Data published 5 years ago by Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corp. showed that the rate of growth, of which market scale of foodservice industry amounts to 133 trillion won, was about twice as that of 2001. By 2014, there showed steady growth w...
Data published 5 years ago by Korea Agro-Fisheries & Food Trade Corp. showed that the rate of growth, of which market scale of foodservice industry amounts to 133 trillion won, was about twice as that of 2001. By 2014, there showed steady growth which amounts to 164 trillion won and 2.22 million people who work in foodservice industry, played a large role in the economy. However, since there are too much competition and rapidly changing trends in this industry, it is not easy to go on current actual operating form of foodservice businesses. In order to win this fierce competition, it is important to develop marketing activities which can build brand awareness among consumers and bring out intention to purchase and intention of word-of-mouth. After World Wide Web service was known to the public in 1990s, SNS arrived at the stage of explosive growth since 2000. In a Newsis article in 2016, it clearly reported that in 2014, smartphone usage time of citizens of Korea is longer than TV watching time per day and smart phone emerged as key media for watching video clips in the country. In addition, in an article of Maeil Business Newspaper of 2016, it showed that most companies develop doors to two-way communication with consumers through SNS marketing in order to use it as a marketing tool while analyzing social media channel operation status of top-100 companies as well as public institutions. So, it explained that marketing activities using SNS according to behavior changes of SNS users as well as corporations' recognition and usage, can be important tools which effectively connect to consumers. Since SNS was established for users to use easily communities, customers also show positive and active intentions to accept them. Also, since the side of senders is believed to gain effects of perceived ease of use in terms of avoiding excess costs as marketing tools, in this study, I would like to recognize the effect of foodservice businesses' SNS marketing activities on brand image, purchase intention and intention of word-of-mouth.
For data collection, I conducted a survey mainly targeting customers who have ever experienced in foodservice business marketing activities via social network services. During 18 days from Oct. 1st to 18th, 2016, questionnaires were distributed, in total, 182 of the 200 questionnaires were returned and among these, excluding the insincere respondents and the missing values, total 147 were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) 23 IBM.
The results were as follows. Of the SNS marketing characteristics suggested by the investigator, correlations among brand image, purchase intention, intention of word-of-mouth and three factors such as vividness, informativeness and reliability were analyzed and it appeared that reliability showed the strongest positive correlation with purchase intention and the next strongest positive correlation with brand image. Also informativeness showed the strongest positive correlation with purchase intention and the next strongest positive correlation with vividness. Analysis on vividness indicated the largest positive correlation with purchase intention and the next largest positive correlation with brand image. Brand image was positively correlated with purchase intention and intention of word-of-mouth was positively correlated with purchase intention. As the analysis results indicated, in general, correlation coefficients related to brand image, purchase intention and vividness were high and there were important conclusions drawn which indicate that these factors are significant in this study.
Hopefully, the results of this study could be used as preliminary data on marketing via SNS of foodservice businesses which are currently improving steadily in the fierce competition and also it
is believed to be necessary for more and more foodservice businesses to recognize and practically use connectivity among characteristics of SNS marketing, consumers' behavior attitudes and brand image so that doors to communication can be established for two-way communication with consumers.