The purpose of this study was to find efficient and customized tools for delivering the benefit of health functional foods (HFFs). Delivery tools which could influence the impact of advertising were images, explanations of ingredients, diagrams of health benefit, patents, and comments from authority. Six advertisements were developed using these tools: “A”: relevant image + explanation of ingredients + scientific diagram of efficacy; “B”: relevant image + explanation of ingredients; “C”: relevant image; “D”: irrelevant image; “E”: irrelevant image + explanation of ingredient + patent; “F”: irrelevant image + explanation of ingredient + comments from authority. To analyze the consumer perceptions on HFFs and advertisement effects, 300 respondents were requested to answer a questionnaire comprising of the following questions: 5 questions of attitudes (necessity of HFFs, trust in HFFs, gathering information, watching advertisements and trust in advertisement claims) and 6 questions on the 6 developed advertisements (attention, understanding, sufficiency of information, sympathy, trust, and purchase). Scoring was done as per the 5 Likert scale. There was a higher proportion of females and the elderly, as compared to males and youngsters. The overall consumer attitudes were positive. Explanation of ingredients, scientific diagram of health benefit, patents and expert comments were helpful factors in increasing the advertisement evaluation by consumer, but the images were not. Advertisement evaluation of consumer did not differ with gender and age. However, differences were observed between some of the consumer attitudes (necessity of HFFs, trust in HFFs, gathering information and trust in advertisements claim) and advertisement evaluations (attention, understanding, sympathy and purchase). Our results indicate that for consumers utilizing the HFFs, advertisements with concrete tools such as diagrams, patent, and expert comments are more helpful. However, for consumers who do not have interest in HFFs, the scientific information was irrelevant. We believe that to maximize the effect of health information in advertisements, consumers should be segmented, and customized tools for each segment needs to be developed.

본 연구는 아웃도어 재킷에 대한 인식에 따라 분류된 소비자 그룹에 대하여 아웃도어 재킷의 행택 타입에 따른 정보 이해도와 기능성 의류제품 정보 표기의 대안적 방법에 대한 선호도의 차이를 고찰하였다. 행택타입에 따른 이해도 를 알아보기 위해서 투습방수성능 표현한 네 종류의 행택(‘그림만으로’, ‘그림+한국어 설명’, ‘그림+외국어설명’, ‘그래프’)을 제시하여 행택을 통해 알 수 있는 성능을 답하게 하였다. 기능성 재킷의 인식에 따른 소비자 유형별 분석을 위해, 20-60대 472명의 남녀를 세 그룹(‘비전문적/브랜드ㆍ디자인 추구집단’, ‘전문적/기능성 중시집단’, ‘고가 제품 선호집단’)으로 분류한 선행연구의 결과를 적용하여 행택 타입에 대한 이해도와 선호도를 분석하였다. 연구 결과 소비 자 유형과 관계없이 ‘그림만으로’ 표기하는 것을 가장 선호하였으며 ‘그래프’ 표기 방법을 가장 선호하지 않았다. 그러나 정답률에 있어서는 ‘그래프’표기 방법이 가장 높았으며 소비자 유형 중 특히 ‘전문적/기능성 중시 집단’에서 높은 것으로 나타나, 기능성 의류를 인식하는 유형에 따라 정보 표기에 대한 이해도와 선호도는 달라질 수 있다는 것을 알 수 있었다. 또한 ‘전문적/기능성 중시 집단’은 대안적 표기 방법에 있어서 ‘세탁 후의 성능변화’ 등과 같이 현재 제공되고 있는 정보보다 더 많은 정보를 표기해 주기를 바라고 있는 것으로 나타났다. 이와 같이 기능성 의류를 인식하는 유형에 따라 행택(hang-tag)에 표현 된 성능정보의 표현방법에 따른 이해수준에 있어서 차이를 보였으므로 연령, 성별 등의 단순 인구통계학적 분류보다 타겟층의 특성, 정보를 활용하는 유형, 제품의 특성 등을 종합하여 적합한 표기 방법을 선택하는 것이 필요할 것이다.

Customers’ final purchase decisions for electronic products are understandably influenced by previous experiences, marketing messages such as price and promotion, and opinions from other consumers (Simonson and Rosen 2014). In particular, millions of product reviews are posted daily on online review boards or social media represent aggregate consumer preference data (Decker and Trusov 2010). Past studies analyzing online reviews or word-of-mouth (WOM) have focused more on the quantitative dimension of volume of WOM (or “how much people say”), but less on qualitative dimension of valence of WOM (or “what people say”) (Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi 2014). However, recent studies have analyzed disaggregate-level UGC by performing text mining in addition to a general analysis of volume and valence of OUGC. Onishi and Manchanda (2012) investigate the relationship between movie sales and both TV advertising and blogs. Although the authors find that the volume and the valence of OUGC (i.e., blogs) are predictive of market outcomes, they retain only certain words (i.e., advertising, award, interesting, and viewed) that consumers would find useful, therefore having general predictive power for market outcomes. Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi (2014) address the relationship between the content of online WOM, advertising, and brand performance of cell phones and find that the volume of OUGC does not have significant impact on sales, but only the valence of recommendation UGC has a direct impact. Liu, Singh, and Srinivasan (2015) find that both the volume and sentiments of Tweets do not outperform the information content of Tweets in predicting TV series ratings. Although these three papers have investigated the importance of qualitative UGC through text mining techniques, such studies have not accounted for the detailed dimensions of specific contents. For example, Onishi and Manchanda (2012) use only 4 words out of top 30 frequently cited words for their analysis, and Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi (2014) classify the OUGC into three disaggregated dimensions (i.e., attribute, emotion, and recommendation) without further classifications of subcategories and valence of positivity and negativity. Liu, Singh, and Srinivasan (2015) mainly focus on positive and negative Tweet contents about TV shows, lacking further classification of functional and emotional dimensions. In contrast to these studies, this study aims to examine in-depth multidimensional aspects of the content of online reviews, i.e., qualitative UGC, and their impacts on product sales. In this process, we develop defensible measurements of UGC by executing a comprehensive empirical text analysis and evaluate the impact of measures of qualitative UGC relative to volume measure of quantitative UGC. Specifically, we analyze a large data set of UGC on the 350 most talked-about smartphone games from seven different genres (e.g., action, arcade, shooting, puzzle, role playing, simulation, and sports) over a 30 month period, August 2010 to February 2013. We utilize a theoretical framework that classifies qualitative UGC into two major perceptions of functional and emotional dimensions. Prior studies show that perceptions of both functional (cognitive) and emotional (affective) dimensions should be considered to investigate their effects on perceived user satisfaction (Coursaris and van Osch 2015) and online shopping behavior (Van der Heijden 2004). It is evident that both functional and emotional UGC influence consumers to purchase a focal product (Lovett, Peres, and Shachar 2013). The functional UGC relates to the positive and negative attributes and beliefs about a product, and the emotional UGC pertains to the feelings and emotions in response to product experience. As an example, consider one innovative car-racing mobile game which, although expensive, has 3D graphics and high level of complexity. After playing this game, consumers may express their feedback on this game online by describing it as well-made, unique, but sometimes fearful (because a high bill charge is expected from excessive playing time), and addictive (because they like the game too much to stop playing it). This type of online reviews contains different types of UGC: functional (e.g., quality, innovativeness) and emotional (e.g., fear). Another layer of our analysis involves the heterogeneity of impact on product sales across different qualitative UGCs. Specifically, we consider the effects of functional UGC on product sales across emotional contexts such as anger and happiness, in other words, a simultaneous association between functional UGC and emotional UGC. For example, although a consumer may be attracted by some reviews on the high quality graphics of a mobile game (functional UGC), she may hesitate to purchase this product because other reviews express their fear about high cost of purchasing virtual goods (emotional UGC). Accordingly, we expect the functional UGC’s effects on sales to be moderated (amplified or reduced) by emotional UGC. We accommodate such interaction effects in both aggregate and disaggregate models. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to empirically identify two dimensions of qualitative UGC (functional and emotional), and shed light on the effects of multidimensional UGC categories on sales. Our findings on the influence of qualitative UGC on product sales are quite different from the prevailing view that firms should pay attention more to the volume of UGC (Chevalier and Mayzlin 2006; Liu 2006) but little to the valence of UGC (Duan, Gu, and Whinston 2008; Godes and Mayzlin 2004; Liu 2006). Rather, our research is in line with recent three papers (Gopinath, Thomas, and Krishnamurthi 2014; Liu, Singh, and Srinivasan 2015; Onishi and Manchanda 2012) in terms of the importance of considering specific contents from a vast amount of text data. However, our paper provides two key contributions. First, we show that specific categories of qualitative online UGC such as functional and emotional variables can be used to predict product sales; this result will be of a high managerial relevance. Especially, traditional methods that use simple metrics such as volume and valence of UGC are less accurate than our method that employs a sophisticated, multidimensional content analysis. Second, the results offer guidance to firms in determining which specific UGC (quantitative or qualitative; functional or emotional; under what contexts) they should focus on for increasing the efficiency of their online marketing activities. Utilizing a large dataset of online reviews on 350 mobile games consisting of four million postings generated for thirty months, the authors identified 76 representative words to describe the functional and emotional UGC using text analysis and word classification. We combined the resulting UGC volumes with weekly sales, resulting in 1,835 observations for analysis with hierarchical Bayesian methods. We find that functional UGC includes 54 representative words to describe various levels of product quality, product innovativeness, price acceptability, and product simplicity, and emotional UGC includes 22 words to express anger, fear, shame, love, contentment, and happiness. The results show that the volume and valence of aggregated functional UGC and the share of aggregated emotional UGC have the positive effects on sales. The volume and valence of functional UGC subcategories have mixed effects on sales and the link is moderated by the share of emotional UGC subcategories. These results are in contrast to those in the literature. Further, a sales forecasting model which includes 13 variables of UGC subcategories shows the best predictive validity. The authors discuss the implications of these results for online marketers.

본 연구는 기업과 소비자 간의 기능성 의류제품의 효과적인 정보소통을 목적으로 하는 일련의 연구 중 일부로 기능성 아웃도어 재킷에 대한 인식과 행동양식에 따라 응답자를 유형화하고 각 유형별 기능성 아웃도어 재킷 구매 시 활용하는 정보원과 행택에 대한 행동의 차이를 고찰하였다. 설문조사는 기능성 아웃도어 재킷 구매 경험이 있는 20∼60대 남, 녀 472명을 대상으로 실시하였다. 기능성 아웃도어 재킷에 대한 인식은 ‘기능성’, ‘가격’, ‘경험/지식’, ‘브랜드/디자인’ 요인으로 분류되었으며 요인에 따라 응답자들은 ‘비전문적/브랜드 및 디자인 추구집단’, ‘전문적/기능 성 중시집단’, ‘고가제품 선호집단’으로 분류되었다. ‘비전문적/브랜드 및 디자인 추구집단’은 인터넷을 정보를 가장 많이 활용하는 20대, 30대의 회사원과 학생으로 구성되었으며 ‘전문적/기능성 중시집단’의 경우에는 행택(Hang-Tag) 을 정보원으로 주로 사용하는 전문직의 40대, 50대가 주를 이루었다. ‘고가제품 선호집단’은 60대 이상, 주부의 비율이 가장 높은 집단으로 판매원을 정보원으로 주로 이용하는 것으로 나타났다. 기능성 정보제공에 사용된 용어에 대해 설명의 필요성을 가장 높게 인식하고 있는 집단은 ‘전문적/기능성 중시집단’이었으며 성능정보 관심도가 떨어지는 ‘비전문적/브랜드 및 디자인 추구집단’은 오히려 상대적 만족도가 높은 것으로 나타났다. 본 연구를 통해 기능성 재킷 소비자 유형의 특징과 성능 정보에 대한 반응의 차이를 고찰함으로써 기능성 의류제품의 성능 정보 제공을 위한 효과적 인 방법과 내용에 대한 실질적이고 유용한 정보를 제공할 수 있을 것으로 기대한다.

Three categories of basic consumer needs are functional, symbolic, or experiential (Shimp, 2010). Functional climbing wear is specially designed garment for outdoor activity and climbing movement using optimized textiles and garment making engineering process. Therefore, visible feature such as color and design could not provide sufficient information of products for proper communication between company and consumer. Product information of functional wear can be delivered to the consumers via Hang-Tag or advertising but the contents of Hang-Tag are too difficult for the consumers to understandfunctional performance of the product (Lee, Bang, & Yoo, 2014). As to advertisements of functional clothing, its contents and appeal types do not much differ from those of fashion apparel providing no functional information with celebrity models; percentage of no functional information ads were the highest (Liu & Yoo, 2014). This study stared to answer the question, ‘is functional information essential in the ads of functional clothing?’ and ‘is it successful?’ The aim of this study, therefore, was to examine the effects of functional information in the advertisements of functional climbing wear. The advertising effectiveness was measured by ‘communicability’, ‘reliability’,‘favorability’ of the advertisement and ‘awareness and reliability of product’, and ‘purchasing related influence’. For the stimulus,10 different types of advertisements were prepared by combining of the following factors: functional information (whether or not to include), appeal type (rational/emotional), and model type (celebrity/non-celebrity/no-human). For the survey, 388 adults in their 20-50’s were participated. The results showed that regardless ofappeal type or model type, functional information enhanced ‘communicability’, ‘reliability’, ‘favorability’ of the advertisement and ‘awareness and reliability of product’, and ‘purchasing related influence’. It implied the importance andnecessity of functional information in the functional climbing wear advertisement.When other variables were controlled, emotional appeal with human models,especially celebrity model, enhanced the advertising effects. Meanwhile, advertisement with rationalappeal and functional information resulted in better ‘favorability’ of ads even without celebritymodels.The finding from this study could be useful information for the functional clothing company to planstrategies for effective advertisement of their products.