The challenge of adjusting to new travel trends has led to a quest to find ways to motivate people to travel again and to make the industry more resilient long term. The implementation of phygital marketing as an information source seems promising. This is the first study considering phygital marketing initiatives as an approach to trigger people’s travel intentions. An online questionnaire incorporating a scenario-based 2x2 factorial designed experiment with a longitudinal prospective (2 waves) explored the impact of a technology-based peer-to-peer versus human-machine interaction phygital marketing initiatives as an innovative approach to trigger travel intentions for long-distance and short distance destinations. Study 1 (n=330) shows that the experience of using phygital initiatives not only builds trust but also encourages people to visit destinations, leading to a dynamic experience. Study 2 is currently in the field which means after all most of the pandemic related restrictions have been removed to compare to Study 1’s results. Alongside theoretical contributions, this study presents practical implications on how destinations could implement phygital marketing initiatives.

An important segment, tourism e-commerce live streaming (TEcLS) has emerged as a new marketing channel actively embraced by destination marketing organizations (DMO) and tourist firms due to the COVID-19 pandemic. China, Japan, Australia, and many other nations have been selling such tourism products on various platforms. Live e-commerce generates a real-time interactive virtual environment that can be called a livescape. However, many tourism destinations or companies are unaware of the marketing science implications of live streaming and are unsure of their effectiveness or the intricacies of marketing live streaming. Previous research has explored the factors influencing consumer purchase behavior from the product, technology, and live-streamer perspectives, arguing that the advantages of breaking through time and space constraints, strong interactivity, the experience of reality, technological ease of use and usefulness, and celebrity aura encourage online purchases. However, limited investigation has been carried out on the impact of customers’ value-co-creation in livescape when watching tourism live streaming on their purchase intentions considering the key role of engagement. This calls for specific investigation of the phenomenon to facilitate live streaming design and tourism marketing. This study aims to explores the factors influencing consumer purchase intentions in the livescape based on a value co-creation research framework. Compared to traditional e-commerce, livescapes provides the “many-to-many” social presence and an immersive value co-creation platform. Thus, we focus on why and how social presence inspires customer engagement, ultimately leading to purchase intentions. This study finds that, as a crucial marketing tool, the social presence of tourism livescapes can promotes customer engagement, which in turn results in intentions to purchase tourism live-streaming products. Additionally, the mediating role of inspiration (inspired-by and inspired-to) between social presence and customer engagement is examined to reveal the influence mechanism in the tourism context. Finally, this study examines how to create an effective tourism livescape to enhance tourists social presence experience and inspire their engagement, which in turn increases their purchase intention.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has accelerated the promotion and application of service robot in the market. Although technology has provided service robot with increasingly autonomous functions, more research is needed on how service robot with different levels of autonomy affects customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry. Guided by affordance theory, the study examines whether service robot operational and decisional autonomy would have effects on customer satisfaction and explored explanatory mechanism. Adopting an experimental vignette method (EVM), the study reveals that direct effect of service robot operational autonomy and indirect effect of decisional autonomy on customer satisfaction, and functional affordance played a positive mediating role in the impact of service robot autonomy on customer satisfaction. This research extends and enriches the relevant literature on human-machine interaction and customer satisfaction research. Further, the study also provides marketing insights for enterprises to improve autonomous robot design and enhance customer relationships.

The rapid spread of Artificial Intelligence through various connected intelligent objects (wearables, robots) profoundly changes how service is delivered and experienced by the customers (Bolton et al., 2018; Larivière et al., 2017). Robotics, in combination with rapidly improving technologies, has brought prospects for a wide array of innovations that have the potential to transform service industries radically. Service robots provide businesses with new opportunities to reorganize their frontline and serve their customers in new and innovative ways. Advanced technological innovations that become better, smaller, and smarter are virtually renovating the servicescape (Wirtz & Zeithaml, 2018). Transformation in the Healthcare industry is happening the world over. The International Federation of Robots predicts an ever-increasing demand for healthcare robots, estimated at 9.1 billion USD market in coming year. RoboDocs (Robots helping Doctors) can help standardize the common surgical procedures and catalyze a paradigm shift in the healthcare sector. RoboDocs are the linchpin to greater efficiency, more value, and reducing surgical variability (Muaddi et al., 2021, Huang & Rust, 2018).

With the development of WEB 3.0 and the metaverse, the emergence of chat GPT, and AI is attracting attention across all industries. AI technologies such as robotics, advanced analytics, and in-store applications created a sensation in the fashion industry, as well as created an exceptional customer experience. In this study, fashion AI types (e.g. AI models: generative, conversational, AI applications: design, production, sales, retail, marketing) and case analysis (e.g. concepts, characteristics, benefits, risks) are examined. Consumer experiences with fashion AI are also discussed for future research directions. Finally, the Fashion AI research framework and research agenda are discussed for future research.

Fast-paced advancements in technology demand swift adaptation and presents new opportunities and challenges for the optimization of communication, especially for advertisers. Digitalization and new developments in ICT have brought significant changes to the ways in which information, especially promotional messages, is disseminated to consumers. Additionally, with explosive interests in anticipation of fully autonomous vehicles, this study identifies and addresses the potential to optimize communication in an under examined digital media environment – in-vehicle infotainment system. Therefore, this study proposes a text-image embedding method recommender system for the personalization of multimedia contents and advertisements for in-vehicle infotainment systems. Unlike most previous research, which focuses on textual-only or image-only analyses, the current study explores the understanding, development and application of text embedding models and image feature extraction methods simultaneously in the context of target advertisement research. Overall, this study highlights the need to adapt to the ever-evolving technological landscape to optimize communication in various digital media environments. With the proposed text-image embedding method, this study offers a unique approach to personalizing multimedia content and advertisements in the under-explored digital media environment of in-vehicle infotainment systems.

Online communities are identified as people gathering online and communicating through the internet to share ideas, objectives, goals, without any geographical boundary. The growth of user-generated content created in online communities has transformed the way consumers search for and share information, particularly in the hospitality industry. Particularly, in the restaurant and food sectors due to the intangible nature of hospitality services, online reviews play an important role on consumer decisions. Furthermore, online reviews on restaurants are not only informational but also, they impact consumers’ choices regarding restaurants. Consequently, the nature of such user-generated content that is produced at a high speed and is diverse and rich should be treated and understood. This study proposes the first tailored BERTopic model together with sentiment analysis based on pre-trained BERT model that takes advantage of its novel sentence embedding for creating interpretable topics into the analysis of restaurant online reviews to determine how the customers elaborate their criteria in the context of certain experiences. An exploratory analysis is presented involving a large-scale review data set of 261,531 restaurant online reviews from 4 different countries retrieved from the eWOM community thefork.com. A broad list of the topics discussed by customers post-dining in restaurants is built. Insights into the behavior, experience, and satisfaction of the customers across the different restaurants are discovered. This approach and findings are encouraging hospitality managers in understanding customers’ perception, through which applicable marketing can be developed to attract and retain potential customers.

The objective of this research is to analyze the importance of Virtual Reality (VR) in digitally promoting perceived online trust toward green brands. We propose a conceptual framework based on Stimulus-Organism-Response to understand whether VR can increase cognitive and affective experiential state and customers' perceived trust toward green brands.

Some well-known luxury fashion brands log off social media or deliberately keep their accounts empty. The article investigates how consumers of high-end fashion brands react to this social media strategy through a series of experiments. This study provides managerial implications for social media strategy of luxury fashion brands.

Considering the popularity of virtual influencer (VI) marketing while its effectiveness remains fully unexplored, there is a need of academic attention testing consumer responses to VIs in comparison with human influencer marketing. Hence, this study aims to fill this gap by comparing consumers’ perceptions of a human versus virtual influencer’s endorsement. Specifically, based on the construal level theory and psychological reactance, this study investigates how consumers differently evaluate human and virtual influencers’ endorsement motives, which may further influence their attitudes toward a brand, advertising (i.e., endorsement), and an influencer and purchase intentions. Additionally, the moderating role of the number of endorsements (single vs. multiple) and perceived innovativeness are examined.

This research addresses financial market communication of marketing information (i.e., information related to firms’ organic growth opportunities) through depth interviews (Study 1) and quantitative data on conference calls and stock market reactions (Study 2). The investigation (1) reveals that marketing, despite high potential relevance for financial markets, often plays only a marginal role in firms’ financial market communication and (2) develops a framework for effectively communicating marketing to financial markets.

Personalized pricing provides great potential for revenue, but is also accompanied by negative consumer reactions. Therefore, it is of great importance to investigate potential mechanisms and variables that could mitigate these negative effects. In this context, the following paper examines the role of perceived fairness, cognitive dissonance, and product categories.

This study takes the perspective of a brand introducing its own second-hand products to the re-commerce market. The project finds that consumers are more willing to forgive a transgressing second-hand product compared to a new product, which leads to lower negative word-of-mouth. The relationship is mediated by the underdog effect.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities substantially impact a company’s reputation. As companies increasingly embrace social media to communicate CSR activities, they face the challenge of selecting the appropriate message source. In this context, this paper examines the role of message source in the relationship between CSR communication and corporate reputation.

This study aims to capture the impact of stakeholder-oriented corporate actions on consumer purchasing behavior, a factor directly related to business performance. I found that consumers' purchase intentions improved when they were aware of a company's social action of downsizing its Russian operations in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Corporate purpose is postulated across industries as a strategic success driver. In the context of a literature analysis, this study works out whether the concept of purpose is anchored in well-known concepts such as mission and vision. An empirical study will examine the assessment of purpose in relevant stakeholder groups.

Sustainability issue has received growing attention from various stakeholders. To engage more people to participate in sustainable actions, the United Nations has promoted #actnow campaign since 2019. Among various sustainability initiatives and approaches, the UN’s #actnow campaign focuses on food and fashion sustainability since these two industries encompass various sustainability issues from production and post-consumption. By analyzing Twitter's big data, the study findings demonstrate that negative sentiment messages are powerful in driving the public’s engagement in social media message dissemination. The findings suggest that practitioners may use assertive and strong voice messages to lead consumers’ participation in sustainable message dissemination.

Food waste is a critical problem for many countries. Food producers and groceries often discard imperfect foods or food by-products that still contain nutritional value. To address this problem, some food manufacturers have turned to upcycling, that is, to convert otherwise discarded ingredients into new food products (e.g., cacao fruit pulp into crunch bites). Consumers’ acceptance of sustainable products is generally lower than that of conventional products due to quality concerns. We speculate that for upcycled food products, consumers’ perception of product quality may vary when different percentages of imperfect ingredients are integrated into the products. Drawing from schema congruity theory, this research examines how the usage of imperfect ingredients can impact the perceived quality of upcycled food products. The implications for marketing upcycled foods are discussed.

Marine industry generates tons of waste, which is usually discarded or used for production of fish feed and low-value silage. However, marine residual raw materials (e.g., skins, heads, liver, and roe after fish gutting and processing) contain lipids rich in omega-3 fatty acid, which has several beneficial physiological effects such as maintenance of normal cardiac function, normal brain function, and normal vision. Food fortification with omega-3 fatty acid derived from marine residual raw materials can therefore provide health benefits and contribute to a circular food system. The current research explores consumer acceptance of the food fortified with microencapsulated fish oil derived from marine residual raw materials. Consumers may be hesitant to try these products due to food neophobia associated with tendency to eat foods with familiar ingredients. The idea of ingredients from normally discarded food parts may seem disturbing. However, there is a growing concern about low utilization of bioresources. Thus, conflicting goals may be in place and there is a need for research on motivations and barriers for consumption of this type of food. To address this, focus group interviews were conducted with 42 Norwegian consumers (7 groups, 4-7 participants each). The sample represented different age groups (20-55 years), genders, educational backgrounds, and income levels. Each participant received a compensation of ca. USD 30. The focus groups discussed food habits, attitude towards the fortified food and utilizing residual raw materials, and reasons for intake/no intake of such food. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using the constant comparative method. The results indicate that the informants have limited experience with fortified food. However, they demonstrate positive attitude towards the foods fortified with microencapsulated fish oil and appreciate the utilization of residual raw materials. Health benefits are one of the important motivations. Still, the informants are concerned about the fishy taste, as the flavor is also quite crucial. Another barrier is an expected high price for such food. Adding fish oil may also be a problem for vegetarians and consumers with allergies. Thus, transparent information about the food ingredients is essential. The results also highlight the importance of food’s sensory characteristics. The current study advances understanding of the consumer acceptance of the food with residual raw materials (so far under investigated in the literature), and thus provides a basis for finding an efficient strategy for communicating its benefits to consumers. It also provides societal health benefits and positive environmental effects due to the increased intake of omega-3 and better utilization of unused bioresources.

Luxury, which can be defined as 'high standard goods’ provide symbolic, emotional values based on scarcity and exceptional quality. In reference to previous studies, luxury fashion product is classified differently from other general products because of their differentiated quality, design, and premium price. There are a few stereotypes about people who wear luxury fashion products which are known as high social status, materialism, fashion involvement, and sustainability. As these various perceptions of luxury fashion consumption are established among people, this study intends to examine how these perceptions are formed when people wear luxury fashion products from an observer’s perspective and explore the effects of perceptions on emotions, and evaluations regarding the wearer. Lastly, within the formation of perception, emotion, and evaluation of luxury fashion wearers, this study aims to examine the differences between the real world and the metaverse.