This study will explore the paradoxical tension influencer face when promoting sustainable luxury leisure activities for sponsoring brands. Social media influencers play a pivotal role in this advocacy as luxury consumers are inspired to associate themselves with sophisticated social values, superior social status, or differentiate themselves from others with lower esteem. However, the commodification of their influence to stimulate consumption amongst their audience and followers creates paradoxical tensions between their brand performance, economic incentives, and ethical socio-ecological outcomes. Despite numerous studies have been undertaken to examine the role of influencers in sustainable luxury tourism, there is still a need for understanding of how influencers negotiate the paradoxical tensions arising from (a) sustainability and luxury; (b) instrumental goals and personal brand identity. Data sources for this study include influencer interviews and social media contents created by the influencers, such as video, blog posts and tweets.

Central to retail therapy is the notion that stress can be eased by simple browsing, which produces immediate and positive psychological effects through shopping. In the Philippines, retailers are slowly adopting omnichannel strategies as a response to the fundamental shift to online retailing. However, during the pandemic, shoppers resorted to retail therapy to appease emotions and senses. This might explain how the Filipino deserve ko ‘to (I deserve this) mindset can be a form of self-gifting that may relate to retail therapy.

This study, based on mixed method research design, explores the mechanism by which online service provider experiences are indirectly influenced by service interactions (service manner and need identification) in a rarely explored context (e-learning service and digital product/online MBA). While the service provided by employees is argued to play an important role in consumers’ evaluations of service performance (Vasconcelos et al., 2015), the impact of service interaction on experience (combining credence service theory and customer experience theory) has to date not been explored.

This study examines how brand-influencer, influencer-users, and user-brand congruences affect perceived fantasy about the influencer and closeness toward the brand when an Instagram ad is endorsed by celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) influencers. The study employed a between-subject online experiment by manipulating an advertisement endorsed by a celebrity and a non-celebrity influencer. The results suggest that congruence between brand-influencer matters in building effective relationships.

In the current era of sustainable development, economic, social, and environmental changes are interrelated, and social inclusion and environmental sustainability are our shared goals. In response, social and environmental values have become important considerations for the success of an enterprise, placing an increased emphasis on the interests of all stakeholders. This trend in the governance of enterprise fueled the emergence of a new organizational form: the certified B Corporation (B Corp), a social enterprise certified by B Lab as an enterprise that creates value for non-shareholding stakeholders, including employees, customers, the local community, and the environment. With their positive social and environmental impacts, B Corps have become increasingly recognized as instrumental in the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and literature on B Corps has increased. However, empirical research on the role of B Corps is still lacking.

This study investigated the conditions under which consumer participatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns could be effective and focused on power as the key variable. Specifically, based on motivational intensity theory, the interaction effect between participation effort and power was examined on CSR attitude and participation intention. In addition, this study tested the mediated moderating effect of power through self-efficacy in order to examine the mechanism behind the interaction effect. Results of two experimental studies (Study 1 and Study 2) showed a significant the interaction effect of participation effort and power on participation intention. When the consumer's power was low, participation intention was lower for those in the high effort condition compared to those in the low effort condition. On the other hand, when power was high, there was no difference in participation intention according to the level of participation effort. This study has significance in that it reaffirms and furthermore expands the existing academic results and presents practical implications.

Negative brand events can significantly harm the brand, affecting consumer cognitions, emotions, and behavior, leading to negative brand evaluations, negative emotions, brand avoidance, and retaliation. Thus, it is critical for brands to design and implement strategies that promote consumer forgiveness to mitigate those negative consumer responses. Despite the growing literature on the determinant factors of consumer behavior in a brand failure context, there is still scarce evidence regarding the impact of brand type on consumer responses, including consumer forgiveness, following a negative brand event. Considering that consumers tend to react differently to a brand perceived as arrogant (making them feel inferior), as opposed to a brand they strongly identify with, this paper focuses on failures of equal vs. higher status brands and investigates their impact on consumer forgiveness. Following the above, we expect that differences in brand status can shape consumer behavior following a failure or transgression.

In recent years, social media influencers (SMIs) have brought dramatic shifts to the marketing trend. Apart from product endorsement and ad campaigns, they are increasingly hired by brands for promoting social causes including Black Lives Matter movement, COVID-19, and LGBTQ+ issues owing to their perceived authenticity and expertise (Open Influence, 2022). As such, brands promoting social causes to take ethical obligations to the society, namely, corporate social responsibility (CSR), has become an indispensable business practice (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001). Accordingly, past studies revealed that SMIs’ capability of creating authentic connection with target consumers and the fact that stakeholder awareness and authentic motives are preconditions for the success of CSR initiatives can create a synergic effect (Yang et al., 2021).

The objective of this study is to compare the efficiency of VR and 2D in the tourism industry as marketing tools, using affective forecasting and purchase intention. Accordingly, this study has two primary research aims. The first is to examine if a higher level of mental imagery (resulting from VR) is more effective than a lower level (2D) in a tourism marketing context. To evaluate this, the researchers use experimental method, measuring predicted dominance, predicted pleasure and predicted arousal, as well as purchase intention towards the hotel. Relevant to the tourism industry, tourism products are spatially and temporally distant (vs. near). This study aims to investigate how differently mental imagery, resulting from VR (versus 2D) experience, generates affective forecasting of a tourism product when tourists plan distant (versus near) future trips (temporal distance).

With the popularity of live streaming commerce, the characteristics of streamers and products subtly influence consumer behavior through visual live streaming form. Based on dual-process theory, this paper develops a comprehensive theoretical model to examine how consumer perceived streamer characteristics and product characteristics influence streamer attractiveness and product attractiveness, and explore how consumer behavior inertia is affected by streamer attractiveness and product attractiveness. An online survey consisting of 300 participants was recruited to empirically examine the proposed research model. The results indicated that consumer perceived streamer characteristics and product characteristics are important factors affecting the streamer attractiveness and product attractiveness, which in turn positively affect consumer’s shopping experience memory, which further influence consumer behavior inertia. In addition, the moderating effects of mindfulness are also examined.

Expressing political stances is not rare among service providers such as taxi drivers and chefs. For instance, in 2021, a restaurant owner angry at the death of U.S. soldiers during the evacuation of Afghanistan posted a sign on the front door telling Biden supporters to eat elsewhere (Miller 2021). Given findings from research on brand activism, consumers can be expected to have less favorable attitudes toward service providers who are more politically different from them. However, if service providers who are politically opposite are more competent than ones who are politically identical, would consumers still choose politically identical but less competent service providers? To our knowledge, no research has been conducted to examine what factors influence consumers’ choices between more competent but politically opposite service providers and less competent but politically identical service providers. To fill that gap, in our research, we examined the role of consumers’ political ideology (i.e., conservative vs. liberal) in making trade-offs between more competent but politically opposite service providers and less competent but politically identical ones.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities substantially impact a company’s reputation. As companies increasingly embrace social media to communicate CSR activities, they face the challenge of selecting the appropriate message source. In this context, this paper examines the role of message source in the relationship between CSR communication and corporate reputation.

This study takes the perspective of a brand introducing its own second-hand products to the re-commerce market. The project finds that consumers are more willing to forgive a transgressing second-hand product compared to a new product, which leads to lower negative word-of-mouth. The relationship is mediated by the underdog effect.

Online communities are identified as people gathering online and communicating through the internet to share ideas, objectives, goals, without any geographical boundary. The growth of user-generated content created in online communities has transformed the way consumers search for and share information, particularly in the hospitality industry. Particularly, in the restaurant and food sectors due to the intangible nature of hospitality services, online reviews play an important role on consumer decisions. Furthermore, online reviews on restaurants are not only informational but also, they impact consumers’ choices regarding restaurants. Consequently, the nature of such user-generated content that is produced at a high speed and is diverse and rich should be treated and understood. This study proposes the first tailored BERTopic model together with sentiment analysis based on pre-trained BERT model that takes advantage of its novel sentence embedding for creating interpretable topics into the analysis of restaurant online reviews to determine how the customers elaborate their criteria in the context of certain experiences. An exploratory analysis is presented involving a large-scale review data set of 261,531 restaurant online reviews from 4 different countries retrieved from the eWOM community thefork.com. A broad list of the topics discussed by customers post-dining in restaurants is built. Insights into the behavior, experience, and satisfaction of the customers across the different restaurants are discovered. This approach and findings are encouraging hospitality managers in understanding customers’ perception, through which applicable marketing can be developed to attract and retain potential customers.

An important segment, tourism e-commerce live streaming (TEcLS) has emerged as a new marketing channel actively embraced by destination marketing organizations (DMO) and tourist firms due to the COVID-19 pandemic. China, Japan, Australia, and many other nations have been selling such tourism products on various platforms. Live e-commerce generates a real-time interactive virtual environment that can be called a livescape. However, many tourism destinations or companies are unaware of the marketing science implications of live streaming and are unsure of their effectiveness or the intricacies of marketing live streaming. Previous research has explored the factors influencing consumer purchase behavior from the product, technology, and live-streamer perspectives, arguing that the advantages of breaking through time and space constraints, strong interactivity, the experience of reality, technological ease of use and usefulness, and celebrity aura encourage online purchases. However, limited investigation has been carried out on the impact of customers’ value-co-creation in livescape when watching tourism live streaming on their purchase intentions considering the key role of engagement. This calls for specific investigation of the phenomenon to facilitate live streaming design and tourism marketing. This study aims to explores the factors influencing consumer purchase intentions in the livescape based on a value co-creation research framework. Compared to traditional e-commerce, livescapes provides the “many-to-many” social presence and an immersive value co-creation platform. Thus, we focus on why and how social presence inspires customer engagement, ultimately leading to purchase intentions. This study finds that, as a crucial marketing tool, the social presence of tourism livescapes can promotes customer engagement, which in turn results in intentions to purchase tourism live-streaming products. Additionally, the mediating role of inspiration (inspired-by and inspired-to) between social presence and customer engagement is examined to reveal the influence mechanism in the tourism context. Finally, this study examines how to create an effective tourism livescape to enhance tourists social presence experience and inspire their engagement, which in turn increases their purchase intention.

Since the impact of COVID-19, the tourism and hospitality (T&H) practitioners have become increasingly aware of the crucial role of technology. The metaverse, which combines multiple emerging technologies, has become a hot topic that can take customers' experience in T&H to the next level. Previous research has already indicated that industrial practitioners should begin to consider business transformation to face the era of the metaverse. The metaverse is a continuum from the digital worlds to the physical worlds, with the convergence of physical and virtual worlds in the middle. Digital worlds include mirror worlds that simulate and reflect the real world and the virtual native, an innovative digital world. The digital twin has been mentioned as being created for destinations, hotels, and resorts, relying on the internet of things (IoT) as a crucial component of metaverse technology. However, previous studies have rarely explored the role of the IoT in the metaverse, particularly for T&H customers' metaverse experience. Therefore, this study aims to explore the role of the IoT in customers' metaverse experience in T&H and provide a clear picture for industrial practitioners to take steps into the metaverse. Exploratory research was adopted, including document analysis, literature review, and in-depth interviews with twelve international metaverse-related company experts. Moreover, this research adopted the thematic analysis technique to analyze the data; the theoretical bases include the Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and the components of metaverse as the lens and framework to develop this research. The findings uncovered three scenes of T&H metaverse experiences, including mirror scenes (that reflect the physical and real world in the digital worlds), convergent scenes (that combine the digital and real worlds), and virtual native scenes (that mainly create a whole new virtual scene but still connect to the real world). All of these scenes require IoT to connect the physical world and digital at different levels. Such as, mirror scenes strongly need digital twin techniques through IoT to enhance the authenticity and synchronicity of digital hotels or attractions to immerse guests. Under a convergent scene, connecting via IoT devices to display visitors' paths in the attractions simultaneously or a message board with IoT functionality for users’ social interactions simultaneously. In a virtual native museum, even though users stay in a whole new virtual world, IoT techniques can transfer users from the real world to the virtual world and make them feel physically present. The results provide practical implementations to integrate the IoT into T&H, increasing customers' metaverse experience and enhancing the creative and innovative aspects of the T&H experience.

Customers’ service experience is related to the perceived state in the process of interacting with the target at various channel touchpoints (Kaushal & Yadav, 2023). Furthermore, positive customers’ service experiences can increase the repurchase intention of buyers by strengthening the interconnection and cooperation between buyers and suppliers in business-to-business (B2B) firms and reinforcing corporate competitive positioning.

The aspiration of entrepreneurs to extensively grow their firms has been found to make stronger contribution to economic growth than the entrepreneurship rate in general. Formal and informal institutions shape the business environments in which companies are operating. Thus, they affect entrepreneurs’ beliefs about firm growth. However, prior research gives little attention to the interaction effects of formal and informal institutions on entrepreneurial growth aspiration.

Research in entrepreneurial marketing (EM) has put considerable effort into identifying various factors associated with entrepreneurial success, including skills and competences of prospective entrepreneurs. At the same time, little consensus exists regarding the relative importance of particular marketing skills. Moreover, the literature to date does not outline any essential marketing-related competencies needed for nascent entrepreneurs. Our study looks to identify specific marketing competencies relevant to entrepreneurial context. A three-stage mixed-methodology approach to data collection is deployed. Qualitative documentary analysis and exploratory interviews provide preliminary findings and guide the design of a subsequent quantitative survey of UK entrepreneurs, resulting in insights into the most beneficial marketing competencies for entrepreneurship. Further, these insights are used to equip educators with improved practice of developing marketing practice for future entrepreneurs. This research is expected to advance the understanding of nascent entrepreneurship research, practice and pedagogy within EM field.

With the infusion of advanced technology, interactions between customers and firms’ representatives take place in brick-and-mortar stores, 2D online sites, and even 3D metaverse environments. In the metaverse, a firm’s sales avatars interact with other users while representing the firm, recommend, and sell virtual items. Previous literature about the effectiveness of sales representatives agrees that a firm representatives’ smiling faces engender customer satisfaction and better interactions. However, it is unclear whether smiling faces of sales avatars will work the same way in the metaverse as they do in the real world. The current research examines whether a firm’s sales avatars with sad facial expression (vs. those with smiling facial expression) stimulate higher user intentions to interact with firm representative avatars, to purchase virtual items from the representative avatars, and to spread positive WOM about their experience in the metaverse. Moreover, focusing on subcultural appeal, we investigate why this unconventional phenomenon happens in the metaverse unlike in real world. We conducted two experiments to manipulate a firm representative avatar’s facial expression (smiling vs. sad) in the metaverse. We newly designed a metaverse place, and participants who put on a virtual reality headset are exposed to either a hat (Experiment 1) or shoes (Experiment 2) store where they can purchase a virtual hat or shoes. Experiments 1 and 2 basically tested the same things repeatedly. However, to improve internal validity and generalizability, Experiment 2 used human-like sales avatars instead of cartoon character-like sales avatars in Experiment 1, changed virtual stores from a hat store to shoes store, and finally controlled for various extraneous variables such as attractiveness, warmth, and competence of sales avatars, and user’s previous experience about metaverse. Sales representatives with a smile are believed to contribute to beneficial consumers’ attitudes and behaviors in offline stores. However, our experiments demonstrate that this well-received belief does not necessarily apply in the metaverse, where subcultural appeal plays a more critical role. In the metaverse, users evaluate sales avatars with sad facial expression (vs. with smiling facial expression) as more unique and cool (i.e., higher subcultural appeal), leading to their higher intention to interact with the sad sales avatar, to purchase a virtual item, and to spread positive WOM about their experiences. Our results imply that previous findings supported in the offline or 2D online sites may not work the same way in the 3D metaverse.