Introduction Although hotel employees are trained to deliver the best service, service failures may happen at any time because service is delivered by people to people (Susskind, 2002). Moreover, customers are more impressed by failed services than good services (Titz, 2001). According to the recovery paradox, customers have higher satisfaction level after experiencing a service failure if they receive satisfactory service recovery or compensation (McCollough & Bharadwaj, 1992). With the development of information communication technology and mobile device, customers can receive personalized services in recent days (Migacz, Zou, & Petrick, 2018). They also can easily share their experience on the online review platforms such as TripAdvisor, as well as select hotels based on shared online reviews (Liu & Park, 2015; Nieto-Garaía, Muñoz-Gallego, & González-Benito, 2017). Therefore, it is important for hotel managers to understand the mechanisms for service failure and recovery strategy. Thus, this study aims to examine the relationship between different emotion, customer engagement and brand loyalty under the context from the luxury hotels in China that different service failure compensation strategies are adopted. Particularly, the following two research questions are aimed to be addressed: First, do emotions (anger, regret and helplessness) significantly affect hotel brand loyalty through customer engagement? Second, does compensation type (immediate vs. delayed) significantly affect customer engagement and hotel brand loyalty based on customers’ emotions? The results of this study will benefit industry practitioners for formulating effective service failure recovery strategies. Theoretical frameworks and hypotheses development Stimulus-Organism-Response framework Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework is a commonly used form of behavioral research in which events or occurrences are said to be the result of certain stimulus leading to a certain response, following a set of organism processes (Kim & Lennon, 2013; Mehrabian & Russell, 1974). In behavioral research, the S-O-R theory explains “how” something happens and a variance theory describes “why” (Chiles, 2003). We adopted the S-O-R framework in an attempt to explain the effect of the compensation types (immediate vs. delayed) on hotel brand loyalty. In our research model, customer engagement is used an intervening construct on the causal relationship between emotions of customer (anger and regret as a retrospective emotions, helplessness as a prospective emotion) (Gelbrich, 2010) and hotel brand loyalty. Customer engagement is composed of multidimensional concepts of identification, enthusiasm, attention, absorption, and interaction (So, King, & Spark, 2014). Our model thus explains four basic processes of relationship impact on service failure as “stimulus”, emotions and customer engagement as “organism”, and hotel brand loyalty as “response”. This study also emphasizes compensation type as “moderator”. The model shows how to enhance the understanding of emotions that affect hotel brand loyalty through customer engagement based on the moderating effect of compensations type. Customer engagement It is important for a firm to manage customers to improve a firm’s performance. Customer management has transformed from customer transactions, to relationship marketing, and then engaging customers (Pansari and Kumar 2017). There are different definition about customer engagement and most of them define customer engagement as the activity of the customer toward the firm. For example, Pansari and Kumar (2017) define customer engagement as how customer contributes to the firm by “the mechanics of a customer’s value addition to the firm, either through direct or/and indirect contribution.” Vivek et al. (2012) define customer engagement as “the intensity of an individual’s offerings or organizational activities, which either the customer or the organization initiates” (p.127). It has been discussed that customer engagement has been affected by customer emotion and also has significant impact on behaviour intention and brand loyalty. However it has not been discussed under service failure context and when different types of compensation strategies are employed. This study therefore aims to explore this mechanics. Under hospitality context, So, King and Sparks (2014) develop five factors to measure customer engagement: identification, enthusiasm, attention, absorption, and interaction. Since this study also examine hotel guest customers, we adopt the scale of So et al. (2014) due to its comprehensiveness and consistent context. Service failure and emotion Customer emotion is an important antecedent of customer engagement. Currently firms have been shifted their focus from selling products to emotional connection with their customers (Pansari and Kumar 2017). Positive emotion may enhance customer engagement and thereby improve customer loyalty. But when service failure occurs, customers have different negative emotions including anger, frustration, helplessness, regret amongst others. These negative emotions of customers disappoint customers themselves and reduce customer loyalty. Different emotions may have different impact on customer engagement. Anger often refers to the attributes of others such as the service providers (Weiner, 1985) whereas regret often refers to the service failure locus of customer himself/herself such as the customer is regret to choose this service provider (Roseman, 1991). Both anger and regret refer to retrospective emotions and when customer would like to solve questions they may also negative emotion of helplessness which is called prospective emotions (Davidow, 2003; Gelbrich, 2010). This study aims to examine and differentiate the impact of two retrospective emotions of anger and regret and one prospective emotions of helplessness. The first hypothesis is therefore proposed: H1: Anger has negative impact on customer engagement. H2: Regret has negative impact on customer engagement. H3: Helplessness has negative impact on customer engagement. Service failure compensation Though service providers aim to deliver zero fault service, it is inevitable service failure may occur that may bring customers anger and dissatisfaction and damage the customer loyalty thereby. It is found that compensation is an effective way to comfort and delight the dissatisfied customers. Therefore, it is important to formulate effective compensation strategy when service failure occurs. Different compensation strategies such as monetary or nonmonetary (Fu et al. 2015), immediate or delayed compensation (Boshoff, 1997; Davidow, 2003), may be suitable to different contexts/situations. According to prospect theory, a customer is risk-reverse in case of gains. A customer may value products available now more than products obtained in the future due to the higher certainty of the former. Similarly, immediate compensation has less uncertainty than delayed compensation, and therefore is supposed to have higher value. Therefore customers with anger are assumed to have higher customer engagement when immediately compensated. On the other hand, regret customers attribute failure to himself/herself and therefore less expect compensation. The immediate compensation may lead to unfair and thereby less effect than delayed compensation. Therefore immediate compensation may not always be superior over the delayed one under different contexts. We therefore propose the second hypothesis: H1a: Compensation type (immediate vs. delayed) moderates the relationship between anger and customer engagement. H2a: Compensation type (immediate vs. delayed) moderates the relationship between regret and customer engagement. H3a: Compensation type (immediate vs. delayed) moderates the relationship between helplessness and customer engagement. Brand loyalty Brand loyalty refers to the loyalty of a customer toward the brand both behaviourally and attitudinally (Dick and Basu 1994; Li and Petrick 2008; So, King, Sparks, and Wang 2013). It is a key goal of marketing activities, and its antecedents have been extensively examined such as satisfaction, perceived quality, received value, and brand trust, amongst others. Customer engagement, as the activity of a customer toward to a firm, is naturally viewed to influence brand loyalty. This study therefore adopts brand loyalty as the consequence of customer engagement. Furthermore, we would like to examine if compensation types have moderating effect between customer engagement and brand loyalty. We therefore propose below two hypotheses: H4: customer engagement has positive impact on brand loyalty. H4a: Compensation type (immediate vs. delayed) moderates the relationship between customer engagement and brand loyalty. The research model is shown in Figure 1 where all hypotheses are demonstrated. Our research model is developed based on the S-O-R framework in which emotions are antecedent of customer engagement, and customer engagement impacts hotel brand loyalty. This research model also shows the moderating effects of compensation types has on causal relationships between the aforementioned constructs. Methodology Scenario design Scenario based questionnaire is designed to obtain quantitative data for analysis. Based on the interview with hotel managers/operators, one service failure scenario and two compensation scenarios (immediate and delayed) are designed. In-depth interviews with a couple of hotel managers and guests were conducted to verify the realisation of the scenarios formulated. The questionnaire begins with a screening question: in the previous 12 months have you ever had experience staying in a four- or five-star hotel? The survey would only continue if the answer is “yes”. Then the participant is asked to write down the name of this hotel and read the below service failure scenario thereby. Service failure scenario: Imagine you have checked into this hotel again. During your stay in hotel, you send your coat for laundry. It is a nice coat and you bought it a year ago with the price of 1000RMB. However when you collect the cleaned coat, you notice that there is a damage on your coat which makes you cannot dress this coat anymore. You therefore call the service counter for complain. Immediate and delayed compensation scenarios were designed as follows: Immediate compensation scenario: after 15 minutes, the duty manager of the hotel went to our hotel and expressed his sincere apology. You showed him about the damage and informed him the original price of your coat. The manager offered you the cash compensation with the original price of your coat and you agree with this. After half an hour you received 1000RMB cash as the compensation. Delayed compensation scenario: after 15 minutes, the duty manager of the hotel went to your room and expressed his sincere apology. You showed him about the damage and informed him the original price of your coat. The manager said according to the hotel policy, they need to check how this happened and confirm the price of your coat first before making the compensation for you. After two weeks you left the hotel, you received 1000RMB compensation which is transferred into your bank account directly. Participant emotion is measured after the participants read the service failure scenario and before they read the compensation scenario. Each participant is randomly assigned to be involved in one compensation scenario only. Customer engagement and hotel brand loyalty are measured after the compensation happened. Variable measurement Customer engagement is measured using 25-item scale developed by So et al. (2014) in which five factors are involved: identification, enthusiasm, attention, absorption, and interaction. Particularly, identification is measured by four attributes: “When someone criticizes this brand, it feels like a personal insult”, “When I talk about this brand, I usually say we rather than they”. “This brand’s successes are my successes”. “When someone praises this brand, it feels like a personal compliment”. Enthusiasm is measured by five attributes: “I am heavily into this brand”. “I am passionate about this brand” “I am enthusiastic about this brand” “I feel excited about this brand” “I love this brand”. Attention is measured by five attributes: “I like to learn more about this brand” “I pay a lot of attention to anything about this brand” “Anything related to this brand grabs my attention” “I concentrate a lot on this brand” “I like learning more about this brand” . Absorption is measured by five attributes: “When I am interacting with the brand, I forget everything else around me” “Time flies when I am interacting with the brand” “When I am interacting with brand, I get carried away” “When interacting with the brand, it is difficult to detach myself” “In my interaction with the brand, I am immersed” “When interacting with the brand intensely, I feel happy”. Interaction is measure by five attributes: “In general, I like to get involved in brand community discussions” “I am someone who enjoys interacting with likeminded others in the brand community” “I am someone who likes actively participating in brand community discussions” “In general, I thoroughly enjoy exchanging ideas with other people in the brand community” “I often participate in activities of the brand community”. Three emotion of anger, regret and helplessness are included as the measurement of emotion. Particularly, according to Gelbrich (2010), three attributes are adopted to measure anger “I would feel angry with the hotel/hotel employees”, “I would feel mad with the hotel/hotel employees”, and “I would feel furious about the hotel/hotel employees”. Three statements are employed to measure regret (Tsiros & Mittal 2000): “I would feel sorry for choosing this hotel”, “I regretted choosing this hotel”, and “I should have chosen another hotel”. Four statements are used to measure helplessness (Gelbrich 2010): “I would feel helpless”, “I would feel lost”, “I would feel defenceless”, and “I would feel stranded.” Five statements are used to measure brand loyalty (So, King, Sparks, & Wang 2013): “I would say positive things about this brand to other people.” “I would recommend this brand to someone who seeks my advice.” “I would encourage friends and relatives to do business with this brand.” “I would consider this brand my first choice to buy services.” “I would do more business with this brand in the next few years.” A seven-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (=disagree strongly) to 7 (=agree strongly) is adopted for all measurement. Data collection and analysis method In-depth interview with managers from upscale hotels and customers will be used to finalize scenarios. Opinions of academic experts will be used to revise variable measurements and questionnaires. Convenience sampling method will be adopted to obtain about 400 respondents who has experience of staying at four- or five-stars hotels in China in the previous year. Regarding with data analysis, Partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is used to test the hypotheses proposed. Expected results The manipulation check has been conducted to verify the scenarios designed. The negative relationship between emotions and customer engagement are expected and compensation timing (delayed or immediate) may moderate this relationship. Most importantly, it is expected that this moderating effect varies when different emotions and customer engagement are examined. Contributions The theoretical contributions have three folders. Firstly, this study first considers compensation timing into the examination of relationship between different negative emotions and customer engagement, after service failure occurs. Secondly, this study adopts stimulus-organism-response theory to explore the mechanism how service failure could be well recovered by relationships of different negative emotions, effective compensation type, customer engagement, and brand loyalty. Thirdly, this study applies second order factor for the measurement of customer engagement and also divides negative emotions into retrospective and prospective ones to shed light on customer engagement in the context of service failure and compensation. The practical implication of this study will benefit industry practitioners for their formulation of compensation strategies. Especially as the development of big data, hotel industry is able to adopt different strategies for individuals to maximize customer experience. The findings of this study could propose different strategies for different situations/individuals thereby.

Employee innovation is critical to business success and draws knowledge and ideas from customer engagement (CE). In particular, customer interaction, a key aspect of CE, offers opportunities for, and act as a source of, hotel employees’ innovative behaviors (Jaakkola & Alexander, 2014; Li & Hsu, 2016). Focusing on the hotel industry, this study investigates the role of customer interaction, positive affect, and employee motivations in enhancing employees’ innovative behaviors. A structural model was developed based on relevant literature and pilot tested on data collected via a quantitative survey of 196 hotel employees who were in a position requiring interactions with customers. The findings provide support for the proposed model and suggest customer interaction, positive affect, and intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as influential factors impacting on employees’ innovative behaviors directly and/or indirectly. This pilot study forms the basis of a larger project modeling the customer interaction - employee innovation relationship (findings to be presented at the conference). The study contributes to the limited literature on innovation through enhancing CB and employee emotional welfare, addressing the call to strengthen research on the antecedents and outcomes of CB (So, King, Sparks, & Wang, 2016). Practically, the results highlight a need for hotels’ benefit and reward systems to incorporate measures of employee performance in relation to CB.

Customer engagement has become a prominent issue in hospitality and tourism industry. However, customer engagement, is not easily defined or uniformly measured because a number of diverse factors must be considered. While meeting planners are important customers to CVBs, their engagement with CVBs has rarely been studied. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to develop and test a model of meeting planners’ engagement in CVBs empirically. Survey data were collected from a variety of meeting planners, which resulted in 305 usable responses for data analysis. Two step analyses (measurement model and structural model) were implemented. In addition, the moderating effect of reputation and familiarity were examined among the paths of the constructs. The results showed that the hypotheses were supported while familiarity has less salient impact than reputation on customer engagement in the event industry.

Introduction The social Web is becoming more and more visual. While Facebook remains the leading social networking site (SNS), visual-based platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest have showed a significant increase in the proportion of online users worldwide (Greenwood, Perrin, & Duggan, 2016; Statista, 2017; Pew Research Center, 2017). The trend toward visual communication on SNSs is influenced by the emergence of advanced mobile technologies and the shifting habits of how social media users consume content today. While images displayed on Instagram are past-oriented sharing of memories, or present-oriented displays of creativity, Pinterest presents opportunities for future-oriented inspiration to evolve (Jin, Lin, Gilbreath, & Lee, 2017; Phillips, Miller, & McQuarrie, 2014). Pinterest also serves as a searchable archive of visual content, allowing users to seek and include brand-relevant pins and boards into their own aspirations and inspirations, thus facilitating the sharing of branded content (Phillips et al., 2014). Extant industry reports also suggest that Pinterest users are more likely to image-search for products, interact with sponsored pins, and show favorable attitudes toward advertising, compared with Facebook or Twitter users (McMullen, 2015; Ruscillo, 2017; Williamson, 2015). Considering the benefits of social media for global marketing and the role that imagery plays for developing international brands (Mikhailitchenko, Javalgi, Mikhailitchenko, & Laroche, 2009), this research focuses on the visual aspects of consumer engagement with branded content on Pinterest and investigates how such engagement leads to consumer-brand relationship building and Pinterest-inspired purchase intention. Theoretical Frameworks The extant consumer research has documented the superiority effect of visual content on facilitating persuasion (Childers & Houston, 1984; Miniard, Bhatla, Lord, Dickson, & Rao, 1991). Recent research on social media marketing also suggests that branded content with visual elements help generate favorable consumer responses (De Vries, Gensler, & Leeflang, 2012; Trefzger, Baccarella, & Voigt, 2016). The presentation of branded posts is directly related to the flow construct and trust (Bart, Shankar, Sultan, & Urban, 2005; Hoffman & Novak, 1996). Along this logic, consumer engagement, the degree to which consumers consume, contribute, and create social media content in relation to brands (Schivinski, Christodoulides, & Dabrowski, 2016), is likely to be influenced by brand-related visual cues on Pinterest. While consumption refers to consumers’ acquisition of both brand-created and user-generated content (Muntinga, Moorman, & Smit, 2011), contribution refers to consumers’ inputs to content created by brands or by other consumers (Shao, 2009). Further, creation is the highest level of engagement, which refers to consumers’ generation of brand-related content that could stimulate further consumption and contribution (Muntinga et al., 2011). Therefore, the visually dominant and appealing presentation style, such as appearance, layout, and images, on Pinterest would provide users with high information content, and is likely to increase both active and passive consumer engagement with brands (Bart et al., 2005). Consumer engagement is then expected to encourage social media users’ willingness to actively promote and endorse brand-related content, including organic and sponsored pins. Such volunteer display of their preferred brand-related content is likely to help engender eWOM communication and make such content become more influential in the social Web (Chu & Kim, 2011). As a result, users’ brand-related Pinterest activities are likely to enhance their relationships with brands (Rapp, Beitelspacher, Grewal, & Hughes, 2013) and their intention to purchase from the brands featured in the pins and boards (King, Racherla, & Bush, 2014). All hypothesized relationships are therefore formulated and displayed in Figure 1. Methods To test the proposed conceptual model, an online survey was conducted with participants recruited from a consumer panel administrated by Qualtrics. A total of 467 Pinterest users (58.2% female, Mage = 28.9, SDage = 5.6) comprised the sample, including Caucasian (76%), African American (7.5%), Hispanic (7.4%), Asian (6.9%), multiracial (1.3%), and others (.9%). The participants spent an average of 9.5 hours on Pinterest per week. Smartphones (54.8%) emerged as the most dominant devices for their Pinterest usage, followed by computers (34.9%) and tablets (10.3%). They had an average of 33.7 boards (Range = 1,233), 1,384.1 Pins (Range = 69,000), 930.1 likes (Range = 100,000), 319.0 followers (Range = 44,231), 65.0 following topics (Range = 3,442), 173.0 following people (including brands, Range = 7,000), and 102.0 following boards (Range = 6,000). To note, 78.3% of the participants reported that they made Pinterest-inspired purchases frequently (including 24.8% always, 24.4% usually, and 29.1% often). In addition, the participants were asked to answer questions pertaining to their perceptions of visual cues related to a self-selected brand on Pinterest, engagement with brand-related content, brand endorsing behavior, consumer-brand relationships, and Pinterest-inspired purchase intention (see Table 1). Results To test the proposed hypotheses, a two-step modeling approach following Anderson and Gerbing’s (1988) procedures was employed. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that the measurement model achieved acceptable fit for the data (χ2 = 1178.30, df = 393, χ2/df = 2.99, RMSEA = .065, SRMR = .054, CFI = .930, TLI = .922). The constructs had good composite reliability (>.70). Factor loadings of the construct indicators were all above .70 with significant t values, which indicated good convergent validity for each of the construct items (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). Following Fornell and Larcker’s (1981) criteria, the results achieved satisfactory discriminant validity because the average variance extracted (AVE) for each factor was above .50 and greater than the squared correlations between each pair of constructs. The factor scores were then used to perform a path analysis for hypothesis testing which showed satisfactory fit of the conceptual model (see Figure 2). The results indicated that visual cues positively influenced consumer engagement with brand-related content (β = .68, p < .001), which positively led to brand endorsing behavior (β = .86, p < .001). Consequently, brand endorsing behavior positively enhanced the development of consumer-brand relationships (β = .97, p < .001) and increased Pinterest-inspired purchase intention (β = .48, p < .001). In turn, all hypotheses were supported. Discussion and Conclusion In response to the thriving academic interests in understanding how social media users connect and interact with international brands across SNSs (Hennig-Thurau, et al., 2010), this research sheds light on factors that determine social media users’ active discovery, creation, and distribution of visual branded content and the effects of consumer engagement on social media marketing outcomes. By focusing on Pinterest, the research findings showed that users, both men and women, actively seek inspiration from Pinterest across brand-relevant categories. They are highly engaged, open to brand activities, and ready to take Pinterest-inspired actions in the real world. The visual presentation of branded content plays an important role in generating consumer engagement, which is likely to act as a form of perceived relationship investment and subsequently stimulates brand endorsing and advocacy behavior (Simon & Tossan, 2018). Engaged Pinterest users search and select brand-relevant visual content, including sponsored pins, as part of their self-presentation to others (Phillips et al., 2014). Through such interactions with brands and other like-minded users on the platform, their relationships with brands and purchasing behavior are likely to be further enhanced. This research integrates several important literature streams in the conceptual model and employs a representative adult sample to provide theory-driven and generalizable insights into how visually-focused social media marketing works. Marketing managers face opportunities and challenges that social media and the interconnected international business environment present. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how social media users interact with brands on different platforms in order to tailoring brand strategies accordingly for fostering consumer engagement. Specifically, as Pinterest’s popular visual discovery engine continues to attract myriads of global users, managers should harness the power of visual content marketing and engage current as well as potential consumers on the platform, which could have a significant impact on consumer-brand relationship building and business performance in domestic and foreign markets. Building on the findings of this research, future studies should further delve into the psychological underpinnings and motivations that drive consumer engagement with visual branded content on SNSs across cultures and discover how paid, owned and earned brand communication on visual-based SNSs can help strengthen consumer-brand relationships.

A company’s collaborative competence to seamlessly engage with its customers within the service industry becomes one of the primary sources of competitive advantage. Increasingly more customers expect more personalized and contextualized services to maximize the value they can obtain from each transaction, and companies are actively seeking opportunities to listen and learn from customers to enhance their value proposition. Scholars in the service marketing literature suggest that service recovery encounter represent one of the situations where a company can effectively leverage its collaborative competence to restore the company-customer relationship damaged due to an initial service failure. One of the important benefits customers can obtain from actively engaging in recovery is enhanced control. However, they are required to put additional personal resources which count as an increased cost for customers. Also, depending on the nature of a collaborative outcome (positive vs. negative), customers tend to ascribe responsibility differently (more credit to oneself for a positive result and less blame for an adverse result). This study attempts to 1) investigate the role of enhanced control and increased self-effort in customers’ equity perception toward a service recovery encounter and 2) examine how attributional bias intervene in the process. A 2 x 2 web-based experiment with a service recovery scenario was designed and administered to collect the data. The results indicate that when the resulting outcome is not desirable, the increased self-effort from customers counteracts the positive effect of enhanced control. When the recovery outcome is positive, on the other hand, customers with a low level of involvement in recovery process tend to overestimate their self-effort. However, such effect does not exist for customers with a high level of engagement. This study contributes to the extant literature by contemplating adverse impacts of effort and positive impacts of empowering customers with more control. It also provides valuable insight into the usefulness of customer engagement as a pre-emptive recovery strategy.

Festival branding is undergoing a revolution based on the consolidation of new communicative behaviours in virtual brand communities (VBC), above all channelled through social media platforms (Hudson & Hudson, 2013; MacKay, Barbe, Van Winkle, & Halpenny, 2017). Although generic literature (Dessart, Veloutsou, & Morgan-Thomas, 2015) has highlighted the role of user engagement in VBC, there are no in-depth analyses of how users modulate engagement attributes and behaviours and how they are related to festival branding, as well as other possible and sometimes interrelated drivers (social capital creation, place making). Thus, this paper aims to characterise these elements in festivals’ VBC to cover these shortcomings. This proposal performs a multi-platform, multi-period, multi-user and mixed-method analysis of nearly 2,150 references in the Twitter and Facebook VBC of one of the most prominent music festivals in Europe, Sónar (Barcelona). Results show the benefits for organisers (and other relevant users) of jointly understanding these elements (and their mutual relationships) with the aim of retaining various positive economic and social impacts.

Since the late 1980s, information communication and technology (ICT) have reshaped the landscape of the tourism industry (Buhalis & Law, 2008). Thanks to the Web 2.0 technology, tourism practitioners have never been this close to their customers over social media platforms. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), social media refers to “a group of Internet-based applications which build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (p. 61). In line with this definition, electronic social networks, user-generated content aggregators, as well as location-based applications are all typical social media platforms, across which enable customers to create, edit, and share content. The increasingly growing social media platforms have greatly facilitated implementations of customer engagement strategies for organizations. As a psychological state, customer engagement is featured by interactive customer experiences with an organization, which encourage psychological, emotional, and physical investment a customer has in the organization (Harrigan, Evers, Miles, & Daly, 2017). In the tourism and hospitality context, customer engagement strategies are as critical in strengthening customer loyalty, trust, and brand evaluations (So, King, & Sparks, 2016). Useful insights have been gained relating to conceptualization and measurement scale of customer engagement, organizational and cultural obstacles to consumer engagement within hotel organizations (Chathoth et al., 2014), customer engagement in a social media context alongside the process of recognition (Cabiddu et al., 2014). Underlying the practical and theoretical significance of customer engagement lies the subjective nature of views on the social media platforms. Goh, Heng, and Lin (2014) recognized that engagement in social media brand communities positively lead to enhanced purchase expenditures through embedded information and persuasion. Quantitively, the persuasive effect of user generated information is at least 22 times more than that of marketer’s in terms of marginal effect. Although previous research has examined consequences of consumer engagement, there has been less attention paid to its causes. Meanwhile, as far as Brodie et al. (2011) were concerned, the persistency of consumer-brand engagement is contingent on an assessment of tangible and intangible costs against possible benefits such as product news and offers. Therefore, identification of these benefits can offer supplementary insights into current literature of consumer engagement. The current study utilizes the self-determination theory to uncover how engagement in social media activities is facilitated by consumers’ intrinsic motivators and what psychological benefits can consumer obtain from such engagement, as either psychological state or process (Brodie et al., 2011). Research subjects in this study are Chinese social media users. According to eMarketer’s (2017) estimated that more than 80 percent of Internet users in China (i.e., around 626 million people) accessed social networks regularly in 2017. The importance of tapping this massive market can never be overestimated.

Despite the increasing attention to customer engagement (CE) by practitioners and academics, extant studies have largely been restricted to conceptualized relationships without empirical testing (So, King, & Sparks, 2014). Drawing on social identity theory and social exchange theory, this study develops a research model delineating the relationship between customer identification (CI), CE and customer purchasing behaviors in virtual communities. The model was tested with structural equation modeling and survey data from 513 members of two virtual tourism communities. Results indicate that both customer-community identification and customer-customer identification (constituting two classifications of CI) have directly positive effect on customer engagement attitude, on which the duration of membership in a community has a moderating effect. Additionally, customer-customer identification influences customer engagement behavior directly and positively, of which customer engagement attitude is the psychological foundation. Finally, customer engagement attitude and customer engagement behavior will promote customers’ purchasing behaviors. The contribution of this paper is that CE has been empirically validated to compose of customer engagement attitude and customer engagement behavior these two separate variables, and CI is testified to be an antecedent rather than a dimension of CE, in line with the standpoints proposed by Algesheimer, Dholakia, and Herrmann (2005).Through the current investigation, empirical studies into the concept connotation and formation mechanism of CE are enriched, and the insight into customer behavior management and CE marketing is intensified.

The channel transformation to omni-channel is currently in progress in the retail industry. For the progress to occur, facilitating meaningful experiences of customers in their customer journeys, capturing such experiences through various channels and touch points, and then analyzing the information acquired as big data are required (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). With the increase in the number of customer experiences being observed through the internet and mobile communication, the focus is now on engagement. However, there have not yet been many studies conducted to deliberate comprehensively on how the engagements of behavioral aspects captured through various channels and the evaluation indicators of customers, as represented by the RFM or LTV, are related in a broader sense. The purpose of this research is to clarify the relational structure from a comprehensive perspective that are not constrained by monetary amounts. This paper showed results using data from the retailer. This research is divided broadly into two stages. The first stage identifies the engagements of behavioral aspects and the relationship between the respective behaviors, as well as the typification of behavioral patterns. The second stage involves clarifying the relationship between the customer’s evaluation indicators and engagement behaviors. The engagement behaviors are basically correlated with RFM, however authors found that there is no relationship between specific engagement behavior and RFM in the group of low rank customers. On the other hand, using different types of services or shops from the core business strengthens the customer relationship. Finally, the relationship between the types of engagement behaviors and the respective customer evaluation indicators is presented in the conclusion.

Customers’ opinions on social network platforms are known to influence peer behaviour (Bai, 2011; Eirinaki, Pisal, & Singh, 2012). Customers are also known to be more engaged in sharing their experiences by writing online reviews and recommendations that may be useful to others (Cantallops & Salvi, 2014; Tang & Guo, 2015; Xu & Li, 2016). Actually, user-generated content (UGC) on social network platforms has emerged as an important source for understanding and managing consumers’ expectations, particularly using automated and semi-automated knowledge extraction techniques from text such as text mining and sentiment analysis (Zhang, Zeng, Li, Wang, & Zuo, 2009). This research analyses dimensions of online customer engagement and associated concepts in customers’ reviews through (i) a global sentiment analysis using positive, neutral and negative sentiments and (ii) a topic-sentiment analysis to capture latent topics in online reviews. Furthermore, it examines what influences customers to contribute their online reviews, beyond the features of each focal company or brand. The research methodology is based on a text mining approach, using the MeaningCloud tool. The study focuses on Yelp.com reviews and includes a random sample of 15,000 unique reviews of restaurants, hotels and nightlife entertainment in eleven cities in the USA. An innovative customer engagement dictionary is created, based on previously validated scales using known dimensions of engagement, experience, emotions and brand advocacy, and extended using WordNet 2.1 lexical database. The research findings reveal a high impact of the engagement cognitive processing dimension and hedonic experience on customers’ review endeavour. The study results further indicate that customers seem to be more engaged in positively advocating a company/brand than the contrary. The findings will help social network managers to reinforce their platforms.

This study focuses on the digital generation in China and their engagement in social media to co-create values with firms. The study employed a qualitative research approach to first develop a social media co-creation value scale. This was followed by motivational analysis of social media engagement to co-create values. A spectrum of utilitarian and hedonic motives related to value co-creation behaviors via social media were then identified. Many theoretical and practical implications are provided based on the study findings.

This study discusses how firm-customer interactions impact customer engagement behaviors in the area of hospitality and tourism services. In the current study, two research questions are raised to answer: 1) what values are perceived by customers through firm-customer interactions during various service encounters? 2) how customer engagement behaviors are led by the customer perceived values? To test the proposed model, a quantitative approach is adopted. Amazon Mechanical Turk is used as data collection platform to collect responses with the aid of Qualtrics as questionnaire development tool. To reach the maximum scope of hospitality and tourism services, hotel guests, restaurant patrons, travelers, airline customers, and theme park travelers are included in the sample. This study adopts a quantitative approach to investigate the factors that contribute to the varied customer engagement behaviors (i.e. online ratings, online reviews, online blogging, and customer-to-customer interactions). Successful industry practices demonstrate that customer engagement brings many benefits and opportunities to maintain business sustainability and profitability.

To investigate the value co-creation process in wellness tourism, this study constructed a structural equation model of customer interactions with (1) the environment, (2) service employees, and (3) other customers relating to customer-perceived value and customer engagement. Empirical data were collected from 528 survey respondents who were at wellness tourism resorts. The results reveal that all three types of interaction have positive effects on customer-perceived value, and that perceived value positively affects customer engagement. Based on this finding, management recommendations for wellness tourism service enterprises are given.

Value co-creation has become an emerging venue of the customer engagement research. The purpose of the study is to investigate a model that represents the process (behavior and value) and consequence (satisfaction) of customer co-creation in the restaurant context. Specifically, with the theoretical support of service-dominant logic, the present study explores customer co-creation behavior as a key predictor of co-created value, which in turn leads to customer satisfaction. The results of the study confirm that customer value cocreation is a subtle process by examining the relationship between customer co-creation behavior at the “co-production” stage and co-created value at the “co-creation of value” stage. The findings of the study contribute to the evolving knowledge of customer cocreation of value, and offer practitioners in the hospitality and tourism industry effective marketing strategies based on re-examining customer relationships and engagement, thereby maximizing customer value.

Engaged customers are a crucial asset in many service industries, especially in the tourism and hospitality context (e.g. So, King, Sparks, Wang, & Hall, 2016). Positive effects of customer engagement (CE), such as word-of-mouth, community participation, or provision of new ideas for services are likely to become increasingly important for companies and help them develop unique offerings and generate new revenue streams (e.g. Kumar & Pansari, 2016; Venkatesan, 2017; Verhoef, Reinartz, & Krafft, 2010). Although previous research has repeatedly emphasized the positive effects of CE, the patterns that bring about CE are less clear. This research contributes to the investigation of CE antecedents and draws on data elicited from a series of focus group discussions and interviews with customers, experts and executives in the services, hotel, and tourism industry. The findings from these qualitative studies point to complex patterns of customer and firm based antecedents (e.g. Brodie et al., 2011; van Doorn et al., 2010) that play a role in stimulating CE. Among other results, the findings show that customers exhibit different motives for engaging, such as feelings of familiarity, pride and belonging, helpfulness or emotions and companies need to adjust their approaches to meet these motives. In sum, these findings contribute to the literature on CE by unveiling different antecedents of CE and investigating their interplay. This article also contributes to the services and relationship management literature by investigating which relationship characteristics play a role in CE and how they bring about engagement behaviors.

The service setting is more than ever dynamic. Customers’ engagement is changing due to the multiple interactions at different levels of the consumption experience journey. The customer as an active and engaged value co-creator raises new challenges to theory and practice. However, the connection between engagement and co-creation is scarce in the literature. The experience of the active hotel customer occurs through customer engagement with internal actors and factors from prepurchase through to post-purchase. Since value co-creation results from the engagement of multiple factors and actors (f/actors) in the process, it is essential to understand the actors’ activities that promote or obstruct this process. This paper proposes a connection between customer engagement (CE) and value co-creation framework to ascertain and depict the internal actors’ activities and factors that foster or hinder customers’ experience in the hotel industry. The researchers used qualitative methods (35 in-depth interviews, document analysis and 4 observation sessions) in seven regions in Ghana to explore the customer’s perspective. Data was analysed with Nvivo11, within a thematic analysis framework. Findings suggest that customer’s engagement within the hotel environment with multiple actors has an influence on customer value co-creation/destruction process. It found that positive and negative engagement fosters/hinders guests’ interactions which lead to value cocreation/ destruction. The research also discovered that negative interactions occasioned by any factor/actor triggers value destruction at multiple stages of the experience journey. The study suggests theoretical and managerial implications focused on the actors’ practices that foster or hinder customer engagement and value co-creation.

Customer online engagement is crucial to online travel websites which depend online reviews to attract new users and maintain current ones. The distinctive features of public attractions in tourism and the unique webdesign of TripAdvisor create an empirical environment for this study to explore the influence of customer experience and satisfaction on their engagement in posting reviews regarding public goods. Based on a sample of TripAdvisor-listed attractions and considering the information from over 37,000 online reviews, the empirical findings suggest that (1) customer online engagement is stronger (weaker) on paid (public) attractions, and (2) the positive effect of satisfaction on customer engagement in posting reviews is more evident among public attractions rather than paid attractions. This study concludes by offering managerial implications to regulators of public attractions, operators of travel websites, and managers of paid attractions.

What is the connection between aesthetics or classroom design and engagement towards courses, teachers and groups? Students spend at least one quarter of their waking hours in schools, most of it in classrooms, which have become a potentially powerful setting for influencing them. Especially in recent years, where marketing classes are often projectbased and students are required to regularly interact in class and participate in group assignments, the role of classrooms and their design is crucial for improving learning and engagement (e.g. Abernethy and Lett III, 2005; Razzouk, Seitz and Rizkallah, 2003). Education research over the past decade has demonstrated that classroom designs have an effect on learning behaviors. Ample evidence suggested that classroom layout, technology and overall design can have a profound effect on student learning (e.g. Cheryan, Ziegler, Plaut and Meltzoff, 2014; Neill and Etheridge, 2008). So far, literature on classroom design and teaching has mainly focused on the relationship between quality of physical infrastructure and student achievement (Cheryan et al., 2014), on flexible learning spaces (Neill and Etheridge, 2008) and on the use of interactive technology (i.e. student response systems or clickers) for improving satisfaction, creative interaction, and achievement (e.g. Eastman, Iyer and Eastman, 2011). Little research has examined the role of classroom design on engagement (Kuh, 2001; Marks, 2000), investigating it primarily in the online or distance learning contexts (Chen, Lambert and Guidry, 2009). Unexplored in previous research is the role that a high vs. low technological classroom design may play in students’ engagement, and more specifically, in the general engagement level experienced by students towards a course, a teacher and a group. This work includes a comparison of two courses taught by the same instructor in a lowtechnology space (traditional class) versus a high-technology space, demonstrating counterintuitively that students perceive a higher engagement in a traditional classroom setting, evaluate the teacher more positively, and like to work in groups more.

Building on insights from motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) theory, we explore the antecedents and conditions through which entrepreneurs within small and medium enterprises (SMEs) adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Seeing how current research is almost exclusively dominated by investigating the activities of multinational or large organizations, we shift the attention to the social responsibility initiatives of the individual entrepreneur, seen as a moral, social and environmental champion. This study contributes to marketing and international business literature by advancing knowledge of the determinants of responsible entrepreneurship across different research settings. We highlight the importance of personal entrepreneurial values and moral ideologies and their impact on CSR engagement. From this perspective, we first applied an exploratory/qualitative research method to focus on the CSR initiatives of entrepreneurs in the UK by conducting series of interviews to identify various individual, firm and external level determinants that influence the implementation of responsible entrepreneurship practices. Second, we completed a large scale survey among 224 UK entrepreneurs. Preliminary results demonstrate that others-centered values, entrepreneurial alertness, competence, availability of resources and stakeholders influence, are important antecedents of both intentional and actual engagement in CSR practices, which in turn leads to improved performance.

This study presents a machine learning approach using conditional inference tree (Ctree) to determine how brand equity can be used to factually engage consumers into social media brand-related activities. Using the Ctree algorithm (Hothorn, Hornik, & Zeileis, 2006), a predictive model was computed using self-reported data on consumers’ perceptions of brand equity (Aaker, 1991) and engagement into social media brand-related behavior (Muntinga, Moorman, & Smit, 2011) from a sample of 690 individuals. The predictive modeling analysis revealed 5 different rules (patterns) that trigger social media brand-related behavior. Each rule comprises behavioral engagement discriminating low, medium, and high levels of consumption, contribution, and creation of brand-related social media content. Additionally, the analysis portrait 5 subtypes of consumers according to their behavior. This study has incremental explanatory power over preceding consumer brand engagement studies, in that it demonstrates how to manage brand equity to factually engage consumers into social media brand-related activities, therefore, generating valuable insights that may be used to support business.