By means of a field experiment, corporate brand posts on Facebook are analyzed regarding their effect on brand fans’ post recall capability, attitude toward the brand, and purchase intention. Results indicate that Facebook brand posts are able to positively influence fans’ attitude toward the brand. A significant interaction effect between the level of product involvement and the degree of brand posts’ interactivity and vividness is found. Implications for marketing research and practitioners are discussed.

Justice theory has emerged as a frequently used framework in theory and among service leaders to investigate reasons for customer complaints and their satisfaction with the handling of the complaint (Orsingher, Valentini, & Angelis, 2010; Tax, Brown, & Chandrashekaran, 1998). Whereas the complaint of a single customer used to be heard by only a small circle of acquaintances, with the rise of social media it can now be transferred to a large community of other customers as well. Theory suggests that justice perceptions might be able to explain the reactions of third parties to a complaint. Therefore, we analyze 400 complaints of 8 companies from 4 different retail and service industries and their related comments from a large German online complaint forum. We found that complaints addressing procedural justice issues receive the most attention and a lot of support from other users. Complaints regarding interactional justice, receive more opposition than support, evidenced by the negative comments from the other users. They seem to perceive the interactional complaints as less severe and even defend the company in many cases by attributing part of the blame to the complainant. Companies should consider these findings when they manage their complaint process and when they try to assess the criticality of complaints. In addition, this study once again confirms the danger of not reacting to customer requests in a timely manner as this can be interpreted by customers as intentionally ignoring them, which leads to positive reactions of other users and to solidarity with the complainant.

This study investigates the role of knowledge sharing in the development of relationship capabilities, focusing on the interaction between exporting organizations and their foreign partners. Knowledge sharing can be defined as the activities of how to assist communities of people work together, facilitating the exchange of their knowledge, enhancing organizational learning capacity, and increasing their ability to attain individual and organizational goals. Knowledge sharing facilitates the development of innovative ideas, creates new business opportunities through the learning process of knowledge workers, and increases the ability of employees to achieve individual and organizational objectives. The exchange of information and knowledge is crucially important in an export marketing context, as a result of the increasing complexity and volatility of the international business environment and the information asymmetry between exporters and their foreign distributors. Knowledge sharing between the two parties enables exporters to gain a better understanding of local market conditions and develop appropriate products that fit the needs and preferences of end-user customers. In an effort to fill an important gap in the export marketing literature, the present study develops and empirically tests a conceptual model of the organizational factors that stimulate the adoption of an export knowledge sharing behavior, the relationship between export knowledge sharing behavior and export relationship capabilities, and the resulting positive outcomes for exporting organizations. The study develops seven research hypotheses, which are then tested using data collected from a sample of Greek direct exporters by means of an online survey. The key informant in this study is the head of exporting activities (hereafter referred to as export executive). The study employs available guidelines in the literature regarding the collection of high quality data from key informants, questionnaire design, and measure development and validation. The data analysis procedure involves the assessment of the psychometric properties of the measurement scales and the estimation of a structural equation model. Study findings provide support for all seven research hypotheses. More specifically, results indicate that the prevalence of an organizational culture that supports knowledge sharing is an important factor that enhances the adoption of export knowledge sharing behavior by export executives. Similarly, export executives’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing have a positive effect on their knowledge sharing behavior. Organizational culture and export knowledge sharing behavior have a positive influence on an exporting organization’s relationship capabilities. In turn, export relationship capabilities have a significant positive effect on export product advantage and export market performance. Finally, a strong positive relationship is evident between export product advantage and export market performance.

Understanding the richness and complexity of consumers’ memory structures for a country is important for governments, tourist boards, investment promotion agencies, cultural institutes, exporter associations, Ministries of Foreign Affairs and NGOs in order to increase tourism, exports, inward investment, etc. The image of the country is a key asset that, beyond its symbolic value to the pride and confidence of a nation, has an impact on the welfare and the economic development. Understanding and specifying which levers have a disproportionate effect on generic county evaluations and country image perception is invaluable to both practitioners and academics. Associative network analysis can be helpful to identify the key levers that shape a country’s image. While a number of studies conceptualise brand image from an associative network perspective, based on cognitive psychology, only a few researchers (Henderson, Iacobucci, & Calder 1998; Teichert, & Schöntag 2010) combine this psychological approach with a network analysis perspective applying it at the product brand level. The use of such a combined approach offers certain advantages and more informed insights of image concepts in comparison to a mono-method perspective. This research uses the combined methodology to examine country image associations, and offer new insights on the construct of country image, and on the future development of a more customised approach to the country image measures.

This paper examines consumer impulse buying choice in various situations. A questionnaire was sent to 414 consumers in the UK and Taiwan. The results demonstrate the interactions between the consumption situations and corresponding individual-related factors. Individuals’ cultural backgrounds were also found to predict different types of impulse buying patterns effectively.

Although the role of Guanxi in the Chinese business to business (B2B) market as a form of relationship marketing has received increasing attention in recent years, few empirical studies have explicitly distinguished between Guanxi and relationship marketing. Westerners typically consider Guanxi as unethical, but foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) may have some difficulty in fully practicing relationship marketing in China without considering the influence of Chinese culture. In this regard, this study is guided by the following research question: “In China, should foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) adopt Guanxi instead of relationship marketing in the B2B market?” In this study, we first provide an overview of previous research on Guanxi, focusing on the fundamental differences between Guanxi and relationship marketing. We then provide an empirical analysis of the differential effects of Guanxi and relationship marketing on firm performance by investigating 295 FIEs in the Chinese B2B market. The results suggest that Guanxi and relationship marketing are not trade-off options in today’s Chinese market. Guanxi and relationship marketing have synergetic effects on firm performance, that is, they have differential effects based on the mode of market entry and the type of competitor. Guanxi is more likely to influence firm performance for collaboration based entry firms rather than entry without collaboration firms, whereas relationship marketing is more likely to influence firm performance when FIEs’ main competitors are foreign firms than when they are local firms.

Marketing green products can be challenging and identifying the preferences of consumers can help marketers overcome these challenges by developing focused marketing solutions. This research was conducted to examine the affects of cultural differences on the perception of green buildings thus the associated preferences of the occupants. This study found that South Koreans perceive indoor environmental quality as the most important green building attribute while Americans feel the same way for the materials and resources used to build. Interdisciplinary approaches such as the ones developed in this study can help develop targeted marketing strategies to ultimately benefit multiple industries by offering sustainable solutions to the growing global and regional environmental, economic, and social problems.

This study explores the moderating role of perceived sponsor motive and event-self congruence on the relationship between event-sponsor congruence and attitude toward sponsor in CSR advertisingcampaigns. A scenario based 2 (event-sponsor congruence: high/low) ⅹ 2 (perceived sponsor motive: selfish/altruistic) ⅹ 2 (event-self congruence: high/low) between-subjects design experiments are conducted for the test of hypotheses. According to the results of ANCOVA, consumers' perceived sponsor motive and event-self congruence are shown to moderate the effect of event-sponsor congruence on consumers' attitude toward sponsor. And, when the consumer perceives sponsor motive as ‘altruistic’ and event-self congruence as ‘high’, the difference of attitude toward sponsor between the high group and low group of event-sponsor congruence perception is the lowest.

A side effect of green advertising has emerged in the form of ‘greenwashing’, which designates “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service” (Terrachoice, 2010). Till now, research has focused on ‘claim greenwashing’, the use of textual arguments in the ad that create a misleading environmental claim and ignored the potential ‘executional greenwashing’ effect, whereby nature-evoking elements (e.g., pictures symbolizing endangered animals or renewable sources of energy, backgrounds representing natural landscapes) in the ad execution may induce false perceptions of a brand’s greenness, whether intentionally or not on the part of the advertiser. This research addresses this gap by documenting the ‘executional greenwashing’ effect and identifying moderating factors (i.e., consumers’ knowledge about environmental issues in the product category, the display of environmental performance information) that may reduce or even remove its impact on consumers. Research on green advertising has largely drawn from the ELM framework (Petty & Cacioppo, 1981) to assess the impact of green cues on consumers’ brand attitudes (Hartmann & Apaolaza-Ibáñez, 2009). However a sole focus on the content of the advertising message may not be sufficient to understand consumers’ responses to it. There may be important variables that moderate the effects on the brand’s ecological image. One important individual moderator, in the tradition of the ELM, is consumer topic knowledge, i.e. knowledge related to the topic of the message, which influences the ability to process the message and the outcome of persuasive attempts (e.g. Alba & Hutchinson, 1991). In the context of ‘executional greenwashing’, the persuasive power of advertising executional elements representing nature may therefore differ depending on consumers’ topic knowledge of environmental issues in the product category. Consumers with such topic knowledge, referred to as “expert” consumers, are less likely to rely on and be influenced by the use of advertising executional elements representing nature, whereas “non-expert” consumers may be influenced through the peripheral route to persuasion, resulting in greater perception of the brand’s ecological image. Stated formally: H1. Advertising executional elements evoking nature have a positive influence on the brand’s ecological image for non-expert consumers, but not for expert consumers. One important contextual moderator is the type of relevant information provided in the advertisement. In this paper, we examine whether the display of environmental performance information, which was in fact selected by the European Community, can correct a potential ‘executional greenwashing’ effect. The Directive 1999/94/EC requires that car manufacturers selling within European countries provide information regarding new cars’ carbon emission to direct consumers’ choices towards greener cars. A potential additional benefit of environmental performance information is that this kind of objective information may also prevent greenwashing by helping consumers form an accurate perception of a brand’s image, regardless of the executional advertising setting. A central premise of the ELM is that consumers’ response to information differs depending on their level of knowledge about the issue at hand. Expert consumers should be more able to treat the environmental information provided, therefore following a central route of persuasion (Alba & Hutchinson, 1991). Their brand evaluation should be formed based on the objective environmental performance provided, which are strong arguments, and not from the visual and sound executional elements manipulated in the ad (conversely for non-expert consumers). H2a. For non-expert consumers, advertising executional elements evoking nature enhance the brand’s ecological image, whereas the level of the environmental performance indicator (EPI) does not influence it. H2b. For expert consumers, the level of the EPI damages the brand’s ecological image, whereas advertising executional elements evoking nature do not influence it. Considering the relative efficiency of specific formats to display environmental performance information, we tested the traffic-light type of label, inspired by the energy appliance label program compulsory in Europe. The label format is crucial, especially if it can reduce the perceived costs of searching and processing this information and offer a comparison baseline. In the context of the EPI display, a traffic-light representation of the raw information about emission rates showing value ranges associated to color codes should may help expert and non-expert consumers calibrate environmental performance information, therefore counterbalancing the ‘executional greenwashing’ effect. H3. For experts and non-experts, the presence of a traffic-light label removes the effect of advertising executional elements evoking nature on the brand’s ecological image.

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of social labeling as a technique to promote pro-environmental behaviors in children, and examine more specifically the potential moderating effect of children’s age. We run an experiment on a sample of 115 3rd to 6th grade children and show that 1/ children exposed to a social labeling actually declare more pro-environmental behaviors and that 2/ children at an intermediate age (between 9 years and a half and 11 years and a half) are the most responsive to the technique, underlying an inverted-U relationship between social labeling effectiveness and children's age. These results contribute to a better theoretical understanding of social labeling mechanisms and suggest implications for public policy makers.

The main aim of this research study is to compare the Relationship Marketing Orientation (RMO) between public and private commercial banks in Sri Lanka. Thus, the findings of this study can possibly be useful to promote application of Relationship Marketing Orientation in both public and private banks in Sri Lanka. The theory of social exchange provides a theoretical base for this study. Trust, bonding, communication, shared value, empathy and reciprocity were considered as dimensions of the RMO. The data obtained from 1002 customers of Sri Lankan commercial banks were analyzed to test relevant hypotheses. The findings revealed that Relationship Marketing Orientation of private banks is significantly higher than that of public banks. In particular, in terms of individual dimensions of the RMO, Bonding, Shared Value and Empathy of the private banks seemed to be significantly higher than those of the public banks. Nevertheless, public banks were more trustworthy than private banks. Based on these findings, we have provided interesting implications and recommendations to the both private and public banks.

New health care services are salient in the supply chain. The market success of new health care services depends on the knowledge-based view to integrate organizational knowledge and attain service innovation performance. This study suggests that the hospitals integrate total market orientation and entrepreneurial orientation as organizational knowledge to sustain marketing operations advantages and achieve market performance in the new health care service supply chain.

Criticisms of marketing now include contributions to unsustainable economic growth, resource depletion and environmental damage. These criticisms are examined in the context of the role of marketing within wider economic activity and the impact of growing calls for sustainability. We note consumers’ roles in sustainability, and contradictions evident in balancing economic growth and sustainability, together with the lack of standard ethical frameworks, codes of ethics that can be applied across cultures and the lack of effective enforcement mechanisms to ensure adherence to any existing codes. The need for cross cultural research to enable these issues to be addressed concludes the paper.

This study used the methods of decision tree analysis, association rule analysis, and Kano’s model to explore the behavior patterns of mainland China tourists staying at the international tourist hotels in Taiwan. To this end, the data of their demographics, travel variables, overall satisfaction with the lodging experience, different service quality perceptions, and loyalty intentions were included. The decision tree analysis showed that a tourist’s overall satisfaction with the lodging experience, satisfaction with the quality of core intangible services, and certain demographic characteristics are three important determinants of tourist loyalty towards the hotels. In terms of the effect of demographics, the customers’ monthly income and length of stay at the hotel are two main determinants in this study. In addition, if the customer perceptions of different parts of hotel service quality are taken into account, among the five hotel service quality domains, core intangible services from the receptionist, housekeeping personnel, and food & beverage personnel are found to be important influences on hotel customer loyalty intention. In other words, high quality intangible services are important for luxury hotels to demonstrate their unique ability to help customers experience the service quality that creates loyalty intentions. With regard to the association rule analysis, the results showed that core intangible service aspects from the receptionist, housekeeping personnel, and food & beverage personnel are strongly associated with customer loyalty intentions, as are the tangible aspects of the reception and hotel room facilities. The former indicated that reception in the hotel lobby could be considered one of the most important servicescapes because of its impact in forming many of the first impressions of hotel guests, while the latter is treated as core offerings in hotels that would be encountered by most hotel customers. If the tourists are mainly from package tours, the intangible services and tangible facilities of these areas are the important areas to create customer satisfaction. However, if the tourists are mainly independent tourists because they have more time and free choice to stay at the hotel longer than the package tour tourists, the intangible services and tangible facilities of the entertainment or business centers would be even more important to these tourists than to the package tour tourists. With regard to Kano’s model analysis, the results showed that, based on mainland China tourists’ perceptions, most of the service elements fit into the category of one-dimensional quality attributes. This means that these service elements are positively and linearly related to customer satisfaction, and the greater fulfillment of the attribute results in a greater degree of satisfaction. This also means that hotels should make more effort to innovate their intangible services and tangible facilities to create business advantages in the market.

Adventure tourism accounted for 60% of international tourism activities by the year 2007 and is still growing. Nonetheless, relatively little is known about the ecological issues associated with adventure tourism. To address this issue, this study examines 502 Chinese tourists’ intentions to revisit adventure tourism activities by incorporating nature-relatedness (i.e., NR-self, NR-perspective, and NR-experience) into a modified flow model. After analyzing these data by structural equation modeling, our findings show that positive emotions and flow experiences influence one’s intentions to revisit adventure tourism activities and that then intensity of the flow experiences is influenced by skill, perceived challenge, and playfulness. Moreover, our study finds that tourists who enjoy being outdoors (NR-experience) and who find conservation unnecessary (NR-perspective) are likely to have a more positive attitude about adventure tourism. Conversely, individuals who are concerned about the environment will not have such emotions. The implications of these findings for such promotions are discussed.

Finding the balance between economic development and preservation of the natural environment is a challenging yet important task. This is a particularly pressing issue in the case of China, as it is the largest and fastest-growing market for tourism. The purpose of this research is to examine Chinese tourists’ participation in nature-based, tourism activities by incorporating tourists’ environmental attitude, measured by the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale, into a tourism constraint-negotiation model. The responses of 112 Chinese tourists were examined through CFA. The results from structural equation modeling show environmental attitude will positively affect tourists’ motivation, which, in turn, will affect their negotiation strategy and ultimately their participation behavior. On the other hand, constraints on nature-based tourism will negatively affect tourists’ participation behavior. The theoretical and managerial implications of this study are discussed in the context of the tourism literature.

With the popularization of the issues of global warming and climate change, more and more people are aware of environmental damages caused by human behavior. The fundamental living necessities of humans, such as food, water, clothing, housing and transportation, all take place on the Earth. Many environmentalists and governments worldwide have started to promote low carbon and green concepts. Such a green urgency is sweeping the world. Based on the surveys conducted by the Organic Trade Association (OTA) in 2013, over 40% of those surveyed in US households have a higher level of motivation to purchase organic products, for the sake of their own and their family's health. In addition, 97% of organic product buyers had purchased organic fruits or vegetables in the past six months. We can also see this kind of situation in Taiwan, where about 80% of consumers are willing to pay more money to purchase environmentally friendly products. The OTA even maintains that, except for Japan, Taiwan is the fastest growing organic market in Asia. Therefore, this study aims to explore the consumers' purchase behaviour behind the organic market in Taiwan. The organic market in Taiwan covers the products from agriculture, food processing, textiles, apparels, and even personal care products and cleaning supplies. Following this green trend that seeks to enhance human health and to maintain a sustainable earth to live on, organic stores in Taiwan have become an emerging industry and there seem to be endless business opportunities in this potential organic market. In order to acquire a significant market share, it is necessary for enterprise managers to understand consumers' perceived value of organic products and how this determinant, perceived value, impact their purchase intention. Perceived value is the overall purchase experience of consumers. It is based on the consumers' comparison between the quality and quantity of products received and paid out, and their objective and subjective consideration of certain factors (Schechter, 1984; Zeithaml, 1988). Perceived value varies with the type of products and services and consumers' personal traits (Zeithaml, 1988). Perceived value is a complicated construct and, therefore, its impact on consumers' purchase intentions toward products cannot be judged from a single dimension only (Bolton & Drew, 1991). Literature on perceived value divides it into utilitarian and hedonic values. Utilitarian value refers to the perceived value acquired by consumers after their purchasing goals have been achieved in the process of consumption. That is to say, utilitarian value is the task- and rationalization-oriented decisions of consumers. On the other hand, hedonic value is affiliated to the individual emotional and irrationality phase of consumers, which usually occur during the process of consumption. Consumers commonly feel pleasant emotions and feelings of motivation and accomplishment, or can even fulfill their desire for escape (Babin & Attaway, 2000; Babin, Darden, & Griffin, 1994; Bae, 2008). Past studies have pointed out that perceived value has a direct impact on the purchase intention (Grewal, Monroe, & Krishnan, 1998). However, in the Value-Attitude-Behavior Model, Homer and Kahle (1988) indicated that perceived value affects consumers' purchase intention through the mediating effect sourced from their attitude. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has been commonly used to explain a variety of human behaviour (Cunningham and Kwon,2003; Andrews, Silk and Eneli,2010; Kim & Chung, 2011). The TPB mainly focuses on the influence of three behavioural intention dimensions of individuals: attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control. In short, following the fundamental concept of TPB (Ajzen, 1985), this study explored the variables of (1) consumers' attitude towards organic products, (2) the subjective norm, represented by the pressure from family members and close friends, and (3) the perceived behavioural control, presenting perceived ability to control the availability and accessibility of organic products. The ultimate goal of this research is to find out the critical determinants influencing consumers' purchase intentions towards organic products. In order to explore the consumers' possible decisive path from perceived values to purchase intention toward organic products (see figure 1), this study includes the variables utilitarian value and hedonic value as the antecedents, attitude as the mediating factor, and both subjective norm and perceived behavioural control as other influential factors. Figure 1: Conceptual framework and hypotheses This study mainly targeted the consumer behavior toward organic products in the Taipei area of Taiwan. Totally 565 samples were collected. Excluding invalid questionnaires (73 samples), the number of valid questionnaires was 492. The valid response rate was 87%. The SEM is a statistical technique combining both factor analysis and path analysis and is widely used in social and behavioural science studies. Therefore, this study adopted the SEM as the analytical tool to explore the causal relationship among the latent variables discussed above. In sum, this study revealed that the proposed model could well predict consumers’ purchase intentions toward organic products. The empirical research results of this study are summarized as follows. First, the findings of this study confirmed the claims proposed by many scholars that perceived value is a critical determinant affecting the purchase intention of consumers (Zeithaml, 1988). The empirical results of this study show perceived value is an important antecedent driving consumers to purchase organic products in Taiwan. Nevertheless, perceived value is a multi-dimensional construct. As Ryu et al. (2010) suggested in order to explain all consumptive phenomena, we should consider consumers' overall evaluation of utilitarian and hedonic values that are taken into account during their consumption experience. This study found that utilitarian and hedonic values are, indeed, the important driving antecedents for consumers to purchase organic products. Moreover, utilitarian value, compared to hedonic value, has a higher level of impact on the consumers’ purchase intention toward organic products. With regard to the sale of organic products, in addition to the emphasis on the interesting and exciting experience acquired from the purchase or use of organic products, what is more important is that managers can directly emphasize the quality, practical value of organic products, and the contribution that organic products make to people’s health and environmental protection. This not only directly drives consumers to purchase organic products but also further promotes the degree of satisfaction of consumers towards organic products, subsequently increasing the chances for organic products to be purchased. In particular, this study also finds that the main reason for people who never purchase organic products is that they do not yet have a preference toward organic products. For enterprises which want to extend the organic market in Taiwan, this study suggests that managers make consumer to be fond of organic products by driving hedonic and utilitarian value that can be provided by the organic products. Second, the influence of perceived behavioral control and attitude on purchase intention, as mentioned in the TPB in previous studies, was also supported in this study. In other words, when consumers purchase organic products, they have been deeply affected by factors regarding the degree of their knowledge of organic products or the accessibility of the organic products. In that case, the channel strategy and the store coverage of organic products should be very critical in the ever-booming organic products market in Taiwan. Besides, this investigation finds that a certain proportion of consumers do not purchase organic products because they do not understand the organic products, which is also a very important clue for the companies that intend to penetrate the market. They could spread environmental protection knowledge via the advertisements to educate consumers about the benefits (such as protecting the environment, and being good to health, etc.) of the usage of organic products. In that way, the potential consumers could be encouraged to purchase organic products and this will be beneficial for the development of total organic product market.

Impacts of Relationship value on Loyalty of Online Group-Buying Customer in China With the development of e-commerce industry, online group-buying pattern has been one of the most popular online shopping patterns in China. Although the online group-buying platform has a large number of consumers, the consumer loyalty to specific online group-buying platform is low. For this phenomenon, scholars usually studied from the perspective of factors which influenced consumer behavior intentions. However, few studies focus on the component and measuring of relational benefits in the process of group-buying. Based on the perspective of consumers, this paper studied the relational benefits between consumers and online group-buying platform, and the perceived benefits of consumers who are in different relationship life cycle.This paper used SPSS to test the reliability and validity of data and carried some discussions about research model through factor analysis and regression analysis. The results indicated that relational benefits were significantly related to customer loyalty, that relationship quality and relationship life cycle was considered as mediator and moderator, respectively. Further, we made some management recommendations for operators in the online group-buying platform.