically, culture has its rich connotation and extension, and its products and services have the characteristics of high permeability, high added value and high radiation. Therefore, the spillover effect of cultural export trade also has more scale, quality and sustainability. From the perspective of the spillover effect caused by the export trade of Korean cultural industry, this paper focuses on the important content of export products, film and television dramas. Through the analysis of ‘point consumption’ to ‘surface consumption’ brought by the export of popular Korean dramas to China, this paper verifies the generation of spillover effect by driving the export growth of tourism, beauty, food, mobile phone, automobile, food, clothing and other industries. At the same time, it examines some problems existing in Chinese film and television dramas, and provides some reasonable suggestions for the ‘going out’ of Chinese film and television dramas in the future.

Purpose - Urban agglomeration construction is one of national strategic plans to accelerate the development of industrialization and urbanization in China, which has threatened the eco-environmental quality at the same time. This paper selected the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River as the research area. Research design, data, and methodology - The the slack-based measurement (SBM) model considering undesirable outputs is applied to measure the eco-efficiency of this urban agglomerations during 2006-2015. Results - The empirical results show that average eco-efficiency of the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River is 0.595. Regional ecological development is unbalanced. The highest eco-efficiency is recorded at Wuhan Metropolitan Area, and the lowest one is at the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan City Group. Energy consumption and waste dust emissions are the key factors led to ecological inefficiency. Based on this, potentials for energy saving and waste dust reducing are calculated. Conclusions - Finally, this study provides policy implications targeted to promote the coordinating development of economy and eco-environment under the construction of urban agglomeration.

일본 애니메이션 영화는 독특한 매력이 가지고 있어 세계의 광범위한 찬양을 받았다. 그리하여 역사적, 문화적 요인의 영향을 미치기 때문에 영화 속에 어느 정도 비극적 분 위기 나타낸다. 따라서 비극적 색채도 일본 애니메이션 영화의 특색중의 하나이다. 일본 애니메이션 영화의 종류가 다양하지만 그 중에서는 제일 매력적인 것은 상업 애니메이션 영화중의 극장 애니메이션영화이라고 할 수 있다. 일본 극장 애니메이션 영화는 제작하기가 아주 복잡하고 표현형식이 훌륭하다. 그리 고 제작품은 일본 애니메이션의 수준을 대표할 수 있으며 사회적 영향이 크고 깊은 연구 가치를 가진다. 오늘날에 일본 애니메이션은 많은 연구 성과를 거두었지만 그 중에서는 비극의식 탐구에 관한 연구는 아직 많지 않다. 일본은 비극의식을 강한 민족이다. 그러니까 일본 애니메이션의 비극의식에 관한 연 구를 중요한 의미를 지니고 있다. 일부 연구원들이 일본 비극의식을 연구할 때 “죽음” 에 한하여 탐구한다. 본문은 일본의 인문 사회과학 등 다방면을 통해서 분석해 보고자 한다.

Enhancing yield has been a major challenge of agriculture. In rice, tiller number is one of the important biomass and yield components. A maize mutant grassy tillers1 (gt1) increases lateral branches in maize. The GT1 gene encodes a class I homeodomain leucine zipper (HD-Zip) protein. In maize, the gt1 expression is induced by shading and is dependent on the activity of teosinte branched1 (tb1), a major domestication locus controlling tillering and lateral branching. To estimate the biological role and agricultural utility of gt1 in rice, rice homologue (OsGT1) has been isolated and its overexpressors and RNAi lines were generated. Field data showed that OsGT1 overexpressors reduced tillers and panicles while RNAi lines increased them, compared to wild type. Shade signal is an important factor in determining lateral branching. To understand the relationship between OsGT1 and shade avoidance, plants have been grown under 50% shading in the field. Also, double genetic combinations with phytochrome mutants (phyA, B, and C) are being examining for tillering phenotype. These ongoing researches will provide insights in determining the action of OsGT1 on branching and shade avoidance in rice.