Effect of the On-line Personal Services on Store Image and Purchase Intention in Electronic Stores

This is a brand and innovation dominated era; a clear and strong brand makes a company easily identified by consumers in an intensively competitive market, and innovation leads a company to a high value blue ocean. Notebook is one kind of global products of which different stages of a value cahin are dispersed to those locations around the globe where value added is maximized or where costs of value creation are minimized. Since notebooks of different brands have similar global products attributes, brands are what make those notebooks differentiated from competitors; thus, the band origin effect may be a factor that influences a consumer¡¦s purchasing dicision. The research takes notebook as an empirical study object to discuss the interrelationship among product innovation, brand country-of-origin effect, brand equity and purchase intention. The research finds that product innovation and brand country-of-origin effect are significantly related, and there is significant difference of product innovation based on differenct brand country-of-origin. Besides, brand country-of-origin has significantly positive effect on brand equity and purchase intention. Though product innovation, however, doesn¡¦t have significantly direct effect on purchase intention, it has significantly direct effect on brand equity, and it has indirect effect on purchase intention if mediated by brand equity. Moreover, there are significantly differences on product innovation and brand equity based on different notebook brands. Also, brand equity has significantly direct effect on purchase intention.

In recent years, many sexually attractive PR females can be seen at every exhibition. They are top models, stars, adult video actresses, poster girls, show girls, etc. A lot of literatures have mentioned that females are frequently objectified and commercialized in order to satisfy the desire of males in a patriarchal and capitalistic society. Due to the changing trends, saleswomen reveal different appearances in various frameworks of exhibition. Sexually attractive females have become the key persons in the exhibition; their mission is not only to soften the atmosphere permeated by cold hard products, but also to attract visitors, engage in customer relations, and achieve the expected turnover. The study subjects were visitors at the 2007 Kaohsiung Computer Multimedia and Audio Exhibition. By answering the questionnaires their ¡§visiting purpose¡¨ and ¡§purchase intention¡¨ as well as the ¡§demographic statistic variables¡¨ were all investigated. All data were analyzed via: descriptive statistics, reliability factors, correlation and single-factor variation (one way ANOVA). The correlation and study assumptions can therefore be verified. The research results showed that there is a correlation among ¡§visiting purpose¡¨, ¡§purchase intention¡¨ and ¡§demographic statistic variables.¡¨ It proved that the sexually attractive females did not necessarily attract consumers with pure intentions to purchase their desired products, but they did attract consumers who love to ogle scantily clad females or who just want to spend their free time at the exhibition. The demographic statistic variables presented that those sexually attractive females did attract many students under the age of 25, and they were willing to change their purchase intention. Companies can refer to this research in planning their sales strategies and determine special promotions where sexually attractive PR females can be used to help hawk their products, so that the best benefits can be achieved. Keywords: exhibition, feminism, sexually attractive females, visiting purpose, purchase intention

The latest data reveals, in 2008, the total market value of tea beverage in Taiwan exceeded 20 billion NT dollars. Because the tea beverage market is extremely large, there are dozens of brands in the market. When a customer wants to choose a product from kinds of choices, what factors does he/she consider? According to former research, we know that the factors include price, brand, package design, sales promotion and advertisement. However, we still didn¡¦t know how they affect consumers buying tea beverage. Consequently, this study researched that if both package design and brand image have notable influences on consumers¡¦ purchase intention for packaged tea by regression analysis. The major results for the research are as follows: 1.Approximate 90% of respondents usually buy packaged tea in convenient stores. Half of them indicate that their motivations of buying packaged tea are thirst-quenching. More than half of respondents buy Uni-president most frequently, and then is Vitalon. 2.This study uses two tea brands as subjects to test the hypothesis repeatedly. The results revealed that package design have notable influence on purchase intention. So, manufacturers should change the package design irregularly and try to analyze the merits and drawbacks to improve the package. 3.The results also revealed that brand image have notable influence on purchase intention. It represents that brand image play a significant role in a consumer¡¦s purchasing process. Manufacturers should pass through the basic threshold, or their products would not be acceptant by consumers.

The main subject of this study is about Taiwanese girls and ladies clothing brand called Scottish House, and to discuss the consumer whether or not be influenced by extrinsic cues such as image of the country of origin, brand image and prices when purchasing clothing, thereby affecting the perceived quality and purchase intention. The main conclusions of the study are as follows: 1. Image of COO and COD will indeed have a positive impact on perceived quality, indicating that female consumers of Scottish House think the image of COO and COD make them feel that the clothing has high quality. And the impact of image of COD on perceived quality is more than image of COO. 2. Brand image will also have a positive impact on perceived quality and the influence of brand image of the Scottish House on perceived quality is the strongest over image of COO and COD. 3. Perceived price will have a positive impact on perceived quality, and the female customer regards Scottish House as high price. However, the influence of perceived price on perceived quality is far lower than the image of COO and COD. 4. Perceived quality will have a positive impact on purchase intention, customers thinks Scottish House has high quality and thus increase their willingness to buy. The conclusions above are significant to the management in the following aspects. 1. COD is relatively important. 2. Brand image is a key extrinsic cue for judging product quality. 3. Price has a limitation to explain product quality. 4. High product quality leads to high purchase intention.

Word of mouth has been playing an essential role while consumers make their purchase decision since ever, and its diffusion is becoming much faster via the internet nowadays. Surfing the internet gathering information before making the purchase, the so-called ¡uWisdom of Crowds¡vshopping pattern is taking its shape and possibly going to become the main trend in the future. Thus, electronic word of mouth does play an important part during the process of consumers¡¦ decision making, and more and more consumers start to ponder what to believe on the internet. As a result, trust is becoming the key factor if the consumers can take electronic word of mouth into their consideration or not. This research discusses how message sideness appeal and emotion in electronic word of mouth affect consumers¡¦ trust under a positively framed message and a negative framed message. This research adopts experimental method, distributes questionnaire and analyze the data with SPSS12.0. The results present message sideness appeal and emotion have impacts on consumers¡¦ trust. Two-sided appeal can cause higher consumers¡¦ trust than one-sided appeal whether under a positively framed message or a negative framed message. Emotion also plays an important part between message sideness and consumers¡¦ trust during the process of diffusion of electronic word of mouth. The results can not only help the word-of-mouth senders to develop an appropriate writing pattern to make electronic word of mouth more credible and effective, but also provide the business a brand-new point of view and some practical suggestions to develop a new marketing strategy.

Traditionally speaking, some firms believe that great brand awareness will affect consumers¡¦ purchasing intention and bring much more profit in returns. Hence, a large number of entrepreneurs are spending a tremendous amount of capital on enhancing their brands and brand awareness but they often ignore the importance of word-of-mouth communication on internet. Recently, the internet has become much more popular and common than decades ago and such channel has changed consumers¡¦ purchasing habits. In fact, there are more consumers who share their experience on those products and services that they have used through internet. Furthermore, there are also more consumers who use internet to receive the information that they need for specific products and services. Thus, the importance and effectiveness of ¡§word-of-month of communication¡¨ on internet are much more important than the traditional ¡§word-of-mouth communication¡¨. This research study will be focused on hotels in Kenting area to discuss the effectiveness of purchasing intentions based on the brand awareness of that hotel and messages from the word-of-mouth communication on internet. More importantly, this research study will use customers¡¦ involvement as moderators to further understand the relationships between brand awareness & purchasing intentions, and word-of-mouth communication on internet & purchasing intentions. This research study has chosen two hotels in Kenting area. One hotel has high brand awareness while the other one has low brand awareness. This dissertation has also conducted on-line research based on their word-of-mouth communication on internet and the questionnaire participants are customers who have been to Kenting hotels. After collecting all data, this research has discovered that a hotel¡¦s brand awareness will affect customers¡¦ purchasing intentions. In other words, higher the brand awareness, more purchasing intentions from consumers. In addition, messages from word-of-mouth communication on internet will also affect customers¡¦ purchasing intentions. When the word-of-mouth communication on internet is negative, there will be fewer customers with lower purchasing intentions. Yet, the messages from word-of-mouth communication on internet will have higher effectiveness than the brand awareness of that specific hotel. Nevertheless, consumers¡¦ involvement will not affect the brand awareness, word-of-mouth communication on internet, and purchasing intentions. Last, the conclusion of this research study will provide some practical recommendations for hotel owners. Key words: brand awareness, word-of-mouth on internet, customers¡¦ involvement, and purchasing intentions.

The online consumer engagement is becoming very significant for companies striving to build their relationship with their consumers. Social media gives an opportunity not only to reach consumers in a passive way, but to engage them in active communication and to upload content that is consequently updated and drawing followers´ attention. Successful online consumer engagement can improve consumers’ loyalty and trust in the brand. Therefore, it is important for a company to be aware of actions that can encourage consumer engagement on social media. The goal of this study is to help marketers achieve higher consumer engagement that will consequently lead to more loyal customers.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine what kind of factors that can influence consumers’ intention and how do Swedish consumers evaluate these factors to purchase grocery products through the Internet. Background: E-commerce has been a widespread environment for consumers and online shopping also becomes more and more popular nowadays. However, in Sweden, although there is huge amount of online users, online grocery shopping is still in an early stage. Theory: For this paper the Theory of Planned Behavior was used, as well as a range of factors that are commonly used in existing literature on this field of research. Method: Both quantitative and Qualitative method were used to collect primary data and semi- structured interviews were conducted with participants with similar demographics. Conclusion: Combined with previous literature, questionnaire and interviews conducted, relevant factors are brought up to be analyzed. Situational factors which include perceived product quality, perceived product price, weather, perceived potential risks, delivery cost, delivery time, types of product, and time saving. The study shows that above factors all have impact on online consumers’ purchasing intention with different levels.

In recent decades, the growth of international trade and delocalisation been increasing with the advent of globalisation and nationalisation. Consequently, a proliferation of hybrid or bi-national products has emerged in the research of international marketing. A large body of studies agree that country of origin (COO) plays an important role on product evaluation, since a product consists of an array of information cues, and intrinsic (physical appearance) and extrinsic (price, brand or COO) compositions. There is a strong evidence that consumers usually use COO as one of the most important cues when making a judgement about a product. However, bi-national products raise a particular issue because they are associated to both country of manufacture (COM) and country of design (COD) constructs. The interaction effects between both cues are found to have a more powerlful effect than when only cue is presented (Bertoli and Resciniti, 2012). This study intends to decompose the COO construct into COM and COD constructs. Moreover, the roles of COM and COD on customers’ purchase intentions are investigated in order to provides practical implications for the sportswear industry, as well as consumption insights relating to the emerging market, Thailand. This research provides an in-depth examination of COM, COD and product involvement on consumers’ purchase intentions and customer perceived value (CPV). Thus, the research measures the effects of product familiarity in order to infer how consumers use country-related information in purchase decision-making. In addition, the research clarifies the role of CPV, which remains unclear regarding how consumers develop a product’s value through informational cues (COM and COD). Moreover, the previous research have only examined the outcomes of perceived quality as influenced by COO. Hence, this research intends to bring all dimensions of CPV to investigate whether the combined effects of COM and COD can have either a positive or a negative impact on customer’s value. A model of CPV is developed by Sweeney and Soutat (2001), which consists of quality, social, price and emotional values. A quantitative approach using experimental research design was conducted in Bangkok, Thailand for the purposes of this study, with a pilot test to ascertain the variables used in the main experiment: product involvement, favourable/least favourable COM and COD images. The experiment was designed to measure the relationship between constructs, of a high involvement product, namely sports trainers, and a low involvement product, namely sports t-shirt. The US and China were selected as the most and the least favourite COD, resepectively. Meanwhile, Japan and China were selected as the most and least favourite COM, respectively. Data analysis techniques such as analysis of varaince (ANOVA), multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and t-test were employed for hypothesis testing. The results of this research demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the interaction effects of country image and product involvement. The study confirms that COD is the salient cue for the evaluation of sportswear products in emerging countries. However, the level of product involvement does not influence the consumer’s decisions when COD and COM are both presented. Thus, the roles of COM, COD and product invovlement play an important role in evaluating overall CPV. The key contribution of this research is in its practical, theoretical and methodological implications to international marketing communications toward the sportswear industry. It offers the insights of two informational cues (COM and COD) to explain the phenomenon of bi-national products for unknown or new products.