Social marketing is a discipline promoting voluntary behaviour change in target audience to effect societal and individual benefits by applying commercial marketing strategies. Considering the UNFCCC mechanisms are established to foster voluntary cooperation of parties of the Paris Agreement (2015) in achieving their emission reduction targets and adaptation goals, potential for social marketing playing a critical role in contributing to the context seems endless. The Climate Technology Center and Network (CTCN), established in 2013, is an operational arm of the Technology Mechanism (TM) introduced by the Conference of the Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. With the purpose of pursuing impactful mitigation and adaptation technology transfer based on global cooperation ontology, the CTCN supports technical assistance (TA) to developing countries on climate technology issues. Nevertheless, the participation rate of the domestic members in the CTCN TA project is low at 7 per cent. With this regard, little has known about what government support would benefit the Network members most, therefore, contributing to the global climate change issue. This research aims to respond to these calls. Three sequential studies outlining 4P strategy development were conducted. Study 1 conducted an online survey to identify pricing factors influencing participation of climate technology transfer business (RQ1). Study 2 tested four different types of government support program that will is most likely to encourage the Network member’s CTCN TA participation (RQ2). Study 3 pilot tested the most appropriate government support program, including a new communication strategy (RQ3). This research has taken climate technology experts’ perspectives in order to enhance the participation of 81 Korean Network members in climate technology projects. This paper contributes to applying the social marketing approach in expanding climate technology assistants globally, thereby purposefully bringing new theoretical and practical insights affecting the mitigation of carbon emissions and increasing the adaptation to climate-related disasters in developing countries.

Electronic waste (E-waste) has become a long-standing global concern. People are purchasing new affordable and improved technologies long before the end-of-life (EOL)’s of their old devices, which is leading to overconsumption and growing volumes of e-waste. At present, official data indicates that 80% of the volume of e-waste is not formally treated globally. The complex nature of e-waste recycling processes is a significant challenge.

Entomophagy (or insects eating) is seen as a new, sustainable, and promising protein alternative for consumers in Western countries. Although eating insects is not new for many cultures (e.g., Asian culture), it represents a novel and unconventional eating practice in the Western world (e.g., United States and Europe), often characterized by food taboos and by a negative advertising in the media.

Today, customers have more authority thanks to digital tools, and extensive information access. Customers use technology to hold companies accountable and utilize consumer rights. Personal data and information can be generated, stored, and exchanged almost indefinitely through digital and the Internet. In particular, maintaining a digital environment requires facilitating collaboration and simplifying decision-making, and companies need structures and plan to facilitate faster, easier, and more efficient flows. This study focuses on the impact of Corporate Digital Responsibility-based ESG fashion brand activities on purchasing intentions, and we will present suggestions after identifying value congruence, brand trust, and attitude effects on CDR-based ESG fashion brand activities.

Disinformation can distort real-world events and influence individuals’ decisions, posing a serious threat to society. However, moderating disinformation is still a major challenge for social network operators, as they are omnipresent, and social media’s ease-of-use, anonymity, and interconnectedness enables their rapid diffusion. Additionally, there is a lack of clear guidance on prioritizing content for censorship efforts. Until now, existing literature focuses on the virality of traditional online content, such as marketing campaigns, which are generally driven by positive emotions and arousal. Nevertheless, this type of content is vastly dissimilar from the hate-filled, misleading, and malicious content on social media platforms, rendering literature findings inapplicable when it comes to disinformation diffusion. So, what makes disinformation go viral? Using a unique dataset of ~400 million live-crawled messages on Twitter surrounding the US presidential election in 2020, our study analyzes which content and context characteristics drive the virality of disinformation. We classify ~10 million disinformation spread over ~50,000 distinct disinformation stories and (1) identify different diffusion trajectories of virality with the help of time series shape clustering. Moreover, to investigate the differing diffusion patterns, we (2) use state-of-the-art natural language processing to analyze linguistic and meta-level features. With that, this work provides ex-ante guidance to policymakers and network operators to help identify the most critical content on social media to curb the spread of threatening disinformation online. Furthermore, this study advances the overall understanding of disinformation diffusion by focusing exclusively on misleading content and the differences among them. Lastly, this work can add a new perspective to existing research by extensively quantifying the effects of viral disinformation online with a large-scale social media analysis.

Group identities, also known as social identities, have been established as measurable, stable, and behaviorally relevant constructs in marketing, psychology, and political science. According to research in political psychology, shared in-group identities can increase a voter’s support for an in-group political candidate.

Political conflicts and trade tensions affect entrepreneurial activities. This paper qualitatively evaluates the success factors of a B2B company’s marketing management strategies within the context of trade policy changes. Results indicate that a strong brand, personal ties to customers, retailers and competitors, and international manufacturing sites reduce the risk. Companies not only face the challenge of disruptive innovation caused by global digitalization activities. In addition, disruptions in the macro-environment are actually increasing. One example that impedes the growth of industrial activities is the current, still escalating, US-China trade war. Unusual forms of marketing coalitions and networks in trans-organizational systems are considered key constellations to ensure future company success (Achrol, 1991). What are the success factors for a B2B company’s marketing management strategies within the context of disruptive economic market and industry conditions, e.g., international trade policy changes?

The spread of COVID-19 changes consumer preferences and behaviors greatly across the world. Extant literature has demonstrated that when there is a threat to disease, people stay away from those who do not seem healthy as they can be potentially infectious. Based on the previous literature, this research shows that individuals exposed to disease threat avoid products of which designs are high in visual complexity. When disease threat was present, individuals had lower purchase intention for products with complex designs. The perceived uncleanliness mediated the effect of visual complexity and disease threat on purchase intention. The findings provide a novel insight into the effect of disease salience on consumer perception of product design.

The present study is designed to assess the ethical-moral effectiveness of three levels of AI implementations in the hospitality industry, which include mechanical AI for transactional services (automated service), thinking AI for functional services (algorithms search), and feeling AI for hedonic services (biometric sensors) when compared to consumers’ interactions with human. AI service robots are ethically challenging in use and morally controversial in its acceptance of labor replacement in hospitality contexts. In the hospitality industry, service robots have been rapidly adopted replacing frontline human services (Park et al., 2021). Service robots refer to “system-based autonomous and adaptable interfaces that interact, communicate and deliver service to an organization’s customers” (Wirtz et al., 2018, p.909). On the one hand, the applications of artificial intelligence (AI)-based service robots are promising in this field owing to remarkable accuracy in error reduction, portion control, and cost control in service operation and delivery (Berezina et al., 2019). However, on the other hand, there has been a debate on ethical and moral principles and values regarding service robots replacing human labor (Cowls et al., 2021). Nevertheless, restaurants’ adoption of service robots seems inevitable in the current marketplace as labor shortages and rising wages have challenged them to invest in automation (Tanzi, 2021). While prior research focused on the benefits of AI-based service offerings (e.g., Cristou et al., 2023; Huang & Rust, 2021; Park et al., 2021), this study explored the extent to which AI-based service robots are accepted by consumers without rising concern about service robots replacing human labors. To this end, we adopted Huang and Rust’s framework that identifies three levels of AI applications: mechanical, thinking, and feeling AIs. Mechanical AIs refer to the automation of repetitive and routine tasks (e.g., self-service technologies); thinking AIs facilitate rational decision-making based on data processing (e.g., conversational intelligent systems such as Siri); feeling AIs are able to interact with human emotions (e.g., humanlike robots that respond to human emotions such as Sophia). Further, we adopted the construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003) to examine how different levels of AIs’ service capabilities influence the way that people think about AI-based service robots. In brief, this study demonstrated how different levels of AI benefits influence consumers’ moral concerns about AI-based service robotization’s replacement of human labor and social acceptance.

The Metaverse is a digital space that utilizes the internet and augmented reality to blend real-life and virtual experiences. This emerging environment offers opportunities for individuals to purchase goods and services, enjoy entertainment, and participate in virtual events. By utilizing Direct-to-Avatar (D2A) and Metahuman (D2M) approaches, brands can create more seamless and immersive customer experiences, representing a progression in omnichannel evolution. Despite this growing interest in the Metaverse, there is limited research on how it impacts consumer perceptions. To address this gap, a qualitative study was conducted involving semi-structured interviews with C-level executives in the fashion industry, alongside two experimental studies that examined hypotheses related to the Metaverse experience. The results revealed that customer experiences in the Metaverse enhance perceived seamlessness and customer engagement. These findings can assist managers in identifying innovative ways to improve customer experiences, including developing new paradigms for the phygital world, combining elements of both physical and digital reality, and creating distinctive brand-customer interactions.

This study examines the impact of digital payment methods on consumer spending, highlighting adoption's moderating role. A two-phase approach, involving 741 survey participants and 166,151 customer records, reveals that digital payments increase willingness to pay and total spending compared to credit cards. Adoption plays a pivotal role, with simple payment users showing significantly higher credit card usage than non-users.

This research demonstrates that consumers with high (vs. low) usage of social networking sites (SNSs) prefer NFTs representing a partial but the only digital piece (vs. one of the limited digital copies) of artwork. NFT uniqueness is identified as the psychological mechanism underlying the SNS usage effect on NFT preference.

Customer engagement has been a focus of a significant amount of research. Most of the prior research on customer engagement typically focused on engagement and loyalty in loyalty program context, while the impact of rewarded customer engagement on program members has largely been missed out. Additionally, no prior study yet has focused on the conceptualization of rewarded customer engagement, while exploring and comparing its significance on various digital platforms, such as loyalty programs and Metaverse. Thus, this study aims to conceptualize rewarded customer engagement while investigating its impact on loyalty program members, and whether it induces and/or encourages their engagement in brand’s Metaverse platform(s).

As the importance of online virtual spaces increases due to COVID-19, interest in online virtual spaces using 4th industrial technology is increasing. Accordingly, the metaverse that combines virtual and real is becoming an issue. In the fashion industry, marketing using online is gradually increasing, and various attempts are being made by converging with the metaverse to provide new and enjoyable experiences to customers. This study looked at the impact of customer experience of a luxury fashion brand pop-up store on customer satisfaction, affective commitment and brand loyalty in a metaverse environment where utilization is increasing due to COVID-19 and technological development. For the analysis data of this study, a survey was conducted on the users who experienced the metaverse platform Zepeto's ' BVLGARI World'. As a result of examining the effect of the customer experience of a luxury fashion brand pop-up store on customer satisfaction, affective commitment, and brand loyalty in a metaverse environment, some of the customer experiences affect customer satisfaction, and the proposed hypothesis was partially accepted. In addition, it was confirmed that customer satisfaction affects affective commitment and brand loyalty, and affective commitment affects brand loyalty. In this study, we examine the impact of the customer experience of a luxury fashion brand pop-up store on customer satisfaction, affective commitment, and brand loyalty in the metaverse environment, and identify what is needed for more active convergence and activation of the metaverse and fashion brands. Also, we provide practical implications to people who involved in the metaverse and the fashion industry.

NFTs are touted as revolutionary to market and monetize digital assets. However, critics have questioned NFT value, labeling it as fraudulent. Despite mixed reviews, various firms are leveraging NFTs as a value proposition for customers. In this study, using service-dominant (S-D) logic, we explore how NFTs can help firms in value co-creation and service exchange. We propose and test a conceptual framework using a multi-method approach -1) we investigate NFTs popularity using historical news articles spanning ten years, 2) we use a case study to examine business NFT use in value co-creation and service exchange, subsequently, proposing a conceptual framework illustrating such value exchange, 3) we test our conceptual framework by analyzing data from multiple sources, including surveys, online forums, social media, and transactions. Results from our study, provide business valuable insight into using NFTs as value co-creation and service exchange tool.

As environmental pollution and natural resource depletion are seriously threatening human beings’ well-being, consumers’ concern about environmental issues has substantially increased. Accordingly, increasing consumers consider themselves to be environmentalists and support environmental protection by consuming green products. In response, more and more firms follow the popular trend by conducting green marketing practices. As a result, green markets are demonstrating greater growth compared to conventional markets these days. On the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming the way of consumer-firm interactions in various industries including the green industry. More and more industries and firms adopt AI agents to replace or assist human employees. Deposit the pervasive and rapid nature of the transformation, however, we have limited knowledge of how the transformation of consumer-firm interaction influences green product marketing practices. Accordingly, the current research aims to investigate how the adoption of AI agents in green marketing strategies impacts consumers’ responses and further explore which mechanism underlying the process. To examine our hypotheses, we conducted a series of studies, and we collected the data through an online survey platform. Our findings demonstrated that consumers’ reaction was sufficiently different when they interact with AI agent compared to human agent in a green consumption context. Our findings contribute to enriching prior literature on green and AI by integrating each other and also provide practical implications for marketers in the related industries.

As the demand for luxury brands faces uprising trends in popularity, marketing strategies strive to fully encompass the shifting tides of the market. Especially, high-end customers, hereby VIPs, are heavily nurtured based on their high-spending nature. With the understanding of VIP sales behavior based on social comparison and the adequate use of VIP marketing programs, luxury brands can optimize their sales of luxury brands. However, scant research examines the simultaneous impact of social comparison and VIP marketing in the luxury industry.

Recent studies have examined the correlation between erotic capital and luxury brands, which is essential to social success. However, limitations of such research have been noted due to the ambiguity of the concept and measurement of erotic capital. Therefore, in this study, we clarify the components of erotic capital and develop measurement tools to study the expansion of the base of luxury brands. To this end, a survey targeted 200 consumers who had purchased luxury brands within six months. The results of this study show that the attraction value of individuals and expected social success increases purchases of luxury products. This study suggests that marketers of luxury brands based on traditional values should reflect the concept of erotic capital for product planning, promotion, and marketing to expand the consumer base.

Social networking sites (SNS) is an image-oriented sharing platform and can form social relationships among users. This allows individuals to create and share the contents which include their stories, ideas, reviews, opinions, and evaluations, etc. Consumers who sympathize with and trust these contents will follow them and form the relationships. Contents created and shared by individual users is more effective than advertisements delivered by brands in generating electronic word of mouth (e-WOM). Accordingly, opinion leaders and influencers who influence potential customers based on their opinions and style related contents have emerged in various fields such as health, fitness, fashion, beauty, food, and high-tech.

While companies and brands have always collected and used customer data for multiple purposes, the advent of smart devices, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data has made it much easier to access and utilize consumers’ personal information. For consumers, however, such ease of access to their personal data and frequent cases of data breach have increased their concerns about data privacy (Harris & Associates, 1996; Milne et al., 2004). Nevertheless, consumers continue to share their personal information with companies and brands in the digital environment (Turow et al., 2015).