Since Taiwan joined the WTO in 2002, the market has been gradually deregulated because of the impact of globalization. Take the airfreights forwarding industry as an example, due to the low entry threshold in Taiwan, the foreign investors has been adjusting their business operating strategy by taking Taiwan as a pre-enter step before investing China¡¦s market. The foreign investors are capturing the Asia Pacific Region¡¦s market distinctly with their strong funds and globalized information platform, which severely threatens the local enterprise. Therefore, to adjust operating strategy, to position the market and to promote competitive ability become the crucial tasks for local airfrights forwarding industry. The key element for obtaining customer¡¦s satisfaction and loyalty is to improve our service quality. This research takes airfreight forwarding industry as an object to explore how service quality influences customer satisfaction and enhances customer loyalty, which will further make business more profitable and even more valuable. Collecting and analyzing the related documents construct the primary structure of this research. The hypotheses and questionnaires are analyzed through SPSS statistical methods- reliability analysis, canonical correlation analysis and stepwise multiple regression analysis. The research has demonstrated: 1.The service quality has positive influence on the customer satisfaction 2.The customer satisfaction has positive influence on the customer loyalty 3.The service quality has positive influence on the customer loyalty

With the changing on network technology and Internet exchanges frequently, the Internet plays an important role in many people's lives, but also affects the learning, the change of the sale. The survey found that internet users are young than12-year-old is a rising trend. Therefore, construction of children's Web site to make children to feel about the vast Internet information in the information filtering case. Then, to provide a satisfactory experience for users of the site will affect the users of the site's views and re-visit frequently. This study aims to explore the impact on user perceived experience and loyalty of children's web-based service quality in order to understand whether website on providing service quality have different views in different a point of view, as the reference of site designer, web-site operators and follow-up study in the future. The results pointed out that in the course of children's website, the dimensions that the web-based service quality and perceived experience affect user¡¦s satisfaction and user¡¦s loyalty can be summarized as follows: (a) user¡¦s perceived experience of web site can directly impact on user¡¦s satisfaction and loyalty; (b) web-based service quality is required by the user satisfaction indirectly affects user¡¦s loyalty and demographic variables in the study of variable conditions sum up the differences. The management of meaning which are obtained by variance analysis will be able to serve as managers in improving the children's web-based service quality.

<p><strong>Purpose:</strong>The purpose of this study is to investigate the most important factors for creating customer loyalty, which contribute to competitive advantage in the DMP industry.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Background: </strong>The emergence of the digital music industry in recent years has resulted in a competitive situation with new digital music portals (DMPs) entering the market. A DMP can be defined as ‘<em>an e-business whose core service is to legally offer digital music by means of stream and/or download’.</em> The industry has experienced rapid developmental changes on the online platform with an outcome of a steady growth in online sales. Customers can choose from a large music assortment and DMPs function as intermediaries between right holders and end-consumers, and customers can easily switch between rivals at low costs. <em> </em></p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Method: </strong>The research strategy used in this thesis was a qualitative research strategy. Data was collected from eleven interviews, from people working within the DMP industry, using semi-structured questions. The sample was selected through a combination of convenience and snowball sampling. The collected data was later interpreted and analysed. Coding was used as an analysis method, where the authors selected relevant data and created groups of themes related to the purpose and the research questions.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>The analysis results show that DMPs have to focus on performance, explicitly performance competing strategies for creation of customer loyalty, which overlaps value and trust creation activities. The most important factors for creating customer loyalty contributing to competitive advantage in this industry are gathered under three concepts: developing innovative new transaction structures, increasing customer affiliation through usability and editorials and to engage the customer in the portal’s service.</p>

Social media is a newer emerging media outlet that could serve as a good communication tool for companies, marketers, and advertisers alike; yet, studies into the effects that social media may have on people’s perceptions is more limited. The goal of this research study is to investigate whether or not social media has the ability to influence people’s perceptions of brands. It applies cultivation theory to social media and specifically looks at whether or not social media can cultivate brand affect, trust, and loyalty. As a result, this study will allow for potential understanding of how to use social media effectively to communicate messages and where additional research can be done to better understand this newer media outlet. / text

Social networking has become integrated into every aspect of business that one can imagine and universities must take advantage of the phenomenon to build personal relationships with young alumni in an effort to build a lifetime of loyalty. This study addresses some issues that should be considered to build loyalty in young alumni, from the moment of their first arrival, rather than waiting until after they graduate to cultivate them. This study examines how alumni relations officers can help build relationships through social networks, and in-school interventions that will help creating lifetime loyalty among young alumni. Young alumni, who are more familiar with technology than older generations of alumni are a prime target audience that should be considered to study efficient and effective way for universities to get their messages out. Through an interactive qualitative analysis study, this research addresses the factors that keep alumni from wanting to hear about and be vested in their alma mater before they graduate and how they will communicate with the university after graduation. This study explores the broad question, Why do some students use alumni social media and some do not? To answer the question, the researcher explores the phenomenon of The Undergraduate Experience and Using Social Media. Using Interactive Qualitative Analysis (IQA), this study identifies the elements that make up The Undergraduate Experience and The Using Social Media Experience. The study goes further by identifying how these elements relate in a system of influence. The study concludes with practical solutions for the engagement of alumni. / text

In Chapter 1, I analyze a setting where a pair of retailers which sell unrelated products at the same location (e.g., a strip mall) compete with other retailers located at a different strip mall across town by jointly introducing a bundling discount while independently setting their respective stand-alone prices. Customers who shop from multiple strip malls rather than only one incur additional exogenous shopping costs. I first show that if each retailer chooses a bundling discount non-cooperatively, then the equilibrium bundling discounts will be zero. In contrast, pairs of firms located at the same strip mall always find it profitable to jointly offer positive bundling discounts in order to encourage customer loyalty. Moreover, I demonstrate as a comparative static that as the shopping costs increase, pairs of firms have less incentive to make joint bundling arrangements in equilibrium. If only one pair can introduce a bundling discount, in equilibrium while total industry profit rises, consumer surplus and welfare fall with the increase in shopping costs. When both pairs offer the bundling discounts, all consumers buy a bundle in equilibrium. Thus, the presence of a positive shopping cost does not affect any industry variables in equilibrium except stand-alone equilibrium prices which decrease with the shopping costs so that the standard Hotelling result extends to this case. In Chapter 2, I investigate the effects of shopping costs on the merger incentives of these unrelated retailers in the context of bundling. I demonstrate that contrary to one’s initial conjecture, pairs of firms do not merge to internalize the externalities created by shopping costs and bundling discounts. While consumers are better off with the merger outcome, consumer and total welfare fall significantly when firms stay independent in equilibrium. In Chapter 3, I analyze how legacy carriers and Southwest Airlines respond to the threat of AirTran Airways entry. My estimation results suggest that equilibrium prices of legacy carriers are on average lower in response to the threat of entry by AirTran as expected, whereas those of Southwest are on average higher. This robust result on AirTran and Southwest competition echoes the pricing behavior in the pharmaceutical industry where brand-name prices increase before and after generic entry. The incumbent low cost carrier Southwest, especially with the incapability to further lower its prices significantly, may still find it profitable to capitalize on its loyal price-inelastic (i.e., high-end) customers. Anticipating a definite price cut from AirTran, however, the high-end customers of legacy carriers may be more sensitive to price differentials offered by AirTran relative to the high-end customers of Southwest because of the size of the offer. Hence, legacy carriers, in contrast, simply reduce their prices in response to threat of AirTran entry to keep these valuable customers. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Business / Master / Master of Philosophy

In recent years, smartphone has become the most popular products, the literature for smartphone is relatively less, most of using Technology Acceptance Model ¡]TAM¡^ as the main research framework to explore. Influencing the consumer intension is concept of cognition ¡]perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use¡^, thereby affecting subsequent behavioral intentions, but what kind of product characteristics affect consumer¡¦s perceiving are seldom addressed. This study proposes "Involvement - Brand Loyalty Model" as the theoretical basis, with the "involvement" concept applied to smartphone users in order to explore the brand loyalty. Involvement antecedent focuses on "product utility", and explores what kind of product characteristics affect the product utility from the past literature, and then is combined with the social influence to investigate smartphone usage. Finally, the study will also compare different groups based on with or without owning a smartphone, and then provide the final analysis of the research results. The final results show that user involvement does affect the brand loyalty of the smartphone, and if the users are highly involved, regardless of whatever the user experience may be, product involvement will affect the brand involvement. Comparison with previous studies finds the similarity and the differences between those two groups. The common is the high involvement of smartphone. The differences lie in the user experience that does affect the user for the demand of products characteristics, and the impact of the social influence. The three products characteristics: convergence, innovation and network externality will definitely affect the product utility for someone who has smartphone, but we can understand that the user experience will impact convergence by analyzing the groups without smartphone. It is difficult to measure the value of convergence for someone who doesn¡¦t have smartphone, so in the study show that the convergence does not significantly affect the product utility, while the other two product characteristics ¡]innovation, network externalities¡^ are significant impact the product utility. For people who have usage experience, the social influence can directly affect their brand judgment, nevertheless without the usage experience, the social influence has impact on the brand involvement only through the product involvement.

This research makes a case for treating an electronic commerce web site as a social actor and argues that LT-enabled support for personalization systems and virtual communities has a significant impact on the perceived communication characteristics of a web site. This research studied the impact of two communication characteristics - adaptiveness and connectivity of a web site. Adaptiveness indicates the extent to which a web site adapts itself to support the needs of its customers whereas connectivity refers to the ability of a web site to link potential customers with other visitors. Further, synthesizing research from communication, media choice and technology adoption literatures, this thesis proposes social presence as the experiential construct and perceived usefulness as the utilitarian construct that will mediate the relationship between communication characteristics of a medium and customer loyalty. A survey and a laboratory experiment were conducted to test the linkages proposed above. The survey showed that while adaptiveness impacted on both social presence and perceived usefulness, connectivity had an impact only on social presence and an insignificant impact on perceived usefulness. Social presence did not influence perceived usefulness while both social presence and perceived usefulness had a significant impact on customer loyalty. By filtering Amazon.com real-time, the lab experiment was conducted to specifically study the causal impact of a web site's support for personalization and virtual communities. Support for personalization had a strong impact on adaptiveness, whereas support for consumer reviews had strong effect on connectivity. Interestingly, support for personalization had a weaker, but significant effect on connectivity and support for consumer reviews had a similar effect on adaptiveness. Data from the experiment was also analyzed using mediation analyses as well as partial least square analysis to show that the general pattern of results observed were consistent across methods thus improving the confidence in the research model proposed. This research by proposing social presence as a crucial experiential predictor of customer loyalty has addressed an important gap that exists in our current understanding of web users' behavior. It also makes a key contribution by empirically showing that a web site's support for IT-enabled personalization and virtual communities do have a significant impact not only on the perceived communication characteristics, but also on customer loyalty through social presence and perceived usefulness.

Magistro baigiamajame darbe nagrinėjamas vartotojų požiūris į viešojo maitinimo paslaugas teikiančių įmonių lojalumo programas. Teorinėje dalyje nagrinėjama lojalumo kūrimo procesai, pritraukimo ir išlaikymo strategijos, vertinimas bei lojalumą skatinančios priemonės. Tyrimas vartotojų požiūris į lojalumo programas viešojo maitinimo įstaigose atliekamas anketine apklausa visoje Lietuvoje. Tyrimu siekiama nustatyti kokios lojalumo programos labiausiai skatina vartotojų lojalumą. Tyrimo metu nustatyta, kad vartotojų lojalumą labiausiai skatina nuolaidų kortelės. Analizuojant apklaustųjų anketos atsakymus paaiškėjo, kad dažniausia respondentai lankosi tik tuose maitinimo įstaigose, kuriuose gauna nuolaidą, tačiau vis dėl to paaiškėjo, kad renkantis maitinimo įstaigą svarbiausias aspektas yra patiekalų ir gėrimų skonis taip pat respondentams svarbu ir geras aptarnavimas. / Master's thesis examined consumer attitudes to the catering services, a loyalty program. The theoretical part deals with loyalty building processes, attraction and retention strategies, and evaluation of loyalty and incentive schemes. The survey of consumer attitudes to loyalty programs, catering facilities and carried out the survey with an online survey in Lithuania. The study aims to determine what the most loyalty programs encourage consumer loyalty. The study found that consumer loyalty is mainly driven by discount cards. The analysis of the respondents replies to the questionnaire showed that respondents usually visit only those food establishments that receive the discount, but nevertheless shows that the choice of catering is the most important aspect of food and drinks taste as well as the respondents and the importance of good service.