Financial Big Bang in 1999 kicked off the entire deregulations in securities broking business for individual clients. Many of new brokers rushed setting up the business and started the tough competition including existing brokers. Many of studies and papers in the past focused on the competition and tried explaining it with the marketing perspective. This paper aimed to try explaining the competition with the marketing and system development perspective.

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Marketers must retain the existing customers in a mature market. Several studies have been conducted on customer retention. In this study we investigate the relationship between customer retention management and churn rates through a case study of Japan's cellular phone market. The aim of this study is to understand how customer retention strategies are implemented and how they work in a business context. The paper suggests relationship between customer retention strategies and institutional changes in the cellular phone market.

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This paper analyzes how a company build up the sustained competitive advantage of Information systems and business systems at business transformation and how the sustainability are developed in detail by case-based approach. The exploratory research from this case study shows that the effectiveness of the developing IS by insourcing to integrate accumulated business know-how and that the activity to develop IS drives the evolution of business systems

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In this research, I explored how marketing information systems help to link diversified communities of practice, and create market intelligence. After reviewing of previous researches which regard shared information system as a "boundary object", I examined a case study of one company which succeeded to achieve competitiveness by using information system.

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This article shows a conceptual model about the organizational use of information technology (IT) tools in new product development (NPD) in business enterprises. This model is based on the organizational contingency theory, proposing that the gap between IT need and usage affects IT usage performance, which in turn influences NPD performance. IT need is determined by environmental uncertainty, organizational strategy and the quality of the project. IT usage is defined by the scope, frequency and lifecycle of IT tool use, which is affected by technological, financial and organizational factors. The positive research regarding the use of IT tools in new product development has only recently begun to accumulate. Therefore, this article contributes to the evolution of this research in that it attempts to propose a model that encompasses various factors by integrating IT usage model in the organization, the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the model of division integration in new product development.

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The purpose of this paper to clarify Business-to-Consumer (B-to-C) communication and Consumer-to-Consumer Communication (C-to-C) influences on brand loyalty. The author of more recent studies have proposed that online community is regarded as a new tool for B-to-B and C-to-C communications, and online communication provides consumer with an opportunity of developing of B-to-C and C-to-C relationships. Through this empirical case study on brand loyalty to the Coop Kobe website, the author hopes to help the readers understand more clearly the concept of Business to Consumer Relationship Marketing (BCRM).

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This article attempts to develop a new conceptual framework for information process in persuasive communication. It begins with an overview of the controversy in persuasive communication research area between dual-process model and uni-model which was proposed by Kruglanski and his group at the end of 1990's. The article then brings together insights from previous researches on communication, and sets forth a new model of persuasive communication process model named dual-process dual-layer model. Finally with re-considering the controversy described above, we try to propose an answer to the controversy by using our new model.

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The purpose of this study is exploring the materiality in cyberspace. In this context, materiality is building a high-performance web server and electricity charges. This cost can be economized by cloud computing services. However, there are limits of using these services. This paper discusses whether to adopt cloud from transaction cost economics. It clarifies all of the facts behind cloud computing. Next, crowdsourcing also has transaction costs. Concretely there is a paradox of managing open community. Thinking about 2ch and nico nico douga, several crucial elements are outlined.

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When the internet marketer place undue emphasis on customer-contacts in the Internet, the customer image might be mistaken. In the past, the salesman, the field engineer, the call center and etc. have played an important role as a sensory organ of undertaking activities. Recently, enterprises are sensing the frequency, the traffic line and even the part of clicking its own HP and others' HP. The internet marketer needs now to know how the customer clicks HP, and to merge with existing information about customers.

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Focusing on Japanese companies, this paper discusses the human-related potential problems concerning information security, which foreign companies may face in Thailand. The potential problems are predicted by using Hofstede's cultural dimensions. To evaluate the magnitudes of potential of the problems, a measure named Level of Potential (LoP) is adopted. The severity of each problem is calculated based on the results of an empirical survey conducted in Thailand. The practicability of LoP is examined. The relations between the conditions of the problems and the respondents' profiles of Japanese companies are tested statistically. It is proved that LoP can predict potential problems to a certain extent as far as Thai business environment is concerned. The problem "Using previous company's confidential information." is found to be the severest. Japanese manufacturing companies are recommended to pay more attention to female employees because they tend to share information easily, neglecting "Need-to-Know" principle.

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This research shows how the introduction of a regional SNS by Yatsushiro municipal government in Japan has been transforming the activity system of regional public communication and thus facilitating endogenous and sustainable regional development since 2004. Using the activity theory as an analytical framework, it compares and analyzes the activity system of regional public communication mediated by a regional SNS with the one mediated by conventional media. Through the operation of the regional SNS, Yatsushiro municipal government has built a communication platform that promotes sharing of interests, information, and knowledge among diverse citizens.

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Recently, local governments have begun to outsource information provision to private web companies, so as to use their own local portal sites to disseminate governmental information alongside private sector information. However, this approach involves some issues that must be addressed. First, there has been no attempt to determine the public's views regarding requirements to be met by public information providers. Second, there has been no attempt to clarify how the public evaluates, in terms of business continuity and information reliability, the credibility of private companies to which such information provision is outsourced. The aim of this research is to examine these issues via resident survey analysis.

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Collaborative filtering methods are frequently used for predicting users' preferences in recommender systems, such as those used for recommending movies, music, or articles. These methods have a large impact on businesses, because the volume of content they offer is tremendous, and it is important to support users' ability to make informed choices from among the available content. To increase sales and improve customer loyalty, many e-commerce companies, such as Amazon and Netflix, have adopted recommender systems. However, these companies generally rely on user ratings for the content they offer, and it is usually difficult or expensive to obtain such ratings data. Hence, we need a high-quality recommender system that uses only binary data, such as historical purchasing data, without ratings. Binary data, however, is very simple, and it is therefore difficult to express a relationship in detail between users and items by using only such simple methods. This paper proposes a recommender system based on a graph-partitioning method to solve the problems through a two-phase approach: We generate a model that expresses the relationships between various items and implements an appropriate grouping by using a graph-partitioning method. We then use our proposed algorithms to determine accurate recommendations. A comparison of our results with those obtained from traditional methods reveals that our method is more practical for businesses usage.

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This paper identifies some key characteristics of the implementation of the waterfall process model of software development that is in adoption by the Japanese software industry. It emerged in the hierarchical structure of the industry and evolved to overcome some of the shortcomings of the waterfall process model. Despite the common view of the waterfall model as being rigid, the Japanese version of it comes with flexibility and pragmatism. The element that adds these to it is called "suri-awase," which is a method of rapidly resolves mismatches between any two stages in the process.

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