Search results

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of China’s image as a country on consumers’ evaluations of brands. Drawing on the literature pertaining to country images and country-of-origin effect, a research model was developed to evaluate country image, corporate image and brand image.

To test the model and investigate the effects of country, corporate and brand image on brand attitude and purchase intention, a survey was conducted that examined Korean consumers’ attitudes toward well-known Chinese brands.

China’s country image was found to comprise four dimensions: political image, economic image, citizen image and country relationship image. Country image had a direct positive effect on brand attitude, and through brand attitude, country image had an indirect positive effect on purchase intention. Corporate image and brand image had a positive effect on brand attitude and a direct positive effect on purchase intention. In addition, country image had a positive effect on corporate image, while through corporate image, country image had an indirect positive effect on brand image.

These findings not only offer theoretical evidence for research on China’s country image, but also provide empirical evidence to support the “going global” strategies of Chinese enterprises.

Through a literature review, we found four potential research topics that are rarely studied in the extant literature, i.e. the missing link between web site quality and flow, an integrative relationships between web site quality, flow, customer satisfaction, and relationship intention even though part of the integrative relationships have been investigated in the previous studies, those flow‐related consumer behaviors in C2C e‐marketplaces, and cross‐national studies on the flow‐related consumer behaviors in the East‐Asian domain. Thus, we attempted to explore the relationships between web site quality, flow, customer satisfaction, and relationship intention in Chinese and Korean C2C e‐marketplaces as well as their cross‐national similarities and differences.

In all, 212 Chinese and 219 Korean online shoppers were surveyed to conduct the above research agenda by structural equation modeling.

Web site quality had some effect on flow and satisfaction in both countries, but different results between the countries were found for the dimensions of web site quality. Flow has a positive impact on satisfaction, but the effect in China was greater than that in Korea. Both flow and satisfaction had a positive effect on relationship intention in the two countries.

There has been little research that addressed the above four research topics respectively or in combination. This study investigates the integrative model between web site quality and flow‐related consumer behaviors in C2C e‐marketplaces. The paper provides empirical evidence of online consumer behaviors in China and Korea, which will help global e‐commerce managers/practitioners in their development of strategies and tactics for the East‐Asian markets.

Urban spatial form influences the social, economic, and ecological development modes of the city. The spatial form during the urbanization of Hanjiang River Basin in Southern Shaanxi needs to be studied. In this study, research methodologies on urban spatial form in China and abroad were summarized. The concept of ecology background was applied, and the research framework for urban spatial form, which integrated the background, framework, core, axis, cluster, and skin, was established. Valley cities in the Hanjiang River Basin in Southern Shaanxi were classified into wide valley, narrow valley, and canyon cities. The spatial form characteristics of these three types of valley cities were discussed. A case study based on a typical city-Yang County-was conducted to discuss the characteristics of the aforementioned six elements of urban spatial form. Finally, spatial form characteristics were summarized. These characteristics provide a basis for the study of the small valley urban spatial form in the Hanjiang River Basin in Southern Shaanxi.