China is leading the global fashion market value in 2023 with consumers experiencing an integration of traditional consumption and production approaches to innovative ones triggered by the internet of things (IoT). This high speed ‘inspire and sell’ consumer conversion approach (ibid) is both enabling fashion consumption and introducing alternative approaches to end of life items. This finds Chinese consumers on the top of the global fashion consumption ranks raising even more the importance of sustainable practices. On an industry level, the shortened fashion cycles, the changes in item longevity, the low prices and the fast-moving consumer trends have attributed to an increasing waste generation as consumers discard clothes more frequently. Increasingly, studies alert to the availability of alternative end of life fashion practices, such as, swapping, renting selling etc offering more choices in terms of reducing fashion waste. Yet research related to these efforts seem to have a national or regional perspective and approach and most of the studies are located and focused on western societies.

Insurance and unit trust (also known as mutual funds) are high-involvement financial products that require investors to hold for long term to gain desired returns. These financial products are also considered unsought products, which require salespeople’s personal touch with their potential customers to make sales. Therefore, the relationship between salespeople and their potential or existing customers becomes crucial in the sales of insurance and unit trust. In theoretical terms, this relationship represents business ties. A strong business ties between the salespeople and the customers enable them to exchange resources and knowledge, and co-create values in their business relationships. Such exchange and co-creation of values are desirable in a business network. Weak ties are irregular and infrequent exchanges, creating structural holes that bring about an opportunity for bridging but have not yet been capitalized.

Driving to the store, finding parking, defective carts, difficulties in finding items, poor product info, long lines for checkout, unclear receipts, carrying heavy shopping bags home, and forgotten items are some of the most common barriers experienced by grocery shoppers. These are also the most common reasons why shoppers decide to switch to alternative retailers or to online grocery channels. COVID-19 accelerated this trend with online grocery shopping and home delivery services became prevalent and grew significantly during the pandemic (Gupta & Mukhejee, 2022). Today, e-grocery has reached 11% of the total grocery sales and being expected to reach 19% by 2025 in US (source: Statista, 2022). Brick and mortar grocery retailers declare to suffer from low loyalty of their customer and margin pressure. On the other side, the recent investments of online pure players such as Amazon and Alibaba in physical retail, including grocery, show that the physical shopping has still potential to lead retailers’ growth, also within grocery. Grocery retailers should therefore find new ways to attract and retain customers to their stores. Offering a better customer experience (CE) may be a valuable strategy to this end. A great CE has emerged at the base of a sustainable competitive advantage for companies, and it is at the heart of customer loyalty (Grewal et al., 2017) in several sectors but has often been neglected within grocery selling.

The backbone of any customer experience management is the ability to understand customers’ needs, wants and lifestyles (Schmidt, 2003). In a post Covid era where consumer behaviours have changed forever, luxury brands need to step up to woe consumers back to their brick-and-mortar stores. For example, the Dior historical and global store at the Avenue Montaigne reopened after two years of renovations to offer a unique customer experience. This iconic store now offers not only the full range of products one can buy, but also an art gallery, a café, a 3-Michelin stars restaurant and an exclusive suite at the price of 25,000 Euros per night. The centrepiece of this new store is the huge glass staircase overlooked by a wall of mannequins dressed in various Dior dresses. It is meant to be “instagramable” for those who need to show off their visit to their virtual followers. The key question one may ask is whether all these innovations and investments in building an exceptional flagship store provide a better customer experience?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it drastically changed the way that many consumers conducted their shopping for almost all their needs. This created a dramatic increase in online purchases, causing global e-commerce sales to skyrocket to 26.7 billion dollars, up four percent from the previous year (UNCTAD, 2021). This surge in sales caused an increase in certain customer segments, resulting in many retailers rethinking their marketing and branding strategies. To many retailers’ surprise, elderly adults aged sixty-five and older began to adopt e-commerce shopping during the pandemic at an overwhelming rate.

This paper focuses on the importance of rethinking the functionality of the fashion retail store and suggests transforming the retail store into a space to educate consumers regarding important societal and cultural issues. Consumption trends and changes in consumer habits reveal that people are continuously looking for brand offers beyond services and products. Consumers are shifting the traditional consumer brands dynamics and societal sustainable brands are gaining momentum where consumers are seeking strong and deep relationships with such brands while discarding others. Despite brands' increased investment in e-commerce platforms and digital technologies, the retail store is still a pivotal space for brands to build and maintain a strong relationship with their customers. However, the traditional functionality of the retail store needs to be reconsidered.

This study investigates the role of consumers’ value orientations on their attitude towards assertive green advertisements. We find that biospheric value orientation improves attitudes towards assertive ads and hedonic value orientation positively affects consumers’ perceived threat to their freedom. Besides, the study supports the role of assertiveness in persuasive communication.

This study investigates how zapping behavior is affected by television-viewing motives, classified into two broad categories: goal-directed instrumental motives and process-oriented ritualistic motives. We examine how such an impact varies among individuals with different degrees of advertising skepticism, opinion leadership, ongoing search, program involvement, and advertising involvement. By combining the television-viewing information of 1,162 individuals from April 2017 to March 2018 with survey data, we empirically analyze the effect of motivation on viewers’ zapping likelihood. The results suggest that zapping probability is lower when television-viewing is driven by instrumental motives than by ritualistic motives. The negative impact of instrumental motivations is more evident for individuals with higher ongoing search tendencies. By contrast, individuals who are more skeptical toward advertisements, have higher opinion leadership, or have higher program involvement are less vulnerable to such viewing motivations. We discuss the implications of these findings for devising an effective advertisement placement strategy.

This study tests the influence of multi-visual dimensions and textual features of electronic word-of-mouth (EWOM) on its perceived helpfulness on a sample from Saudi Arabia. This investigation is conducted in the context of Twitter through an online factorial experiment. The design incorporates a 3 (visual inclusion to text: with product-only photo, with product and face photo, without product photo) × 3 (EWOM valence: positive, positive and negative, and negative) between-subjects experiment (n = 540). It is concluded that when evaluating EWOM helpfulness, pictures do in fact contribute substantial value. For females, this effect is more pronounced when the EWOM is two-sided at the product-only photo level, and when EWOM is negative at the product with a face photo level. Thus, this study adds to the body of existing theories by arguing that EWOM helpfulness largely depends on how the textual and visual features of EWOM are communicated.

This research aims to understand how academic articles stimulate knowledge progress by addressing two questions: Does the level of contribution vary between different methods of research (e.g., conceptual, theoretical, and empirical)? How do we assess the potential of scholarly articles to impact and further innovate the field?

Measuring service quality and related key dimensions has been an important problem in Marketing. In this research, we would introduce a smart methodological framework to efficiently identify refined, key sentiment dimensions for measuring the service quality using both traditional survey and unstructured online reviews (natural survey). The proposed framework consists of three parts: (1) steps for preprocessing the unstructured reviews to generate attribute-level sentiments for independent variables (2) Bayesian regression to efficiently identify key groups of correlated attributes and (3) post-hoc analysis for identifying dimensions from the selected groups of correlated attributes and predicting dimension-level effects. Note, the first part of the framework (i.e., preprocessing) is not required for analyzing traditional surveys. Our framework provides two sets of complementing results such as attribute-level effects under the identified dimensions and aggregate dimension-level effects. In the first application study to traditional SERVQUAL data, we successfully validated the proposed framework by comparing the results between our framework and three commonly used existing methods of regression, lasso regression, and factor analysis. In the second empirical application study with the online reviews from a major game review website, STEAM platform, we found that our framework provided a significantly reduced number of key dimensions which were surprisingly efficient for predicting and explaining the service quality ratings, compared with the same set of compared methods in the first study plus the topic model. In particular, with reviews of 2,825 games, three key dimensions of Mechanical playability, Fun in fantasy and Money for value were identified, and we also found that the Mechanical playability could be an important driver of game popularity.

This study aims to evaluate the level of reproducibility of the marketing field. The research is motivated because many significant published research findings in various scientific areas, including marketing, have been found to be false or only partially replicable, a phenomenon labelled Reproducibility Crisis. This crisis is partly due to the strong overreliance on frequentist statistics and the misuse and misinterpretation of p-values in the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) framework. This study offers two main contributions: first, it develops a methodological, quantitative evaluation of the most-cited published papers in marketing history in its four top journals, creating an overall index of marketing science reproducibility. Second, it analyzes how misuse and misinterpretation of p-values and frequentist statistics have undermined marketing science's reproducibility and discusses possible solutions for these problems. We selected a representative sample of the marketing literature, screening the papers using hierarchical classification criteria and the Web of Science (WoS) database to select the most-cited papers.

The assumption that more-is-better doesn’t hold when consumers want to limit the amount they consume. High calorie meals frustrate dieting plans, food with high salt content may lead to bad health outcomes and large quantity purchases may not fit within available storage spaces. The assumption in economics that marginal utility is always positive may not apply in situations when purchase quantities take on a wide range and when consumers have ideal points and unobserved constraints on their choices. In this paper we develop a model and estimator for locally-rational demand that identifies un- observed constraints on choice by allowing marginal utility to be negative. The model is applied to conjoint data of buy-one-get-one (BOGO) promotions and a scanner panel dataset of milk purchases where the e↵ect of locally-rational demand is prevalent.

While machine learning has gained popularity in choice behavior modeling, most machine learning models are often complex, difficult to interpret, and even considered as black box. This study investigates machine learning methods for choice behavior modeling that provide interpretability of models’ output. We explore various approaches including (1) explicitly descriptive models such as tree-based models, (2) interpretation of predictive models through feature importance measures, and (3) recent advancements in prediction explanation methods such as LIME and SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations). We demonstrate the methods on consumers’ airport choice behavior in Seoul metropolitan area. Through the comparative analysis with traditional discrete choice models, we discuss advantages as well as limitations of machine learning models in consumer choice behavior modeling.

As online reviews become a major factor in the consumer decision making process, firms have started seeking ways to help consumers make informed decisions. To avoid potential information overload, most online retailers provide review helpfulness features by allowing consumers to cast a vote on the (un)helpfulness of a review. Previous research has extensively focused on identifying the drivers of review helpfulness while little attention has been paid to review unhelpfulness. Using an empirical analysis of a large review dataset from a major online retailer, this research investigates the drivers of both review helpfulness and unhelpfulness. By revealing the asymmetry between the consumers’ review helpfulness and unhelpfulness voting behaviors, this study provides practical implications for review platforms.

Frontline employees (hereinafter FLEs) act as boundary spanners, primary representatives, and intermediaries between consumers and service organizations. They are often directly responsible for service delivery and are the customers’ first impression of service organizations. Therefore, maximizing FLE performance is vital for service organizations. Leaders have been argued to play a critical role in fostering FLE performance for a variety of reasons, one of which is to achieve goal-related results. To achieve those results, they often feel a pressing need to discipline their subordinates’ actions. Consequently, leaders may take corrective measures that display controlling behaviors to press subordinates’ best performance. This type of leadership style is known as Authoritarian Leadership (hereinafter AL), which refers to leaders with paternal attributes who utilize absolute authority and control over their subordinates with the expectation of unquestionable obedience. The literature, however, has reported mixed findings of the performance benefits of AL.

The application of mindfulness is increasing significantly in different areas of business studies. However, identifying how mindfulness research has evolved and the major research themes, specifically within the business studies domain, remains lacking. This study unveils the intellectual structure of mindfulness research in business studies. Using citation and co-citation analysis, the study identifies the most influential articles, annual growth, and three key research clusters constituting the intellectual foundation.

The purpose of this study is to examine how similarities between product designs manifest themselves in various aspects and how these influences purchasing and usage behavior. Product design similarity evokes positive images, such as a sense of security and familiarity, as well as negative images, such as mimicry and copying. For example, if you have just transferred to another school and your uniform does not match everyone else's, you might feel alienated. On the other hand, in parks and on street corners, wearing the same clothes and belongings can lead to an awkward moment. In the realm of psychology, the former is called the bandwagon effect and the latter is the snob effect. In contrast to the snob effect, which emphasizes scarcity, the bandwagon effect can create fads and hits. People experience both of these emotions, and it is said that using them appropriately and combining them leads to an effective marketing strategy.

As the worlds’ population ages, more frontline employees (FLEs) will be required in the aged care industry. Notably, workers at residential aged care services are susceptible to workplace stress (Biggins, 2019) due to the long hours, low wages, and physical and emotional demands of helping the elderly and incapacitated (Proust, 2019). This poses challenges for the industry to manage the welfare of its employees.

The popularity of live streaming is driving the emergence of a new business model, known as live-streaming commerce (LSC). Consumers spend more and more time on smartphones, and the emerging business model of live-streaming commerce (LSC) is flourishing in the retail industry. With highly interactive features, LSC social interactions influence viewer purchase behaviors. To examine the interactions between influencers and viewers, we collected a rich dataset from a leading LSC service platform and integrated research models from the natural language process (NLP) field and econometric models.