Research article

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Accounting for Customer Loyalty Programmes Janja Limpapakul Pages 1 - 16    Download PDF  Article preview Cite Abstract In recent years, many business entities have widely adopted the sales promotion strategy, involving the offer of incentives, granted mostly in the form of award credits, to customers as part of their sales transactions. The customers can then use award credits to obtain free or discounted products or services in the future. Previously related accounting practice, called ?the Incremental Cost Approach?, pointed to the recognition of the whole amount of initial sales transaction as revenue on the date of sales transaction, and the recognition of obligating costs or expenses in supplying awards to customers as selling expenses in the accounting period, in which initial sales transaction takes place. Federation of Accounting Professions (FAP) is currently preparing ?TFRI Draft Interpretation No. 13: Customer Loyalty Programmes? for business entities, which grant award credits to customers, in order to use it as an accounting guidance as well as develop accounting standards in Thailand to be more internationalized and more acceptable. According to TFRI No. 13, accounting practice namely ?the Deferred Revenue Approach? is employed to recognize the award credits given to the customers as part of sales transaction. Therefore, the consideration received for the sales of goods or services should be allocated to the award credits based on fair value of the credits. The consideration allocated to the award credits should be recorded as prepaid revenue or deferred revenue, and it should proportionately be recognized as revenue when customers use the awards to redeem. The alteration definitely has influences on a variety of business entities engaging ?Customer Loyalty Programmes?. Apart from changing accounting policy concerning the recognition of revenues and expenses from ?the Incremental Cost Approach? to ?the Deferred Revenue Approach? that result in the deferment of profit recognition, main problematic issue of the compliance with TFRI No. 13 is measurement of the fair value of the award credits. TFRI No. 13 has defined the ?fair value? of the award credits as ?the amount for which the award credits could be sold separately?. The practical application for measuring the fair value of the award credits is presented in the Appendix of this TFRI. Moreover, the entities should record statistical data on the subject of all given award credits and the proportion of awards expected to be redeemed in order to determine the expected redemption rate. The gathering of reliable information can be time-consuming; hence, it is expected that related business entities are currently preparing these information. The entities, which usually involve in ?Customer Loyalty Programmes? and provide various products or services as well as offer many types of incentives to the customers such as airlines, department stores and convenient stores, may therefore design pricing models of their products or services which incorporate the associated variables such as fair value per award credits, number of award credits outstanding, expected redemption rate, and forfeiture rate. It is to accommodate the compliance with TFRI No.13, which will be announced to be effective by FAP in the near future.
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The Japanese Elderly care service Market Opening: the case studies of the Filipino and Indonesian care gives Patnaree Srisuphaolarn and Nuttapol Assarut Pages 17 - 39    Download PDF  Article preview Cite Abstract The Economic Partnership Agreement between Japan and the Philippines and Indonesia in 2007 and 2008 on the movement of natural persons in elderly care giving services reflects the Japanese government attempts to resolve problems that are rooted from being an aging society via international trade in services. Thailand also urged to conclude on the similar agreement but the negotiation is prolonged to the next few years. Thus, this article aims to review literatures and basic data published by the Japanese government, Japanese academia and Japanese mass media as well as Japanese elderly opinion in addition to case studies of the Filipino and Indonesian care givers in Japan. Because the access to these data is still very limited in Thailand, the authors intend to render information for concerned parties in the trade negotiation, public policy setting and the preparation of labor mobility management in the future.
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An Implementation of An Automated System for Summarizing Thai Customer Reviews Trithep Thamrongluck and janjao Mongkolnavin Pages 40 - 62    Download PDF  Article preview Cite Abstract The main objective of this study is to develop an automatic system for summarizing Thai customer reviews which would summarize customer reviews posted on e-commerce websites. The system would extract features of product that customers pay attention and summarize whether opinion that they have towards the features is positive or negative. In this study, we applied techniques such as word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, creation of seedlist of opinion words, feature extraction, and feature orientation identification in different parts of the system. The study is also aimed at discovering related system configurations that suit customer reviews written in Thai. We conducted the experiment on four groups of cosmetic product reviews from www.jeban.com which is a website for sharing customer opinion towards cosmetic products and compared the result from the system against summary of the same set of customer reviews obtained from three marketing experts. The result shows that the accuracy of the prototype system is acceptable. The contexts that are appropriate for applying the system are also suggested.
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Impacts of Banner Advertising Formats on Brand Awareness, Product Knowledge, Annoyance and Clickthrough Kornpreeya Aowpitak Pages 63 - 85    Download PDF  Article preview Cite Abstract The number of Internet users has increased continuously in this past decade. The popularity of Internet has brought us new business opportunities as well as new business models. Internet has been used as a new communication channel to convey information and advertising messages from Internet vendors to their customers. The major advantage of internet media advertising is that it can attract a large group of customers globally. Banner advertising is a kind of Internet advertising. With new information technology such as computer graphic and multimedia, more interesting banners have been developed to attract more customer attention. The purpose of this research was to study the impact of four different interactive advertising banner formats, which were (1) in-page video format, (2) expandable format, (3) floating format, and (4) between-the-page format, on four factors of our interests. These factors of interest included (1) brand awareness, (2) product knowledge, (3) annoyance, and (4) clickthrough.Also, two more factors, congruence of content on advertising banner and content of website as well as personal innovativeness,were considered as moderator variables. Data was collected from 392 subjects using a questionnaire and eight websites. Hypothesis tests were able to verify that four different advertising banner formats had significant impacts on brand awareness, product knowledge, annoyance and clickthrough. The study also indicated that these impacts were higher when the content on advertising banner and content on the website was incongruent and when the visitors of website had low level of personal innovativeness.
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Factors Affecting Thai Companies? Decisions for Foreign Direct Investment in Russian Federation and Somchanok Passakonjaras Pages 86 - 107    Download PDF  Article preview Cite Abstract The objective of this project is to study factors affecting Thai companies? decisions for foreign direct investment (FDI) in Russian Federation (abbreviated as Russia), entry modes and their reasons for choosing these modes. The primary data were collected by in-depth interviews from the executives of a feed mill & a pig farm company, and a cosmetics manufacturer who already have FDI in Russia. An entrepreneur who plans to open a Thai restaurant in Moscow was also interviewed. Further information was collected from the official documents and interviews of FDI-related organizations. The findings showed that FDI in Russia from Thai companies could be well explained by John H. Dunnings?s Eclectic Paradigm (or OLI Paradigm) that FDI occurs when a firm has Ownership Advantages (O), Location Specific Advantages (L), and Internalization Advantages (I). The main reasons of the investments were as follows: 1) to take advantage of operational technology and managerial skills, 2) to take advantage of size or potential of the market, 3) to take advantage of sources of raw materials (also referred to as a factor of production), 4) to reduce lead time and logistics cost, 5) to develop a competitive strategy to take advantage of price, and 6) to avoid the leak of competitive knowledge. The most often cited reasons were market-seeking. Wholly-owned subsidiaries were chosen as an entry mode by manufacturing companies in order to maintain the power of decision making and controlling. A joint venture mode was chosen by service business for a benefit from partner skills. It was found that Linkage-Leverage-Learning Model (LLL Model) by John A. Mathew could be used to explain a Thai restaurant case more clearly than OLI Paradigm.