With changing media environment and consumer trends, business entities recognize that most effective marketing strategy is to inform and publicize consumers of their brand excellence in more efficient and natural manner. To this end, they make more po...
With changing media environment and consumer trends, business entities recognize that most effective marketing strategy is to inform and publicize consumers of their brand excellence in more efficient and natural manner. To this end, they make more positive efforts to implement and facilitate emerging two-way communications (e.g. Internet, mobile telecom and Internet Protocol Television [IPTV]) with consumers beyond traditional ways of communication.
Latest worldwide popularization of SNS (Social Networking Service) and rapidly increasing population of SNS users contribute to proactive deployment of blog marketing. Furthermore, there is a new blog marketing technique called ‘Press Blog’ introduced in SNS market with a view to get over the boundaries of conventional brand blogs, that is, relatively low accessibility and information availability primarily due to one-way communication message and membership process.
Press blog is advantageous in various aspects: Product information and experiences can be naturally posted within personal blog of high reliable informant called ‘Power Blogger’ and any updated posts can be exposed simultaneously to the public, if searched.
Thus, this study sought to determine potential effects of press blog's feature strengths over traditional brand blog on personal attitudes to press blog, and also sought to determine potential effects of personal attitudes to press blog on personal attitudes to the brand of press blog as well as purchase intention. And it sought to determine potential effects of personal attitudes to the brand of press blog on purchase intention.
Based on examinations of preceding academic literatures on brand blog, this study set three major feature factors of press blog, such as accessibility, information availability and reliability. For the purpose of empirical verification, this study used a questionnaire survey on the users of press blog. Next, 237 valid questionnaires out of total 259 questionnaires collected from the users (except 22 invalid or incomplete ones) were finally adopted for data analysis. All collected data were statistically processed using SPSS WIN12.0 for reliability analysis, factor analysis, correlation analysis, multiple regression analysis and simple regression analysis.
According to factor analysis, it was found that there were 2 common factors in effect, that is, attitudes to press blog and attitudes to brand of press blog; Press blog has no stationary position such as business web site or brand blog, but relies on such posts as written by common users within blog site, so users recognize the press blog itself as a brand by way of posted introductions to certain brand or user review about it, rather than have any normalized awareness about press blog. This may have an ultimate and significant meaning that such natural and active communications with consumers as desired by business entities cause users (i.e. consumers) to be unaware of or identify with press blog itself as a part of intermediary media. Thus, the step of hypothetical test in this study sought to construct aforementioned two common factors, i.e. personal attitudes to press blog and personal attitudes to brand of press blog as one variable, i.e. personal attitudes to brand. Based on analysis, major findings of hypothetical test can be summed up as follows:
First, according to hypothetical test on effective determinants on personal attitudes to brand, it was found that reliability was most effective determinant and was followed by information availability and accessibility respectively on a statistical basis. In more details, it was found that the higher extent of reliability, information availability and accessibility was closely associated with the more positive personal attitudes to a brand.
Secondly, according to hypothetical test on potential effects of personal attitudes to brand upon purchase intention, it was found that there were significantly positive (+) correlations between those two factors. That is, it was found that personal attitudes to brand had significant effects on purchase intention.
Conclusively, this study has its own implications in that it pointed out why it is necessary for business entities to well manage feature factors of press blog having significant effects on both brand attitudes and purchase intention, and also gave practical suggestions to justify proactive applications of press blog as a means of marketing strategy in the interest of brand management based on these findings.