Although older adults’ adoption rates of smartphones have continued to increase in recent years, health-related apps are not widely accepted by older adults. Therefore, the primary aim of this study was to explore older adults’ adoption behavior of mobile health (mHealth) apps in the U.S. Specifically, this study applied protection motivation theory (PMT; Rogers, 1975) as the theoretical base to explain older adults’ adoption process of health apps to understand the influences of threat and coping appraisals on older adults’ adoption behavior of health apps. In addition, the current study incorporated the technology readiness theory (Parasuraman, 2000) to understand the influences of older adults’ positive and negative technological readiness (TR) on their PMT components. Data were collected from older adults (n = 600; 60% female) aged over 55 in the U.S. using online survey questionnaires. The data analysis was conducted using partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings suggest the impact of coping appraisals on older adults’ attitudes toward mHealth apps and their (continuance) intention to use mHealth apps. Especially among PMT’s four appraisal components, response efficacy was the most critical underlying mechanism driving mHealth app-related attitude and behavioral intention. In addition, older adults’ beliefs about using mHealth apps (i.e., TR) significantly influenced their coping appraisal processes, while positive TR was more critical in forecasting their coping appraisals. The results suggest a need to classify older consumers into different segments based on their TR to develop differentiated marketing strategies. The findings also suggest that marketers understand various protective motivation components concerning the use of mHealth apps among older adults.

This study focuses on resale behavior in online consumer-to-consumer market platforms and examines the factors that promote and hinder the resale behavior of sellers. The evidence from the experiment suggests the negative effect of emotional attachment on resale intention and the moderating effect of resale possibilities.

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of firms’ repeated use of crowdfunding on consumer responses and the funding success, focusing on compensatory crowdfunding that provides products and services when funding is successful. The result indicates that the number of crowdfunding round and achievement rates are related to parabolic forms. These results suggest that investors can recognize the number of crowdfunding round as a important signal for crowdfunding investment. In addition, this research aims to present practical implications for crowdfunding firms and platforms to attract ongoing investments.

Digital humans integrating anthropomorphism into the performance and problem-solving features of AI offer innovative sources of insights and value that promotes a product, service, or brand. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of a digital human’s aura and anthropomorphism on perceived interactivity, attitude toward a brand, attitude toward a digital human, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) intention, and purchase intention. An entrenched digital human’s aura and anthropomorphism increase perceived interactivity, attitude toward a brand, attitude toward a digital human, eWOM intention, and purchase intention. This study contributes to the literature by clarifying the concept of the digital human’s aura and anthropomorphism and the relationships between perceived interactivity, attitude toward a brand, attitude toward a digital human, eWOM intention, and purchase intention.

A ‘brand’ metaverse is a virtual space where customers experience the brand via digital avatars. With the advancement of augmented and virtual reality technologies, a brand metaverse is an important medium for communicating the brand with customers. In this study, we focus on the resemblance between a customer’s self and his/her avatar (i.e., self-avatar resemblance) in the brand metaverse and examine its influence on brand attitude. Prior studies examine self-avatar resemblance exclusively in non-brand-related virtual gaming platforms and test its effect on identity perception and immersion in the platforms. However, few studies probe the extent to which self-avatar resemblance influences customers' exploration in a brand metaverse and their attitude toward the brand. We fill this research gap by uncovering the positive effects of self-avatar resemblance on brand attitude and purchase intentions. Moreover, we proffer that the customers’ engagement toward the brand metaverse platform mediates the relationship between self-avatar resemblance and brand attitude. In addition, based on the interactive nature of metaverse, we hypothesize copresence―the number of avatars exploring the brand metaverse at the same time―to be a moderator, which strengthens the mediation. We conduct an experiment using a fashion brand’s virtual world positioned in a popular metaverse platform. In this experiment, participants create an avatar and freely roam around in the brand metaverse with their avatars. By reviewing the screen recording of each participant’s brand exploration in the metaverse, we measure self-avatar resemblance and other constructs. We also collect responses from questionnaires designed to measure attitudinal and behavioral variables. With the accumulated data, we test the hypotheses using partial least square structural equation model and find the results largely consistent with the hypotheses. With the findings, we provide important and interesting implications to marketing practitioners considering and doing ‘metaverse marketing.’

Offering a good shopping experience on the web is key for fashion luxury brands. However, it is not a field much analyzed by researchers. This research presents a systematic analysis of the usability of the web and its content in more than 60 fashion luxury e-commerce.

Factory outlet stores represent an integral part of a dual distribution channel strategy, in which products are sold through two different channels: (1) factory outlets and (2) traditional store formats. However, there are potential risks, including cannibalization and brand dilution. Our research considers perceived quality of the item from each channel. Through two experimental studies, our findings suggest that without any pricing information, consumers spontaneously assign products from outlet channels to be of lower subjective quality than those from the traditional channel. However, when both products in each channel are discounted, then this reduction in quality perception is attenuated, following the belief in the price-quality relationship.

Digital technologies that travel between the real and virtual worlds are rapidly adopted by many fashion brands for building virtual fashion spaces. This study aims to investigate the consumer experience of the components of the virtual fashion show and their effect on virtual fashion space, perceived benefits, perceived risk, and behavioral intention in the immersive fashion virtual space. The stimulus for this study was selected as the Prada virtual reality (VR) fashion show which is one of the most active in the VR field. The influence of perceived virtual fashion space and the moderating effect of VR sickness and fashion innovativeness are discussed. This study provides implications about consumer perception and behavior using VR in the context of virtual fashion space for researchers and practitioners.

The metaverse has become a trendy topic for both academics and practitioners in recent years. While the metaverse is still in a developmental stage, it is anticipated that it will bring significant changes to the existing paradigm in marketing, information system, psychology and many other disciplines (Dwivedi et al., 2022)

This paper aims to examine the effect of AI framing (i.e., Scientific AI vs Magic AI) on consumers' product evaluation. This study shows that magically framed AI technology may be more beneficial to appeal to product innovativeness when subjective product properties (e.g., personal taste) becomes important. On the contrary, when objective product properties (e.g., functionality) becomes important, scientifically framed AI technology is more likely to generate higher perceived product attractiveness and purchase intention.

As millennials are continuously growing; hence they are considered today's fine jewelry business treasure. Understanding why they buy fine jewelry using the means-end theory is the key objective of this study. Brand, function and beauty are means that lead to happiness and self-confidence, the end value of millennials mindset

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 investigated the key factors that explain the continuous usage intention of mobile payment users in the post COVID-19 pandemic era. Based on the health belief model (HBM) and communication privacy management (CPM) theory, this study examined how the five constructs of HBM influence mobile payments continuous usage intention through perceived privacy risk and perceived security. It also investigated the moderating role of perceived privacy awareness on the relationship between perceived privacy risk and continuous usage intention as well as the moderating role of information sensitivity on the relationship between perceived security and continuous usage intention.

The body of knowledge from psychology has been useful to marketing for understanding consumer minds and behaviors (Jia et al., 2018). Daily activities, such as movie watching, grocery shopping, online shopping, drinking coffee (with friends or alone), and making an in-app purchases on social media, all involve consumption which is affected by the perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of the decision maker (i.e., consumers). But when the ways in which we sense and interact with the world change, how does it shift our ways of communicating with each other and the processes of forming perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors?

Few species on this planet partake in sex for recreational purposes and humans are one of them. What is noteworthy is that humans are the only species with the capability to develop advanced technologies to satiate the need for recreational sex. At present, there are massive advances in technologies in robotics that would suggest that it will not be long before sex work will be robotised. This large jump in technological capabilities brings up ethical, legal, and practical issues with regards to the commercialization of sex, something previously explored by some scholars (See, for example; Döring, Mohseni & Walter,2020; Mackenzie, 2016; Makenzie, 2018; Klein & Lin, 2018). There is a growing literature that deals with how sex robots will be incorporated into the tourism and hospitality industries (see, for example; Yeoman & Mars, 2012). As sex robots become increasingly sophisticated, the ethics, social debate, and practicalities of their incorporation into society will have to be thought through, especially as their impact will not be gender neutral. While the historical roots of the modern mechanization of sex were gynocentric, the current technological innovations are largely aimed at a male consumer. In this research, the authors discuss the state of the art in sex robots, the practical aspects of the incorporation of sex robots into the field of hospitality and tourism, and the impact that such a technological jump will have upon sex tourism and its contribution to the sustainable development of destinations with a transformation of sex tourism into a new paradigm. The authors will conclude explaining the ways in which this technological innovation will impact upon males and females and the interactions between the genders, transforming human connections and hospitality. This research will be the first to discuss how the digital aspects of the new generation of sex robots will impact upon the marketing of automated sex services, since the intimate nature of the supply of services will require marketing finesse unlike other more openly disseminated hospitality services.

Instagram marketing is a popular tool for communication in the tourism industry. However, research into effective execution tactics has been limited to the content, recipient characteristics, and sender types (e.g., celebrities) (i.e., Ferwerda & Tkalcic, 2018; Jin et al., 2019; Singh, 2020). The layouts of Instagram ads themselves have received little scholarly attention. Instagram ads typically convey multiple pieces of information in a single advertisement unit, raising concerns about the significance of the order in which the information is presented. Specifically, we must understand how different orders of presenting information affect a firm’s performance. Therefore, this study investigates the effect of presentation order on consumer behavioral intentions toward tour programs promoted on Instagram.

This study examines the performance of a penalized neural network and the replication of a customer engagement survey scale with text information in the hotel industry. Although the empirical analysis shows highly accurate model performance only in the training sample, the results also clarify the issues of the engagement scale.

Voice assistance (VA) has been widely adopted in the tourism and hospitality industry to interact and communicate with tourists and provide useful travel recommendations. Although more companies in tourism have adopted environmental sustainability practices and tourists have increased their sustainability awareness, lack of research has been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of VA in promoting sustainable consumption of tourism products or services. This study proposes that customising environmental sustainability messages for tourists with different cultural orientations and VA use purposes can enhance their engagement with the VA, which can affect their consumption decision. The results from a scenario-based experiment demonstrate that tourists with interdependent/independent cultural orientation have higher engagement with the environmental sustainability messages communicated by the VA when they are with a non-transactional/transactional purpose. Implications for tourism marketing strategies are discussed.

Social media have emerged as one of the most important tools for firms to engage customers (e.g., Chandrasekaran et al., 2022; Cheng & Edwards, 2015; Lee et al., 2018; Wedel & Kannan, 2016). Within the tourism industry, scholars have investigated the role of social media communication in various contexts, such as online travel information search (Xiang & Gretzel, 2010), sharing travel experiences (So et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2022) and establishing positive customer relationships (Jamshidi et al., 2021). Insights into which social media content makes for generating positive engagement are, however, still largely based on marketers’ intuitions or focusing on message factors of social media posts such as message appeals (e.g., Wang & Lehto, 2020). It also often neglects the importance of the visual component of social media posts, and only a few research have investigated the effects of the image in social media on the travel industry (e.g., Fusté-Forné, 2022). The objective of this research is, therefore, to understand how textual features and image features generate user engagement in social media utilizing cutting-edge transfer learning techniques and to propose how these features should be customized to maximize user engagement for online travel shopping companies. We collect and analyze more than 10,000 Instagram posts from three online travel shopping companies, including Expedia, Priceline, and Kayak. The results from transfer learning algorithms utilizing 24 features, such as the number of people in the image, emotions expressed in the people in the image, hue, and RGB value, successfully predict the level of engagement measured by the number of likes and comments.

Marketing research in hospitality and tourism has been rising continuously. This study provides a systematic review on marketing research and air transport. It identifies key themes and tracks the changes in scholarly researchers’ perspectives pre and post pandemic. By approaching this review not only from the tourism and air transport perspectives, but also from the marketing perspective, this allows the transfer of theories between disciplines, an added value that provides the basis for a field of research to expand and further evolve. Finally, a conceptual framework and an agenda for future research based on emerging research topics are provided.