We adopt a semi-grounded theory approach to investigate the impact of different review manipulation tactics. Shoppers take a negative view toward seller manipulations, but the degree of negativity varies across different tactics. Moreover, different manipulations tactics vary in the ease of detection, perceived unethicality, and the effect on consumer perceptions.

This study (i) examines the main effect of how a customer’s trust in the service personnel could affect his/her service co-designing and co-delivering behavior; and (ii) investigates how the main effect could vary by the customer’s trust in the service brand, and the types of customer contact service contexts. Keywords: customer participation, co-

Previous research indicates that consumers may resist negative publicity when they perceive a firm to be socially responsible (Klein & Dawar, 2004; Chernev & Blair,2015). However, other research shows corporate social responsibility (CSR) may boomerang the damage of negative publicity (Sohn & Lariscy,2012). Firms may participate in CSR and it is important for market practitioners and researchers to understand the role of different types of CSR in minimizing the impact of negative publicity. This research aims to examine the moderating role of two types of CSR in the effect of negative publicity on consumer responses. An experiment with a 2 (negative publicity type: ability-related vs. morality-related) x 2 (CSR type: philanthropic donation vs. employee wellbeing) between-subjects factorial design was conducted in a major city of China. In the morality-related negative publicity and employee wellbeing condition, the participants were shown with employee wellbeing materials and a morality-related negatively publicized article about a fictitious hotel. Similar arrangements were setup for other different conditions. Then, consumer responses such as firm evaluation and patronage intention were measured. Results of two-way ANOVA revealed a significant interaction effect. The findings indicate that consumers’ patronage intention is lower when a morality-related negative publicity has happened to a firm having “philanthropic donation” type of CSR, and also when an ability-related negative publicity has happened to a firm having “employee wellbeing” type of CSR. Managerial

Crowdfunding has recently emerged as a novel way for people to collect monetary donation from large numbers of internet users. Since 2009, the volume of crowdfunding has increased exponentially, reaching 16.2 billion in 2014. A growing number of literature starts to investigate social influence in crowdfunding that occurs when former backers, who make contribution to fund a project at an earlier stage of fund-raising period, make influences of the contribution decision of latter backers. Crowdfunding can be classified into four categories, namely, lending-based, equity-based, reward-based, and donation-based. The primary goal of lending-based and equity-based crowdfunding is to raise capital and borrow money from a number of investors or lenders in exchange for interest payment or equity share of a company. In contrast, reward-based crowdfunding or donation-based crowdfunding requires a project initiator to create a project, which raise fund to develop a new product (e.g., private good) or enhance the public interest (e.g., public good). In this study, we focus on the two most popular crowdfunding type: reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding projects. In reward-based crowdfunding, backers (or contributors) give a small amount of money in return for a reward such as a copy of creative work or pre-sell products. In donation-based crowdfunding, backers donate to projects for gratitude and the pleasure of giving and expect no compensation in exchange

The value created by supply chain management (SCM) practices means managers today are even more interested in these initiatives, this is especially true in emerging markets where they can have a profound impact. This research examines several critical SCM initiatives (strategic supplier partnerships, information quality, and proactive logistics practices), and their impact on supply chain flexibility, and ultimately organizational performance for small scale (fewer than 100 employees) manufacturing firms in India. These constructs are especially important for India because it has been suggested that they have high logistics costs as a result of insufficient infrastructure (e.g., power grid) and various labor-related issues. Under the Extended Resource Based View of the firm (Mathews, 2003) managers realize that capitalizing on supplier capabilities can improve the firm’s own responsiveness and overall performance. Therefore we examined strategic supplier partnerships (the long-term cooperative exchanges with critical suppliers) and proactive logistics practices (the interactions specifically with logistics providers regarding planning and joint problem solving), along with information quality (including accuracy, adequacy, timeliness, and credibility of information being exchanged) (Monczka et al., 1998). Other constructs include supply chain flexibility (the ability of the firm to respond to any change concerning its trading partners) and organizational performance (capturing productivity, efficiency, market share, and profit level) (Yamin et al., 1999; Tan et al., 1998). Validated scales developed by Li (2002) and Tan et al. (1998) were used and firm owners were targeted from a list of Coimbatore’s (a city in India) small scale manufacturers covering a wide-range of industries. The result was 75 completed surveys (a 94% response rate) which we evaluated using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling as appropriate for our sample size. The findings indicate that improving strategic supplier partnerships and information quality enables the firm to achieve a more flexible supply chain and ultimately better organizational performance. This research improves our understanding of critical considerations

The quality of customer service has been one of the most representative determinants of retailers’ sustainable competitiveness. Since Parasuraman et al. (1988) introduced the service quality instrument, called SERVQUAL, many studies have used SERVQUAL to measure service quality in various domains. However, since SERVQUAL was originally developed to measure general service quality, it didn’t fully consider the underlying characteristics of a specific industry such as retailing. Recently, as retail industry is becoming more competitive, there is a general agreement that the most important retailing strategy for creating competitive advantage is the delivery of high service quality. From the retail manager’s perspective, the level of service quality is highly correlated with the level of customer loyalty and the customer’s favorable word-of-mouth behavior. In this sense, most retail managers would be very interested in the question of how to increase their customer loyalty rate and, therefore, to elaborate this question in more detail, service quality study in a retail setting would be very important. Current measures of service quality, including SERVQUAL, do not adequately capture customers’ perceptions of service quality for retail stores such as department stores or general discount stores. The main objective of this study is to investigate the usefulness and applicability of the different methods, including SERVQUAL, in measuring the service quality of retail environment and their relationships to customer loyalty and word-of-mouth behavior. By exploring the suitability of each different measurement method for retail service quality, this study enhances the understanding of the major dimensions of retail service quality and the analysis of the effect of service quality on customer loyalty and word-of-mouth behavior.

Conflicting accounts of environmentally-friendly motives exist (see Chan, 2001; Hartmann & Apaolaza-Ibanez, 2012; Haws et al., 2014; Johnstone & Tan, 2015; Rashid, 2009; Royne et al., 2013). Recent research has turned to identity-society explanations (see Park & Lee, 2016). This research furthers this inquiry and narrows the gap. To understand environmentally-friendly clothing options (EFCO) motives better, this study uses uniqueness theory, which posits that consumers adopt dress different from mass fashion simply because it is unpopular (Snyder & Fromkin, 1977; Tian et al., 2001). Accordingly, environmentally-friendly attitudes should have nothing to do with the environment, but with norms, conformity, pressure (Law et al., 2004), and uniqueness. Thus, the research questions consist of: 1) is need for uniqueness in dress related to EFCO purchase intentions? 2) If so, does uniqueness relate to other EFCO motives? A survey was administered (n=220), using existing scales, to an online consumer panel All scales exhibited sufficient reliability. Pearson-Product Moment Scores and ANOVAs were used to assess variable relationships. As predicted, concern for the environment and perceived individual impact on the environment were unrelated to need for uniqueness. There was a significant and positive relationship between need for uniqueness and each of: attitudes toward EFCO and social pressure to act green. This indicates that individuals feel social pressure from important others to adapt to consumer trends. However, the manner in which they adopt mass consumer movements, such as sustainability, may be in more unique ways and via unpopular choice, such as EFCO. Finally, an ANOVA indicated that those high in uniqueness were willing to pay substantially more for EFCO.

Emerging Asian markets such as China and India have drawn tremendous attention to marketing and consumer researchers in the past decades (e.g., Cayla & Eckhardt, 2008; Dong & Tian, 2009). The increasing purchasing power of the new middle-class Asian consumers attracted not only global brands but also local brands from the region. Previous studies on Asian consumers found that consumers are actively using Western brands to construct their modern or global identities (e.g., Dong & Tian, 2009). Other studies explored how regional or local brands redefine themselves in both regional and transnational markets (Cayla & Eckhardt, 2008; Wu, Borgerson & Schroeder, 2013). In this study, we employed a cultural approach (Cayla & Arnould, 2008) to examine how Asian brands mythicize themselves in the global marketplace through various storytelling and myth-making strategies. We compare and contrast the mythology and storytelling strategies (Boje, 1995; Lundqvist, Liljander, Gummerus & van Riel, 2013; Vincent, 2001) employed by three Asian consumer electronic brands, Samsung (South Korea), Sony (Japan), and Xiaomi Technology (China) and report our key findings in the following sections. In marketing literature, brand is defined as “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those other sellers” by the American Marketing Association (Keller, 2013, p. 2). In recently years, brands have been viewed as an integral part of contemporary popular culture (Cayla & Arnould, 2008; Hancock, 2009, 2013; Holt, 2004, 2006; Klein, 2001; Moor, 2007). Brands, like other cultural artefacts such as folklore, dance, songs, and costumes, have significant impact on shaping consumers’ everyday lives and influence on how they define their world

Over the past two decades, consumer moralism, or moralism about consumption in a broad sense, has received much academic attention in answer to the growing concern for fair-trade, corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and other anti-consumption initiatives and movements (McGregor, 2006; Newholm and Shaw, 2007). This theoretical trajectory not only pay attention to how everyday consumption practice is shaped by and help shape certain sorts of ethical dispositions (Clive et al., 2005), but it also extends to the understanding of the intertwined relationship between morality, consumption, and consumers’ identity narratives (Thompson, 2011). While previous research has focused on understanding moral consumption as a politically and morally motivated collective practice (Luedicke et al., 2010; Thompson, 2007), limited research has been done on revealing how personal moral identity project institutionalize and contest the socio-cultural power structure through ascribing social meanings in consumption practice to legitimatize seemingly unethical behavior in the marketplace (Brace-Govan and Binary, 2010). This research concerned the creation and negotiation of moralistic identities among a group of young consumers in Hong Kong who engaged in counterfeit consumption. We focused on how consumers strategically appropriate moralistic meanings in their everyday counterfeit consumption, in which their identity work utilized these ‘alternative’ market resources to echoed with, or even reproduce, the entrenched Chinses social relationships and marketplace ideological conditions (Giesler and Veresiu, 2014; Luedicke et al., 2010).

The purpose of this study is to investigate symbolic consumption of fashion global brands and its relation to the self. This work adopts a qualitative approach and the “tripartite model of self” (Brewer & Yuki, 2007) to study brand meaning among consumers in two different cultural settings: UK and Colombia. Findings show how some meanings change among groups, addressing different self-identity needs, motivations and tensions. This work contributes to debates around international marketing strategies.

Advertising both reflects and creates social norms and cultural practices, such as concepts of beauty and gender roles. Research suggests that masculinity, like femininity, is constructed, codified and contested in advertising imagery (Schroeder & Zwick, 2004). By drawing on cultural categories to depict gendered consumer selves, advertising messages often limit and structure possibilities of masculine and feminine consumption. As marketers promote the blurring of traditional gender lines around product categories to open their products to a wider market, men increasingly consume products that are traditionally reserved for female consumption (Thompson & Hirschman, 1995). Despite the growing global men’s grooming market, research suggests that men view the consumption of cosmetics as not acceptable ‘masculine’ consumption behavior (Hall, Gough, & Seymour-Smith, 2013). According to Kolbe and Albanese (1996), masculinity is represented in advertising by images of strong and muscular ‘male icons’. In order to protect their masculine identities men reject advertising images that do not reflect these masculine traits (Elliot & Elliot, 2005). However, with advertising literature focusing on a notion of masculinity that is prevalent in Western individualistic cultures, cross-cultural research in this area is extremely limited. Given the cultural relativity of masculinity and attractiveness, images of masculinity and forms of accepted ‘masculine’ consumption behavior are likely to vary across cultures (e.g., Englis, Solomon, & Ashmore, 1994). For instance, the use of cosmetics may be regarded as acceptable ‘masculine’ behavior in South Korea, where young men spend more per-capita on cosmetics than their counterparts anywhere else in the world (Euromonitor, 2015). The aim of this research is to explore representations of masculinity in South Korean cosmetics advertising. We carry out a content analysis of print ads examining i) What types of male images do advertisers use in South Korean cosmetics advertisements?; and ii) What kind of masculinity do male images in South Korean cosmetics ads represent?

This research analyses the discursive construction of beauty through skin care advertisements and its visual representations in Indonesian women’s magazines. Indonesia is an industrialising and increasingly global country with a sizable emerging middle class that is the largest in Southeast Asia. We explore themes of whiteness, naturalisation and scientification as socio-cultural constructions of beauty as the products not only promise youthful, smooth and fair skin to affluent middle-class consumers, but promote the constant ‘upscaling’ of lifestyle norms related to the pursuit of higher economic and social status. In this research, we draw on existing scholarship in gender, beauty, ‘whiteness’ (Ariss, Ӧzbilgin, Tatli & April, 2014) and ‘colourism’ (Glenn, 2009) that examines the growing phenomena of skin whitening in beauty products and their relationship to particular cultural contexts and locations. This body of theory and research has shown how ‘whiteness’ and ‘colour’ are constructs related to, but not the same as ‘race’, that carry complex meanings generated by the intersection of gender, colonial history, ethnicity, class and globalisation (Rondilla, 2009). While it has been long argued that beauty is culturally diverse in different markets and is multidimensional (Englis, Solomon & Ashmore 1994), it is also highly globalised (Jones, 2011). The globalisation also increasingly standardises communications campaigns run by creative advertising agencies who are predominantly Western or ‘Western trained’. This has contributed to a ‘transnational look’ (Frith, Shaw & Cheng, 2005), a ‘reduction in the range of global variation in beauty ideals’ (Jones, 2008, p.150), and a ‘narrow representation of beauty’ (Yan & Bissell, 2014). We question the extent of this resultant homogeneity in a non-Western context that is under-studied

By adopting regression and time series analysis, this article tries to quantify people’s enthusiasm towards beauty based on sales performance of cosmetics product in previous years in China. The basic assumption in this paper is that people’s attitude towards beauty is positively associated with their purchase behavior of cosmetics product.

There is a variety of mobile beauty application specialized services providing information, such as reports on the advantages and disadvantages of a product, as well as tips and recommendations, based on consumers' comments for products that demand much consultation on the part of the consumers to critique the products. From goods purchased through mobile shopping apps, beauty-related products come right after fashion/retail and food/health-related goods, while promotions, followed by review/comments, are known as influential factors when selecting mobile shopping apps. Consumer reviews about a product are seen as important instruments for obtaining a variety of information about a product for those consumers who have not yet used it. Moreover, there is an increasing interest in authentic information instead of purely advertised narrations, while studies are actively in progress to verify the effectiveness of consumer reviews according to their nature and direction. The results vary with each researcher and since online consumer reviews differ, there is a need to research dynamically blended reviews and the forms that they take. Accordingly, this study attempts to observe and identify the factors that affect the perceived authenticity of the information, brand attitude, purchase intention and electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM). The sample consists of 110 respondents in their twenties and thirties who have purchased beauty products online. The respondents were given online and offline questionnaires, and the collected information was analyzed with SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 18.0 using factor analysis, reliability analysis, t-tests, structural equation modeling (SEM) and multi-group analysis. The results show that perceived information authenticity has a significant influence on brand attitude, purchase intention and e-WOM. Positive, negative and subjective evaluations have more significant impact on information authenticity than did only positive and negative reviews, while perceived authenticity has significant relevance to brand attitude, purchase intention and online word-of-mouth. The implications of these findings

Sustainability was first presented in 1972. It was how biological systems remain diverse and productive indefinitely. Long-lived and healthy wetlands and forests are examples of sustainable biological systems. Now, people do not only focus on economy but also focus on social, environment and culture. In this paper we try to find out how to build sustainability index based on customers’ perception of companies’ sustainable performance in fashion industry. The index was explored based on American Customer Satisfaction Index. Through testing the sustainability performance of fashion industry using sustainability index this study tries to find out how customers were affected by fashion companies sustainability performance and how to improve customer repurchase intention through sustainability performance.

As mass production techniques developed in technological innovation due to the industrial revolution, the world started to face serious pollution problem and therefore ‘sustainable’ and ‘eco-friendly’ movement showed up in our societies. The fashion industry has emphasized the environmental design since the early 1960s. However, in the system engaged on trends and mass-production process, fashion designers and consumers could not pay more attention to the environment issues as expected. In these days, consumers not just in fashion products but also any other products started to care about ‘fair trades’, ‘environmental issues’, ‘human rights’, and ‘donations’ when they shop. Therefore, if fashion industries pay more attention to sustainable marketing and merchandising while selling their products, it will help consumers to build up a ‘sustainable thinking’. Usage of eco-friendly materials and recycling are well-known for practicing eco- friendly fashion but unfortunately, they are only limited in the process of making and disposal stage in fashion. Nowadays, there is an increasing concern and emphasis on fair trade, environmental awareness, human rights and other ethical consumerism practices, and is growing in tendency, which has prompted authentic and honest marketing strategies to become more effective as opposed to the existing one-shot events (Kim et al., 2013). If this trend of planning business strategies with authentic and sustainable tactics is implemented into the Fashion industry, then it will be able to establish a sustainable consumer culture. Until now, contemporary research on environmentally friendly and sustainable fashion are mostly centered on sustainable fashion ideas and studies on sustainable textiles (Fletcher, 2011). However, there was limited studies on sustainable design with various perspectives and design planning, which have much practical and real-world usage for designers or planners in the fashion industry. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct more studies on fashion design planning methods and guidelines that fashion merchandisers and designers in the industry can use.

Using a range of interpretive methods, including focus-group interviews, in-depth interviews, and structured field observations, this study investigates how shopping experiences within sustainable fashion stores may cause consumers to change their attitudes towards sustainable fashion. Heider’s balance theory was applied to interpret the results, whereby we constructed the maps of individual consumers’ positive and negative associations of concepts, events, and outcomes within consumers’ purchasing decisions about sustainable fashion products. Our findings suggest that there could often be a gap between the consumer’s perception of sustainable fashion and their actual purchase behavior, which creates an ‘imbalanced’ state. However, positive store experiences may persuade consumers to achieve a balance by purchasing sustainable fashion products. The study provides important and theoretical and practical insights for sustainable fashion marketing

Despite the consumer's interest in sustainable fashion and the sustainable fashion phenomenon in the fashion business being a serious issue for our society, only a limited number of studies focus on investigating the consumer's perceived value of sustainable fashion. Although eco-friendly consumption has been recognized as one of the major concerns of the fashion business, environmentally prudent consumption has not yet transformed into purchasing behavior. However, fashion companies try to offer many seasonal collections due to the fast fashion trends to meet the consumer's needs. Such trends have brought about an enormous amount of apparel waste, negative environmental impacts and serious questions about social issues. In addition, today’s fashion consumers appear to have a narrow point of view on sustainable/green fashion that focuses mainly on organic clothing, and avoids or shows no interest in the wider scope of sustainability encompassing environmental, social and economic concerns (Cervellon, Hjerth, Richard, & Carey, 2010). Increasing the consumption of sustainable fashion necessitates research into how fashion consumers make purchasing decisions. Therefore, the information and value of sustainable fashion need to be diffused by fashion consumers. Hethom and Ulasewicz (2008) stated that the consumer acts as a major stakeholder with the greatest impact on the development of a sustainable industry. Furthermore, it is necessary to examine the consumer's purchase decision-making process for sustainable fashion products in academia. According to previous studies, the awareness of sustainability issues is also growing due to the environmental impacts. However, this awareness has not yet affected apparel purchasing behavior and actual purchasing (Kim & Damhorst, 1998). In order to affect the behavior of fashion consumers and expand sustainable fashion in today's marketplace, it is essential to identify the influencing factors in purchase decision-making process for sustainable fashion products.