In the hospitality and tourism sectors, service robots have become increasingly adopted by companies to facilitate frontline service to reduce human labor, improve efficiency and provide better customer experience. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified consumers’ demand for service robots to reduce human contact. To better understand the impact of service robots in the service sector, researchers have been examining user behavior of different technologies. While prior empirical studies have mainly focused on utilitarian-based acceptance models, other perspectives, such as the interpersonal relations, have been largely overlooked. With the ubiquitous of social media, people become connected but alone, leading to negative effects on interpersonal relations.

By carrying out experimental research, the authors aim to explore the influence of animosity on tourists’ travel intention. Although animosity is proven to have a direct negative impact on consumer’s purchase intention in many other product categories in the consumer marketing domain (Moufakkir, 2014), little has been investigated into its impact on tourists’ behavioural intention within the tourism context. It is a first study in tourism using experiment method to examine the relationship between Chinese tourists’ animosity triggered by different scenarios and their outbound travel intention. By analysing and comparing types of animosity and price promotion, the research contributes to the existing literature in both consumer behaviour and tourism via better understanding the impact of attitude (animosity) on behaviour (travel intention) and the relative marketing application (price promotions). This study has discovered that although animosity triggered by unexpected incidents and political disputes will lead to significant decrease in travel intention, even deep price cut cannot reverse the unwillingness to travel to those destinations when animosity exists. This research is particularly important for countries/regions that are seeing an increasing number of Chinese tourists and investing heavily to provide tailored products and services to this target market, negative feelings, particularly animosity should be taken into consideration when developing tourism strategies (Richter, 1983).

This interpretive and longitudinal study investigates how a group of Chinese students consume global brands of American origins, in China and in the UK. More specifically, this research examines how meanings attached to global food brands travel abroad with consumers and investigates the relationship between brand consistency and brand meanings across national boundaries. Findings from a thematic analysis of longitudinal data collected through focus group interviews over a nine-month period, reveal that some brand meanings are context and culture specific (contextual meanings) while others meanings travel with consumers across borders (core meanings). Theoretically, this study shows how global brands provide a platform of structural meanings, ideas and practices that are global and globalising in themselves, allowing a degree of fluidity and adaptation in relation to the local context of consumption.

With the impact of globalization, businesses nowadays are searching for new ways to compete more effectively in today’s business marketplace. Companies that have already performed successfully in the external market but cannot perform well with their internal market may find themselves at a disadvantage in the long term (Ralston et al., 2006). Whilst businesses often spend significant amounts on their campaigns to attract external customers, they may also need to consider the internal market place and specifically their internal customers’ needs, i.e. employees, as they often have a significant impact on external market performance and profitability (Lings and Greenley, 2009). In light of fairly extensive literature on the employee management, the idea of viewing employees as internal customers was initiated from the concept of internal marketing and there are an increasing number of studies attempting to develop the concept of internal market orientation (IMO) to further facilitate the internal market exchange feasibility.Whilst employment relationship research has been served as a useful proxy for employee attitude and behavior (Choi & Peng, 2015), the notion that IMO could serve as a predictor of firm performance success has not yet been fully examined in the extant literature. Investigating such relationships combines the adoption of marketing perspectives with strategic human resource management across the organization per se. As such, drawing on data collected from 825 respondents across three different managerial levels in 275 organizations, this study contributes to the pertinent literature by developing a framework to measure the impact of IMO on organizational performance from the internal and external perspective as well as at the individual and the departmental level. Specifically, our findings reveal that IMO, consisting of internal information generation, internal information communication and responsiveness positively enhances employee retention, employee commitment, interdepartmental connectedness and significantly reduces interdepartmental conflict. In turn, given the exception of employee retention, these serve to significantly influence organizational performance. Our study provides several implications for scholars and management, as well as outlining some useful directions for future research.