Negative brand events can significantly harm the brand, affecting consumer cognitions, emotions, and behavior, leading to negative brand evaluations, negative emotions, brand avoidance, and retaliation. Thus, it is critical for brands to design and implement strategies that promote consumer forgiveness to mitigate those negative consumer responses. Despite the growing literature on the determinant factors of consumer behavior in a brand failure context, there is still scarce evidence regarding the impact of brand type on consumer responses, including consumer forgiveness, following a negative brand event. Considering that consumers tend to react differently to a brand perceived as arrogant (making them feel inferior), as opposed to a brand they strongly identify with, this paper focuses on failures of equal vs. higher status brands and investigates their impact on consumer forgiveness. Following the above, we expect that differences in brand status can shape consumer behavior following a failure or transgression.

Emerging markets are experiencing immense institutional transformations, which present substantial opportunities and challenges for entrepreneurial firms attempting to grow their businesses. The main challenges arise from the fact that emerging markets are less productive, and uncertainty and risk are high due to less transparency. Consequently, dissimilar to their counterparts in developed markets, entrepreneurial firms in developing economies are characterised by limited internationalisation knowledge and process, which are pivotal for developing export marketing strategy effectively.

As Hollywood relies heavily on global markets, it is particularly important for studios to understand how their decisions, including on casts, may affect their movies’ box-office in foreign markets. Anecdotal evidence shows that casting actors with similar facial features may be problematic in foreign markets, often disorienting international audiences.

With the expanding availability of market data, firms are increasingly reliant on analytical capabilities as a source of competitive advantage, a trend that is reflected in the rising budgets allocated to data and analytics (The CMO Survey, 2022). Analytical capabilities denote firms' capacity to define and extract insights from the available data and link these insights to decision-making (e.g., Cao et al., 2019; Penttinen & Frösén, 2022). Despite the growing influence of the capability perspective on marketing analytics, which is rooted in the resource-based view (Barney, 1991), the understanding of analytical capabilities as a source of performance disparities remains in its early stages. In particular, although analytical capabilities of firms constitute (1) capabilities internal to the firm, as well as (2) those shared within the firm’s broader business network, the vast majority of previous research focuses on the development and use of internal analytical capabilities only (Gupta & George, 2016; Wedel & Kannan, 2016). As a result, there remains limited understanding regarding shared analytical capabilities that assume close collaboration between business partners, such as suppliers, buyers, and third parties, in developing and sharing data and insights (Alinaghian & Razmdoost, 2018; Penttinen & Frösén, 2022) and extend beyond the boundaries of individual firms.

Sustainability rears its head in the current online marketing and virtual store -research. Sustainability considerations involve pro-environmental-, social- and economic values as well as future generations and continuous innovation (Hanss and Böhm, 2012). Central in the sustainability research is sustainable consumer behavior, which has been found to be subject of intensions varying across different types of consumers, issues, and product categories (O’Rourke and Ringer, 2016). Determining consumers’ general egoistic, altruistic and biospheric values (e.g., De Groot and Steg 2008; Steg et al., 2014) have resulted quite complex and not always so generalizable structural models for sustainable behavior. While value -research has been dominant in determining the sustainability intensions and eventual behavior, there are relatively little solid theories and understating about different psychological processes behind sustainable behavior. Furthermore, the consideration of multiple sustainable consumer behavior outcomes seems to be limited, which can also hamper the development of models and theories (see e.g., Hulland and Houston 2021).

This study investigated the conditions under which consumer participatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns could be effective and focused on power as the key variable. Specifically, based on motivational intensity theory, the interaction effect between participation effort and power was examined on CSR attitude and participation intention. In addition, this study tested the mediated moderating effect of power through self-efficacy in order to examine the mechanism behind the interaction effect. Results of two experimental studies (Study 1 and Study 2) showed a significant the interaction effect of participation effort and power on participation intention. When the consumer's power was low, participation intention was lower for those in the high effort condition compared to those in the low effort condition. On the other hand, when power was high, there was no difference in participation intention according to the level of participation effort. This study has significance in that it reaffirms and furthermore expands the existing academic results and presents practical implications.

This study addresses the problem caused by unhealthy = tasty intuition (UTI) when positioning innovative new categories of food products. Our research on Japanese consumers’ choice of soy meat hamburgers shows that UTI formed by the old category influences choices in the new product category.

In the current era of sustainable development, economic, social, and environmental changes are interrelated, and social inclusion and environmental sustainability are our shared goals. In response, social and environmental values have become important considerations for the success of an enterprise, placing an increased emphasis on the interests of all stakeholders. This trend in the governance of enterprise fueled the emergence of a new organizational form: the certified B Corporation (B Corp), a social enterprise certified by B Lab as an enterprise that creates value for non-shareholding stakeholders, including employees, customers, the local community, and the environment. With their positive social and environmental impacts, B Corps have become increasingly recognized as instrumental in the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and literature on B Corps has increased. However, empirical research on the role of B Corps is still lacking.

In this paper, we propose a new neural network architecture for item recommendation with structural information. Our model, structural neural recommender (SNR) is based on neural networks and operates on a hierarchy paradigm, aiming to explore the effectiveness of incorporating different structural information for recommendation. Many recent state-of-the-art neural network based recommendation models exploit the nonlinear transformations for modeling the complex user-item interaction patterns and user historical behaviors, ignoring the item-item structural relationship. This structural information, however, is uncomplicated to derive and useful for inferring item characteristics. To utilize this information, SNR simultaneously learns representation from user-item interactions and item-item relationships. Empirical studies on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such structural information, by outperforming classic and recent baselines. We also conduct detail ablation studies and hyper-parameter analysis to provide further understanding towards the behaviors of our model. Following the model development, we conduct a field experiment to demonstrate that the effectiveness of algorithmic recommender systems can further increase by using different types of message framing when communicating recommendations to consumers. Our results suggest that recommendations framed with a relevance appeal (e.g. “Top 5 brands for you”) are more effective in general, yet recommendations that are framed with a popularity appeal (“Top 5 most popular brands”) are more effective for customers who were acquired via social media (versus non-social media) advertising or for those who have stronger (versus weaker) social orientation.

With the development of social media, most people will use social media to watch the videos of digital influencers to get spiritual comfort, and they will think that digital influencers are like friends who are connected with their own lives. However, most of the previous studies focused on the influence of digital influencers on followers’ behavioral intentions (e.g. loyalty, and purchase intention). They rarely discussed the online social well-being obtained by followers after watching digital influencers' posts. Therefore, this study integrates the attributes of followers (loneliness, low self-esteem, empathy) and the characteristics of digital influencers (social attractiveness, expertise, homophily) to explore the influence of the parasocial interaction established between digital influencers and followers on followers’ online social well-being. This study uses the Internet to collect questionnaires and takes users who have watched digital influencers' posts on social media as the research object. A total of 597 valid questionnaires are collected. The research results show that: the characteristics of digital influencers (social attractiveness, expertise, and homophily), and followers' attributes (low self-esteem and empathy) have positively affected parasocial interaction. It is noteworthy that loneliness has no significant effect on parasocial interaction.

Consumers visiting platforms that host user-generated content (UGC) not only consume content but also generate content by investing time and effort. This paper seeks to examine a UGC platform's content provision strategy: how a UGC platform can motivate consumers to generate UGC and how it can manage the balance between UGC and platform's own content. As UGC and the platform's own content perform the same function, one may be inclined to think that the two types of content are substitutes. Our analysis shows that they could function as strategic complements. This is because increasing the platform's own content provision raises the quality of content on the platform, motivates more consumers to join the platform, and increases the total UGC provision on the platform. The fact that consumers dislike advertising could lead us to believe that consumers will be less motivated to generate UGC if ad space increases. On the contrary, we find that consumers may be motivated to increase UGC provision to make up for the loss in enjoyment and increase the overall quality of contents on the platform. The public good characteristics of UGC could prompt us to think that UGC provision on the platform will be less than the socially optimal level. Our analysis identifies conditions when the total provision of UGC can be more than the social optimum. One may wonder whether it is profitable for a UGC platform to completely dispense with its own content. We find that it is always profitable for the UGC platform to offer some of its own content. This is because when consumers spend more time consuming the content, the platform can monetize their attention and earn higher ad revenue.

Consumer brand engagement has recently drawn attention for researches because of its importance in predicting brand loyalty. Meanwhile, social media is used as digital marketing tools for marketers to attract and engage younger consumers. This study aims to answer the question whether social marketing efforts by fashion brands on major social media platforms have influence on consumer brand engagement in the context of Vietnamese fashion brands. Social marketing efforts include five dimensions of entertainment, interaction, trendiness, customization and word-of-mouth. Although social marketing efforts has been examined in relationship with other important marketing concepts such as brand equity and customer equity (Godey et al., 2016; Kim and Ko, 2012), few studies have investigated its effect on consumer brand engagement, especially in fashion brands. Besides, Vietnam as an emerging market is witnessing considerable changes that social media brings to every field including fashion markets. It is noticeable that more and more fashion brands in Vietnam are trying to expand and advance their marketing strategies on social media to engage consumers. In this study, a self-administered online survey was delivered to Vietnamese consumers, which included 281 valid responses who followed Vietnamese fashion brands on Facebook or Instagram. The empirical results show that social media efforts engage consumers differently on brand engagement dimensions. The key finding indicates that entertainment and word-of-mouth are positively related to brand engagement in affective, cognitive and behavioral dimensions. Interaction is positively related to affective and behavioral brand engagements. Trendiness is positively related to behavioral brand engagement. Finally, customization is positively related to cognitive brand engagement.

People spent around 90% of smartphone usage time on mobile applications (apps). In response to these opportunities, companies have developed branded apps to interact with consumers and facilitate loyalty. However, companies have hard time retaining consumers to their own brand due to the fierce competition in the app market. As such, it is imperative to unveil factors driving continuance intention of branded apps. This is one of a key research themes in a recent literature review of marketing research on mobile apps. Most of prior studies have adopted the utilitarian perspective where perceived usefulness and ease of use are identified as the key drivers. However, the fit perspective has received limited attention. It has gained increasing importance as recent studies have emphasized the role of person-app fit and person-brand fit in driving consumers’ purchase decision performance and as consumers’ lives are highly embedded into branded apps. This study aims to investigate continuance intention of branded apps from the fit perspective. This research selected the target branded apps in Taiwan based on prior studies. A market research firm was contracted to collect data randomly on various social media sites, and its membership database by using online questionnaires. 198 usable questionnaires were obtained. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

This study examines how brand-influencer, influencer-users, and user-brand congruences affect perceived fantasy about the influencer and closeness toward the brand when an Instagram ad is endorsed by celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) influencers. The study employed a between-subject online experiment by manipulating an advertisement endorsed by a celebrity and a non-celebrity influencer. The results suggest that congruence between brand-influencer matters in building effective relationships.

Imagination plays a critical role in travel decision-making. Given the intangible nature of tourism products, tourists cannot directly experience and evaluate the tourism resources in advance. Thus, tourists must first mentally predict and imagine the future travel experiences and scenarios in the destination based on the marketing information (e.g., travel photo, promo video) and prior knowledge, then form their subjective evaluation of the travel product. This future-thinking process is called “mental simulation”. Stacks of research have shown that mental simulations positively affect travel behavior (Le et al., 2019). However, given that travel is a kind of novelty-seeking activity, tourists are usually not familiar with the destination environment and activities. The lack of prior knowledge might inhibit their mental simulation process, even if destination photos and videos are provided. Thus, how to effectively arouse tourists’ mental simulation of destination experience is an important question for effective tourism marketing.

Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental problems in the world. In modern society, the consumption of single-use plastics in the food service industry has increased along with the increase in food-away-from-home. The COVID-19 pandemic has attacked the consumption of single-use plastic in the restaurant industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the US has retracted the related laws and policies regarding using single-use plastic for fast food and carry-out food, and customers have increased their use of single-use plastic for fast food and carry-out food due to worries about hygiene. Even though sustainability has been a novel topic in hospitality literature, a majority of studies have focused on the consumers’ perception, attitude, or behavioral willingness toward sustainability. To fill this gap in research, finding an effective way to influence consumers’ behavioral change becomes important and necessary.

Tourists tend to conform to the majority in their purchase decisions to avoid negative outcomes. Therefore, newly developed yet unpopular tourism destinations are facing difficulty of promotion. On the basis of evolutionary psychology, this study aims to provide a technique of selling unpopular tourism destinations based on tourists’ mating motive, as implied by evolutionary psychology. Many studies have focused on situations when people conform to the majority, whereas a few studies have indicated that individuals also deliberately follow the minority in purchase decisions (Chan et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2012). Research indicates that individuals tend to showcase unique products to attract mates (Chen et al., 2022; Durante & Griskevicius, 2016). Tourists’ mating motive may be activated when their travel decisions are related to mating success. This study hypothesizes that to display differentiation, tourists with activated mating motives are more likely to choose minority-endorsed (vs. majority-endorsed) tourism destinations. Moreover, to verify the evolutionary explanation of tourists’ preference for minority-endorsed destinations, the current study also tests the mediation effect of uniqueness seeking, which has been regarded as a consequence of mating motive and an antecedent of individuals’ disconformity to the majority (Griskevicius, Cialdini, et al., 2006; Imhoff & Erb, 2009). Based on a scenario-based experiment, this study identified the effect of mating motive on tourists’ preference for minority-endorsed tourism destinations. First, tourists’ mating motives positively influence their preference for minority-endorsed tourism destinations. Second, tourists’ uniqueness seeking fully mediates the effect of mating motive on preference for minority-endorsed tourism destinations. The findings inform the tourism industry an effective way to promote unpopular destinations. Tourists are inclined to follow the choice or opinions of others, particularly when tourists are highly uncertain about their decision outcomes. Therefore, tourism marketers usually utilize social clues in their promotion messages such as “popular choice” and “best sellers.” However, newly developed tourism products that lack awareness, though providing high-quality experience, are facing tremendous difficulty of selling. The current study suggests that the less popular destinations can be rebranded and promoted to target romantically motivated tourists.

Technology, for example, Personalized Technology Services (PTS), has groomed consumers to expect an integrated and personalized shopping experience regardless of the channels, such as websites, mobile apps, physical stores, etc. PTS refers to technologies that offer personalization functions to meet customer needs at the time of their shopping for a seamless experience. The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of retailer mobile apps’ PTS in consumers’ omnichannel shopping experiences by: (1) identifying PTS values specific to retail mobile apps for in-store shopping and (2) testing the PTS values – channel integration – consumer responses links based on Information Integration Theory (IIT). We first proposed that PTS via mobile apps holds various positive values. Second, we postulated four hypotheses: H1. PTS values enhance the integration of PTS values, H2. Integration of PTS values positively affects customer engagement, H3. Customer engagement positively affects customer satisfaction and H4. Customer engagement mediates the relationship between integration and customer satisfaction. Two web-based survey studies were employed with US consumers who had an experience with mobile app-mediated PTS offered by retailers. For study 1, a total of 239 US consumers participated in the survey. Study 1 identified five value dimensions of the app-mediated PTS: hedonic value, utilitarian value, self-efficacy, co-creation, and synchronicity. For study 2, a total of 373 US participants completed the survey. Study 2 confirmed the proposed structural model that PTS values positively affected channel integration which, in turn, positively influenced customer engagement and shopping satisfaction. Additionally, customer engagement partially mediated the effect of integration on shopping satisfaction. This study expanded the literature on omnichannel retailing by exploring consumer in-store shopping experience using retail mobile apps from PTS and channel integration perspectives. Practically, the study findings provided insights for marketers into how to design the retailers’ mobile apps to enhance the integrated shopping experience of consumers.

We enjoy various forms of leisure every day. Human play culture continues to change according to the development of technology and social environment. In line with the changing society, humans experience socialization, and the market continues to change in response to human new ways of life.

Consumers' online reviews have become more powerful in the Internet market. Consumers share reviews, post comments and constantly evaluate products online. In previous studies, the analysis of online reviews mainly focused on purchasing products based on consumers' own use experience, but in innovative products, it was difficult to find an analysis of product acceptor's response to product user reviews. In particular, there is no online review study of VR covered in this study. This study not only quantitatively analyzed online reviews of consumers who purchased VR products on Amazon, an online distribution site, but also qualitatively analyzed them through crawling. This study used Amazon's VR product user review, where purchases were confirmed, to select algorithms that are more likely to be matched by predicting a helpful review and presenting a predictive model. In addition, the online review extracted deep text associated with Helpful and conducted topical modeling. As a result, topics related to 1) experience in use, 2) post-product evaluation, 3) product composition and peripherals, 4) immersion, and 5) comfort were highly acceptable to potential inmates. To enhance the acceptability of innovative products through online reviews, it is not just highlighting the product advantages of VR, but also suggests that the link between smartphones and applications can bring in more potential users. Also, interworking with other peripheral devices (speakers or screens) can be predicted as a way to increase the acceptability of VR products. From a marketing perspective, this study has found targeted topics that help consumers in pioneering the VR market, which will help potential customers create the services they want.