The study evaluates the influence of national culture on the relationships between tourist motivation, service interactions with hotel employees, and place attachment. These relationships are ascertained among four groups of visitors to the island of Mauritius. The overall structural model, tested on a sample of 545 visitors, indicates that motivation and service interactions are strong determinants of place attachment. Multi-group analysis shows there is no relationship between service interactions and place dependence for all four groups of visitors (German, South African, French and British). However, there are differences in the relationships between motivation, place identity and place dependence for all four groups. The findings have important implications for hotel managers, destination marketing and management, and employee training.

Organisations encourage shareholders to invest in the place and the place audience relies on place reputation when making investment decisions and product choices. Given the significance of the place branding and place heritage and building upon the evidence discussed, this research is one of the first attempts at collecting empirical evidence that seeks to prove that a favourable place branding and place branding heritage influence a favourable place image and favourable place reputation. This study aims to explore employees and visitors/consumers’ perceptions and practices regarding the place branding and the main factors that influence place branding suitability at a visitor/consumer/employee level. By achieving these objectives, it is expected that the investigation will add to current knowledge about the place branding and provide practical insights to managers and decision-makers. Based on the research objectives of this study, three overall research questions are: (i) What are the factors that influence place branding favourability, (ii) What are the main influences of place heritage favourability on favourable place branding?, and (iii) What are the main influences of place branding favourability on favourable place image and favourable place reputation? This research addresses the general goals: first, it explores the concept of the place branding and its dimensions. Second, it identifies the factors that are most likely to have a significance influence on the favourable place branding (antecedents of the favourable place branding). Third, it develops and empirically assesses a model concerning the relationships between favourable place branding, its antecedents and its consequences. Fourth, it examines the influence of the favourable place heritage on place branding. Finally, it investigates the impact of the favourable place branding on favourable place image and favourable place reputation (consequences of the favourable place branding). Despite the potentially significant role of the favourable place branding, little empirical research has examined how the favourable place branding exposes corporations and their members to far greater scrutiny. Creating a employee/consumer/visitor level model based on attribution theory demonstrates the issues retailers face in relation to place branding: (i) the association between the place branding concept and its elements that foster or discourage; (ii) its benefits or outcome for place; (iii) the relationships between other theoretically and empirically identified variables. In order to fill this gap in the academic literature, prior studies and the insights gained from current field research were reviewed. The model and various propositions developed thereafter, merit further study.

Recent evidence suggests a dramatic increase of use on the social media environment in the tourism and hospitality industry. This study aims to develop a measurement scale for the social media environment also called “social media scape”. The study will offer insights regarding the consequences of social media scape as well. Empirical data will be collected from 3 different countries and 3 studies will be conducted. In addition, the findings of this study will suggest how social media scape shapes key consumer behavior outcomes. Finally, this study will discuss the managerial implications for marketing and positioning strategy in the social media environment. In particular, the results of the study will indicate how the social media scape should be developed thus helping brands to better position themselves in this social media world and what consumers’ needs can satisfy such as functional, hedonic, social, and psychological. In addition, for global marketers who want to develop international networks, ethnicities are a significant impact factor on users’ behaviors. As such, this information will be useful since our study will include 3 different countries

The development of digital technology has facilitated easier communication between people, and between people and organizations. WhatsApp, one of the most popular digital technology applications, is used not only for personal but also commercial purposes; in terms of marketing, the application has accelerated it, enabling it to be more direct and interactive. This paper will present a success story of the use of WhatsApp to support interactive marketing. In particular, this study aims to expand limited knowledge of the use of WhatsApp to support interactive marketing. A case study approach is employed to achieve this purpose, and the data analysed using the content analysis method. Several novelties that contribute to existing knowledge will also be presented, as well as trajectories for future research

Loyalty programs are one of the most widely used strategy to promote sales and manage consumer relationship. According to Stourm, Bradlow, and Fader (2015), loyalty programs are divided into two types: non-linear programs and linear programs. Of these two programs, linear loyalty programs are increasingly expanding thanks to the development of digital technology. However, it is doubtful whether the findings of previous researches investigating non-linear loyalty programs also hold true for linear loyalty programs. Our study aims to investigate what induces consumers to stockpile or use their points in linear loyalty programs. This is particularly important because it seems that consumers really have no economic incentive to stockpile points in such programs. They are not rewarded for their “stockpiling” behavior- the amount of points accumulated for 1 dollar remains the same regardless of whether a consumer has already accumulated 100 points or 10000 points. The present research shows that in linear loyalty programs, consumers stockpile points just for the sake of “it”. That is, our studies show that the degree to which consumers perceive their effort to invest until they reach certain point level (goal) to be high or low influences consumers’ stockpiling decision. Specifically, when consumers expect that they have to invest greater effort, they are more likely to accumulate points compared to when they expect they don’t have to invest a lot of effort. In the main study, we show that this effect was mediated by consumers’ anticipation utility. Also, we found an interesting phenomenon that shows even when a certain point level is not obviously given consumers still set their own goals and calculate their effort needed to reach the goal.

Fashion bloggers and their personal brands have attracted significant attention in recent years, as prior research has indicated their importance in shaping the fashion industry. As fashion is cultural-specific social construct, to understand how bloggers’ personal brands are developed, it is critical to examine the practices of bloggers from two different cultures, namely, Taiwanese and American. The two cultures are chosen because fashionable persons in the U.S. are well established and can be considered as qualified brands that accumulate a significant amount of followers and fame. However, this institutional process is still under development in Taiwan where routine practices, norms and rules, and the structural features that serve to guide and constrain the behaviours of individuals have yet been established. To focus on the practices within the institution, the framework of practice theory is applied to analyze how individual bloggers negotiate their ways to become branded persons. Focusing on the best practices in the field, 20 most popular fashion blogs from the U.S. and Taiwan were selected in the sample. The verbal and visual texts visible in these blogs are analyzed. The results suggest that moving from amateur bloggers who take interests in fashion to establishing a well-connected fashionable persona in the fashion industry is a long process of celebrities in the making. The contrasts between the two countries indicate that cultural elements are important factors to consider in understanding the formation of persona-fied brands. It appears that the usual assumption of distinction between the public persona and the private persona does not always imply in persona-fied brands. When the external institutions have yet been established, the practices of such a distinction may prove to be challenging. While all the bloggers included in the sample are still unified persons that encompass both the creation and the execution of the personal brands. U.S. bloggers are slowly moving toward professional management of the brands where they see themselves as persona-fied brands and where other persons may execute the brandable qualities on their behalf. On the other hand, Taiwanese bloggers rarely make such a distinction. In fact, most of the bloggers have yet identified the two facets in their personas. They do not see themselves as micro-celebrities that stand in a higher level of the hierarchy than their fans. They regard themselves as part of a fashionable community where others appreciate their taste. This is evident by the practices of how they organize their communities and how they interact with their fan bases.

While it was found that consumers’ experience on purchase intention is significantly affected by greater involvement in blogging (Hsu & Tsou, 2011), not many fashion companies use blogs to improve online consumption and relationship with their employee or customer (Fieseler & Fleck, 2013). Further, despite the growing significance of blog communication, there is a lack of understanding for the impact of accumulation of social capital in the blogosphere on the consumers’ attitude and engagement in previous research. This study is designed to address this gap, and particularly the role of three dimensions of social capital (i.e., structural, relational, and cognitive) in understanding blog user’s attitude and engagement. The purpose of this study is to investigate 1) the effect of blog user’s motivation (i.e., perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, reputation, altruism, enjoyment, community identification) on their level of social capital within the blog 2) the influence of structural social capital and cognitive social on user’s relational social capital and 3) the impact of relational social capital on blog user’s attitude and engagement. Data was collected through a marketing research firm utilizing online survey method. With 530 usable data, the results of this study indicated enjoyment have positive significant effect on structural social capital while community identification have negative significant effect on structural social capital. For the effect of blogging motivation on cognitive social capital, the result showed positive significant effect of perceived usefulness, altruism and community identification on cognitive social capital Further, structural social capital does not have relationship with relational social capital while cognitive social capital has significant effect on relational social capital. The results also indicated that the relational social capital has influence on blogging attitude, which in turn has strong positive relationship with blogging engagement. The findings of this study contribute some useful knowledge about fashion blog and the relationships of the three social capital dimensions to the literature. Also, this study not only provides theoretical insight into understanding the influence of fashion blog user’s motivation on blogging behavior and satisfaction of needs of belong, it also exposes the influence of relationships building in blog community on user’s blogging attitude and engagement. Previous studies focused more on social influence on knowledge sharing motivation, and most of the researchers paid attention to the interaction of cognitive social capital and relational capital. This study employs the knowledge sharing motivation findings of previous studies, and it uses the effective motivation factors to test if they have the same impacts on people’s blogging behavior.

Technology-mediated communication is established as a key channel for firms to interact with consumers, who can choose between a rapidly expanding variety of devices types and interaction modes such as live-chats, video calls, voice-controlled virtual assistants, or online avatars. However, frustrated consumers report publicly about their negative experience and attribute their discontent to a lack of authenticity of the technology-mediated encounter. In technology-mediated contexts consumers often cannot relate to tangible products and observable behavior of a service employee to judge the authenticity of the encounter. Thus, it is unknown how consumers form their authenticity evaluation. We address this gap by exploring the concept of authenticity in technology-mediated consumer-firm interactions. Based on 41 qualitative in-depth interviews we provide a framework of consequences and antecedents of authenticity perception. Most importantly, we identify three different categories of cues from which consumers infer to judge the authenticity of an encounter: the interaction counterpart, the communication quality and the brand experience

The Hofstede and GLOBE national culture dimensions are commonly used by management and marketing researchers and practitioners to understand cultural differences between countries. However, there are fundamental problems in using these dimensions to learn about cross-cultural marketing. Firstly, there is a lack of face validity in many of the items used to determine the culture scores. Second, national culture scores for similar dimensions across the two models for common countries are either unrelated or negatively related, seriously undermining the credibility of the dimension scores in representing the culture phenomena that they claim to represent. Lastly, the national culture scores for dissimilar dimensions are often more strongly related than with the similar dimensions, hence using these scores to infer the broader characteristics of societies, individuals and organizations is invalid and the managerial prescriptions based on such research are misleading. Taken together these flaws must seriously question the integrity and usefulness of the Hofstede and GLOBE national dimensions in international marketing research. We discuss the origins of these problems and advocate a more critical perspective on these taken-for-granted culture models. We conclude with some suggestions on cross-cultural marketing that are both theoretically meaningful and practically useful.

Value creation constitutes the essential purpose of a business relationship. However, limited research examines the role of relationship value in interfirm relationships in general and in international business settings in particular. This study develops a conceptual model that positions psychic distance, relational norms, and relationship learning as antecedents of relationship value, and relationship quality and performance as its key outcomes in international channel relationships. The study uses partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to test the model relationships. Comparing the findings of these two approaches provides an interesting basis for discussion on the importance and applicability of PLS-SEM and fsQCA. Furthermore, the results provide an important addition to the relationship value literature and an interesting discussion on the asymmetric versus symmetric relationships among the observations.

We argue that a novel dark personality trait—the focal firm’s desire for control—may drive key decisions pertaining to how to monitor strategic alliances, which in turn can deter performance outcomes. Our conceptual model was tested based on a survey of 197 international strategic alliances. Results demonstrate that the firm’s use of process monitoring to oversee the counterpart drives its performance outcomes only if there is a low level of information exchange between alliance partners; as such, information exchange norms substitute for process monitoring. Whereas, the focal firm’s use of outcome monitoring enhances its performance outcomes only if it is reinforced by a high level of information exchange; that is, these two monitoring mechanisms complement each other in alliances.

International business ventures are able to survive and succeed in today’s turbulent global market only by developing dynamic capabilities. The dynamic capabilities paradigm proposes for multinationals to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competencies as well as tangible (e.g. financial) and intangible (e.g. reputational) resources to face environmental volatility (Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997; Morgan, Katsikeas & Vorhies, 2012; Leonidou et al., 2015). However, dynamic capability development needs the organizational “capacity to extract economic benefits from current resources and to develop new capabilities” (Luo, 2000). Here the scholars do not offer a unified view. Capacity for dynamic capability is most often linked to knowledge exploitation / innovation capability (e.g. Monferrer et al., 2015), competitor knowledge utilization (e.g. Luo, 2000), or knowledge- sourcing, generative and integrative capabilities (e.g. Michailova & Zhan, 2015). When speaking about global dynamic capabilities, Lawson and Samson (2001) proposed 7-factor model, Chen and Law (2009) 6-factor model, and Leonidou et al. (2015) 5-factor model. New dynamic capabilities were born, e.g. networking capability (Mitrega et al., 2012), international marketing capability (Morgan, Katsikeas & Vorhies, 2012), etc. In spite of various views, scholars agree that dynamic capabilities generate new forms of competitive advantage (Teece, 2014; Leonidou et al., 2015) and offer strategic value to the firm (Morgan, Katsikeas & Vorhies, 2012). Thus, the advancement of the knowledge in this area will significantly contribute to better performance of export ventures in the future. This study addresses the equivocal results of international (business relationship) marketing and international business scholars and closes the gap between the two domains by proposing a structured framework towards global dynamic capabilities understanding. We build on two dynamic capability models (see Table 1): (1) antecedents-processes-outcomes model proposed by Eriksson (2014); and (2) strategy, structure and environment model proposed by Wilden et al. (2013). First, following Fang and Zou (2009) we believe that the magnitude and complementarity of resources deployed to create dynamic capabilities will differ depending on the antecedents or outcomes phases compared to dynamic capabilities creation process. Second, following Wilden et al. (2013) we claim that dynamic capabilities need to be aligned with organizational structure, environmental (competitive) intensity and multinational firm’s strategy to have a positive effect on export performance. In essence, the objective of this study is to offer an extensive literature review and answer the question, which are the key components of the future global dynamic capabilities model. At the end, this multidisciplinary study offers the directions for future research in the dynamic capabilities area. We suspect future studies will focus on the comparison between developed and emerging markets (Khalid & Larimo, 2012), as the level of turbulence in these markets differs leading to unique conditions for multinationals’ dynamic capabilities development. Furthermore, the comparison between headquarters’ and subsidiaries’ dynamic response to cultural, psychic and economic differences (Leonidou et al., 2015) might reveal other factors that equally importantly impact the export marketing strategy implementation effectiveness (Morgan, Katsikeas & Vorhies, 2012). Finally, we may expect more multidisciplinary studies in the future (Teece, 2014), particularly in the overlapping dynamic fields of (international) management, (business relationship) marketing, and humanistic studies.

How stable are shopping styles of women and men across cultures? To find out, the authors develop a new scale that reliably measures differences between male and female shopping styles and is stable across cultures. They develop a conceptual model and hypotheses to test whether observed differences in gender shopping styles are likely to be innate or arise from socialization. Through a survey of consumers in seven countries, they show that males and females are evolutionary predisposed to have different shopping styles. Counter to social structural theory, the observed differences in shopping style between females and males are greater in low-context cultures (higher gender equality countries) than in high-context cultures (lower gender equality countries). Empathizing—the ability to tune into another person’s thoughts and feelings—mediates shopping style more for female shoppers; systemizing—the degree to which an individual possesses spatial skills—mediates shopping style more for male shoppers. Therefore, retail segmentation between females and males appears to be of more managerial relevance than segmentation between cultures. Other managerial implications are also discussed.

The growing pace of market globalization has enabled firms to find it increasingly attractive to exploit growth opportunities abroad. To this end, predicting firms’ success and growth in foreign markets has become an important issue to international business researchers and managers. The international business literature suggests that different internal firm and foreign market specific environment factors drive internationalization of firms including firms’ structure, strategy, orientations, capabilities and nature of foreign market competition. Researchers interested in the field of international entrepreneurship have also given attention to firms’ international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) as a potential driver of firms’ internationalization behavior, with few recent studies reporting investigations into the relationship between IEO and internationalization scope. The entrepreneurship literature suggests that variations in entrepreneurial behaviors may lead to exploitation of “new entry” (Oviatt & McDougall, 2005; Cavusgil & Knight, 2015). Within the international entrepreneurship discipline, international new entry is construed to entail identification and exploitation of new product-market opportunities abroad, or a pursuit of internationalization scope (Dai et al., 2014). Internationalization scope is defined as the process of seeking new market opportunities across multiple foreign markets, and is operationalized variously with indicators that tap the percentage of overseas revenue to total revenue, and the number of foreign countries and geographic regions from which a firm receives its sales. Thus, internationalization scope is viewed to be inherent and essential to the exhibition of an IEO, and may be driven by firms’ entrepreneurial proclivity. While a few studies have looked at how IEO impacts percentage of revenue firms obtain from foreign markets (Dai et al., 2014), little studies have studied how and when IEO drives regional expansion. This is notwithstanding the fact that traditional internationalization theory points to regional expansion as an antecedent to global expansion. Indeed, international business scholars have argued that a combination of increasing informal exporting activities, rising liberalization of regional economies, colonial bias, regional economic blocs and the emergence of middle class in many regional markets has created opportunities for firms to internationalize within neighboring geographical regions. Additionally, it has been argued that the benefits and costs of regional protection can motivate firms to pursue regionalization strategy as an antecedent or an alternative to globalization strategy. In drawing insights from earlier works, therefore, the present study focuses on the regional expansion of exporting firms in a Sub-Sahara African economy – Ghana, and examines how international entrepreneurial-oriented behaviors drive the firms’ intra-Africa expansion. African markets are noted for their diversity in national laws, cultures, geography, and infrastructural development. Particularly relevant to internationalizing African firms is the diversity and imperfection of marketing channels across African markets. An important implication for African firms, therefore, is how they can leverage their comparative advantage of handling diversity and imperfection of marketing channels in their home African market to successfully compete in overseas host markets with similar conditions. Accordingly, we further empirically examine how a firm’s ability to manage heterogeneous and imperfect marketing channels moderates the effect of IEO behaviors on regional expansion. We posit that the extent to which firms develop managerial and organizational capabilities to successfully compete in conditions of high market channel diversity and imperfection is a major contingency factor that can help explain when entrepreneurial behaviors influence regional expansion. By empirically examining these questions, this study brings new insights to IEO research by showing that IEO behaviors are differentially related to regionalization strategy depending on firms’ capability to manage heterogeneous and imperfect regional marketing channels. Specifically, findings from our study of small and medium sized firms in Ghana doing business in regional African markets show that regional expansion increases when levels of product innovation intensity, competitive aggressiveness and autonomous behavior are high and when regional channel management capability increases in magnitude. Additionally, the study provides evidence to show that increases in risking-taking behavior decrease regional expansion when regional channel management capability is high. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that although product innovation novelty and proactiveness are directly related to regional expansion their effects are cancelled out when levels of regional channel management capability are high.

The present paper discusses the interrelationship among knowledge creation, heterogeneity, and open service innovation – an important theme of marketing research. Drawing on the literature of knowledge based innovation, we argue that both researchers and practitioners should extend the functionality of created knowledge into open and service-oriented innovation context. Our conceptual framework represent the following major points. First, the four classic knowledge creation mode each has different influences on open service innovation, given employee and customer knowledge is a cornerstone of service innovation. Specifically, socialization positively, externalization positively, combination positively, and internalization negatively predicts open service innovation. Second, knowledge heterogeneity moderates in the above mentioned relationships. Implication are discussed

Despite the importance of innovation and customer participation for both practitioners and academics, the effects of the integration between innovation and customer participation has rarely been addressed in consumers’ perspectives. Accordingly, the authors first examine separately the impact of the two breakthrough innovation types (technology-based innovation vs. market-based innovation) and two forms of customer participation (as information providers vs. as co-developers) on brand attitude. Following this, the interaction effect between the two variables is also tested. We used a 2x2x2 mixed subjects design. We employed a 2 (breakthrough innovations: T-INNO, M-INNO) x 2 (customer participation: CPI, CPC) between-subjects design for independent variables and the dependent variable had a 2 (brand attitude: pre-brand attitude, post-brand attitude) within-subject design. The hypotheses were tested for a cell phone product category by pretest. Participants were 148 university students from Seoul, Korea. The results show that both breakthrough innovation and customer participation positively influence the brand attitudes held by customers, though neither the two forms of breakthrough innovation nor the two forms of customer participation differ from each other in terms of the strength of this relationship. However, when technology-based innovation is combined with customer participation in the form of co-development, a stronger positive impact on brand attitude is observed than when customers are treated as information providers. Conversely, when market-based innovation is combined with customer participation in the form of information provision, a stronger positive impact on brand attitude is observed than when the customers act as co-developers. These results have a number of theoretical contributions. First, prior innovation research has mostly focused on the impact on firm performance. Even though a few researchers have conducted several studies about the impact of innovation in terms of consumers’ perspectives, they did not consider the specific type of innovation. The present study focuses on comparing the impact of two types of breakthrough innovation based on customers’ perspectives. Second, prior customer participation or co-creation research has mostly looked at the positive impact on performance from both the firm’s and consumer’s perspective. However, they did not consider the specific type of customer participation which can affect differently performance. In this study, the differential impact of each type of customer participation was explored. Third, previous studies have not focused on the interaction effect between two types of innovation and customer participation. We found that the interaction effect can be significant when they are combined together. This study has also managerial implications. First, when firm managers utilize both breakthrough innovation and customer participation strategies, they need to consider the most effective combination of the forms of innovation and participation available. Second, this interaction effect should be considered not only in the innovative product development process but also in the communication activities in their customers. Finally, the limitations and further research directions of this results are discussed.

Customer integration has received considerable attention in the service literature in order to foster service innovations (e.g. Vargo & Lusch, 2004; Chan, Yim & Lam 2010; Yim, Chan & Lam, 2012; Grönroos & Voima, 2013). The changing role of the customer from being a passive consumer to becoming an active contributor during service provision and co-creator has a significant impact on numerous service firms. Customer integration is essential to many services and successful integration improves service experience of the customer and it allows development of new services in particular (Magnusson, Matthing & Kristensson, 2003; Melton & Hartline, 2010). Against this background, service industries nowadays face the challenge of dealing with new customer and employee roles in times of digitalization, increasing customer activity, changing interaction channels, and development of new business model. While the impact of employee’s customer stewardship on the employee-customer relationship has been investigated in prior studies, is unclear whether an employee’s commitment to the customer also motivates the employee to contribute to service innovation development.We propose that an employee’s level of customer stewardship represents an important requirement for organizational learning about understanding customer needs and to uncover future trends. Based on stewardship and agency theory, we develop a conceptual model proposing that idea generation, articulation, and implementation depend on employee-related factors (e.g., employee stewardship), structural factors (e.g., incentive system), and control-related factors (e.g., monitoring system). Hypotheses are tested using survey data from 390 frontline employees in financial services. Results underline the important roles of employee stewardship and organizational commitment. Insights provide managers guidance how to improve motivation of frontline employees to engage in these important behaviors.

The advent of smart shopping environments including innovative information technology, advanced delivery systems, and extended smart phone use has rapidly changed the shopping methods and activities of the consumers. They have chosen smart shopping with greater frequency, which minimizes the use of time, money, effort and energy to buy the right products and to gain shopping experiences such as hedonic and utilitarian feelings (Atkins and Kim, 2012). The concept of smart shopping is based on value co-creation which can be explained as the value from the outcome of interaction between firms and consumers (Grönroos, 2011, Vargo and Lusch, 2004). In the value co-creation process, smart shoppers are willing to perform customer participation behaviors such as information seeking, information sharing, responsible behavior, and personal interaction, and to show customer citizenship behaviors such as feedback, advocacy, helping, and tolerance (Yi and Gong 2013). In smart shopping, a consumer involves in shopping experiences through product purchases and while engaged via the shopping environments such as an elaborate store design, educational events, recreation, and entertainment (Fiore and Kim, 2007). These shopping experiences, which contain both hedonic and utilitarian value (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982), are better explained by consumer processes, responses on the shopping environment, situation, and consumer characteristics (Fiore and Kim, 2007). The attributes of shopping experience are symbolic, hedonic, and aesthetic (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982) and utilitarian and hedonic (Kim, Lee and Park, 2014). Smart shoppers who are involved with value co-creation obtain hedonic benefits with emotional, funny, and enjoyable feelings and along with utilitarian benefits such as rational, functional, task-related experiences (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). The value co-creation and the shopping experience lead to greater customer equity such as value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity (Lemon, Rust, and Zeithamal 2001). Based on previous literature review, the authors constructed the following hypotheses. First, smart shopping will have positive effects on value co-creation, the shopping experience, and customer equity. Second, the smart shopping will have positive effects on both value co-creation and the shopping experience. Third, value cocreation will have positive effects on the shopping experience. Fourth, value cocreation and the shopping experience will have positive effects on customer equity. The authors collected the data based on questionnaires from mobile smart shoppers. The SPSS 20 and AMOS 20 statistical programs will be used for the data analysis. The analysis found the positive influence that smart shopping has on value co-creation and the shopping experience, and customer equity. This is the first study that shows these relationships from an empirical point-of-view. The findings of the study have useful managerial implications on the effects of value co-creation on both smart shoppers and firms. Value co-creation will provide smart shoppers with better product or service quality and enhance firms with more valuable customer equity. The greater shopping experience is the greater customer equity that will be developed. Value co-creation also will give firms a strong competitive advantage in terms of an organization’s learning, brand perception, reduced risk, improvement of customer relationships, and lowering cost for marketing, and research and development. The study has limitations. First, other potential variables of the value co-creation influencing new service development, customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction etc, could be considered. Second, the length of the relationship between smart shoppers and the service provider in value co-creation process should be considered. Third, the study needs to be generalized to cross sectional research beyond smart shopping area. Finally, to examine the effects of value co-creation and the shopping experience on customer equity, future research could investigate how value co-creation and the shopping experience affect the objective financial performance of a firm.