Purpose: North Korea is a very close country geographically and culturally, but the nation has been one of the most secretive countries in the world. However, in recent years, North Korean society has been known to rapidly change its economic environment as well as its diplomatic and political environment. Since the gaining power of Jong-un, Kim in 2012, the North Korean government has implemented a new set of economic policies. North Korea has embraced limited market systems and mechanisms that have become a part of the formal planned economy. This study is concerned with the recent changes in the market and marketing activities of the communist country. It also seeks to gain an understanding of the changing market behavior of North Korean consumers. The purpose of this study is to enhance understanding of the market environments of North Korea and to provide appropriate implications for practitioners and researchers. Research design, data and methodology: Academic access to information that can understand North Korea's reality is minimal. Therefore, this study was conducted based on a qualitative analysis of secondary data. The existing literature on North Korea, related news and reports were the basis of the analysis. Analysis of secondary data related to North Korea was the main methodology of the study. Results: The official ideology of North Korea rejected most aspects of marketing, and yet there were marketing activities in North Korea. This article focuses on the development of market and marketing activities in North Korea during the recent years. This study indirectly confirmed that the market function is being activated in North Korea, and the basic functions of marketing such as advertisement, price, and distribution are being formed. In this process, the activation of the ‘Jangmadang(market)’ played a significant role. Conclusions: Research shows that North Korea is rapidly developing its own market function. In addition, marketing activities such as advertising and pricing strategies seem to be unprecedentedly active. However, due to changes in the political environment, the future development of North Korea's marketing is still in flux. Efforts to improve mutual understanding through continuous research are required.

Purpose: Online and social media and mobile shopping are increasing and companies are required to provide personal information in order to supplement the non-invasive characteristics of the channels. With the increased provision of personal information, consumers' personal and social concerns about the prevention of personal information infringement are also increasing, and in response, personal or opt-in marketing has emerged to compensate for reckless information abuse. Despite the background of this emergence, the existing prior studies are limited to ignoring the negative feelings of consumers in the real world, including only the net function and positive effect of the opt-in mail. Research design, data and methodology: The research framework was intended to utilize the impact of human marketing activities on consumer attitudes combined with positive and negative factors. Factors that positively affect attitudes toward permation marketing were presented, such as informality, and perceived risks were presented as negative impact factors. Also, based on previous prior research, the prior factors of opt-in marketing were to present the effect on purchase intent through the medium of attitude toward opt-in marketing. Results: In this study, we used the framework of a two factor theory to address positive and negative factors as a leading factor in the customer attitude toward opt-in mail advertising, and as a result, functionality and personalization have a positive effect on customer attitude and perceived risk have a negative impact on customer attitude. In addition, it was confirmed that the customer attitude formed this way affects the intention to purchase again. Conclusions: This study suggests that we have demonstrated that marketing, an opt-in marketing that has been recognized as part of marketing that is deployed after obtaining customer consent, has been applied without any other marketing methodology. E-mail advertising at this point also provides practical implications that the system safeguards are in place under an opt-in protocol or system, and that even if an e-mail advertisement is carried out, customers will need to look at the level of awareness about the risks, and suggests that they need to consider the customer’s journey that could lead to purchase at the content level.

A system Integrator (SI) makes a consortium with multiple providers of hardware and software solutions to sell an information system. The success of information systems (IS) mainly depends on establishing a trustful relationship between SI supplier and client, and delivering high-quality system. However, the determinants of trust and system quality have been investigated mostly from the perspective of system buyers rather than system sellers. This study examines the influence of key variables that SI can handle to improve trust and system quality which finally leads to user satisfaction toward SI. This study adopts resource complementarity, user participation and information sharing as the key variable then builds a research model to explain their relationships to user satisfaction. Respondents are recruited from 251 firms that have built any information system in recent two years in South Korea. Results of partial least square (PLS) modeling analysis show that both resource complementarity and information sharing have positive relationships with trust. Also the relationships between trust, system quality and user satisfaction toward S.I are supported. In addition, the mediating roles of trust and system quality are identified. We discussed some of the key managerial and theoretical implications of the paper and suggested further research directions.

Due to the rapid development of IT (information technology) and internet, products become smart and able to collect, process and produce information and can think of themselves to provide better service to consumers. However, research on the characteristics of smart product is still sparse. In this paper, we report the systemic development of a scale to measure the perceived product smartness associated with smart product. To develop product smartness scale, this study follows systemic scale development processes of item generation, item reduction, scale validation, reliability and validity test consequently. And, after acquiring a large amount of qualitative interview data asking the definition of smart product, we add a unique process to reduce the initial items using both a text mining method using ‘r’ s/w and traditional reliability and validity tests including factor analysis. Based on an initial qualitative inquiry and subsequent quantitative survey, an eight-factor scale of product smartness is developed. The eight factors are multi-functionality, human-like touch, ability to cooperate, autonomy, situatedness, network connectivity, integrity, and learning capability consequently. Results from Korean samples support the proposed measures of product smartness in terms of reliability, validity, and dimensionality. Implications and directions for further study are discussed. The developed scale offers important theoretical and pragmatic implications for researchers and practitioners.