The appearance of free newspaper already gains on a considerable part of the existing newspaper market, and the free newspaper distributed widely free of charge around subway stations attracts a good response among the youth who are familiar with the ...
The appearance of free newspaper already gains on a considerable part of the existing newspaper market, and the free newspaper distributed widely free of charge around subway stations attracts a good response among the youth who are familiar with the internet with the advantages to read it casually without paying any cost.
However, where as free newspaper increases rapidly, a systematic study on the users of free newspaper is very insufficient. The argument over the existing free newspaper has been made mostly concerning the marketability of free newspaper. Keeping it in mind in this research, we intended to consumers' using behavior on free newspaper in the phase of the use and gratification approach focused on the users who use free newspaper practically.
We attempted to examine free newspaper users' motivation of the use and analyze how the using motivation affected any correlation on consumers' perceived values, using satisfaction, loyalty, reuse intention etc.
The survey methods for this research were planned for the respondents to reply to the survey questionnaire for themselves with the self-administration method, and sampled the survey objects targeting 206 men and women in all the age bracket in Seoul ․Gyeonggi province, and used 171 persons' responses in the final research analysis.
① Free newspaper users' using motivation through above factor analysis consists of four areas of diversity, convenience, economy and recreation. As the results of analysis, free newspaper users' using motivation was the highest in economy, convenience and diversity being average, with the using motivation of recreation being low. As the result of its cross analysis according to respondents' general affairs, it showed some differences in the diversity by the school background.
② As the results of the regression analysis on the effects of using motivation upon perceived values, the higher the motivation of the use of economy, diversity and convenience was, the higher the perceived values on free newspaper became. As the results of the regression analysis on the effects of using motivation upon the overall satisfaction, the higher the motivation of the use of recreation, convenience, diversity and economy was, the higher the overall satisfaction became. In the results of the regression analysis on the effects of using motivation upon the satisfaction of the use of the articles and information, the higher the using motivation of diversity, recreation and convenience was, the higher the satisfaction of the use of articles and information was.
③ In the results of the regression analysis on the effects of perceived values upon the overall satisfaction, the higher perceived values were, the higher the overall satisfaction got. In the results of the regression analysis on the influences of perceived values upon the using satisfaction of articles and information, the higher perceived values were, the higher the using satisfaction of articles and information became. As the results of the regression analysis of perceived values upon royalty, the higher perceived values were, the higher royalty became.
④ As the results of the regression analysis on the influences of perceived values, user gratification and royalty upon reuse intention, the higher royalty was compared with other factors, the higher reuse intention appeared.
Free newspaper can work as an incentive device to develop new newspaper readers. Therefore, it is presumed that if newspaper readers are developed through free newspaper, the development potential of newspaper readers will get higher through diverse media or methods in future. This suggests that free newspaper can cultivate the habit of young consumers' newspaper reading and lead to the effects to develop a class of potential readers of pay newspaper in the long run.
In this research we examined the differences between the using behavior of free newspaper and that of other information media in the angle of the use and gratification theory targeting adult men and women. And as we cast the significance of the research on the consumer side. we have to progress a more subdivided research including personal character and psychological properties besides free newspaper users' using and gratification desire. As we verified only the variables concerning the use and gratification of free newspaper, we shall have to study precedent factors and control variables with the theoretical validity in the future research more comprehensively and systematically. In addition, as we executed a survey in this research targeting male and female adults residing in the metropolitan area and drew the results based on this analysis, we shall have to generalize the research targeting young boys and girls and the national recruitment group in future.
Based on the significance and the limitation of this research, we will extend the consumer study on future free newspaper and follow up more detailed study about the competition between free newspaper and existing media.