Over the past decade, the global apparel industry has witnessed an exponential growth of rental business. As consumers are increasingly aware of the environmental impact of over-consumption and garment waste, there is a new demand for apparel rental service as it helps reduce discarded garments to the landfill while satisfy consumers’ fashion needs This study examines the motivational factors that influence Generation Z consumers' attitudes and purchase intentions towards fashion rentals in China. Based on the theory of reasoned action, a survey was conducted with Generation Z consumers in mainland China. The findings suggested that economic benefits, ego defence, fashion orientation, experience value and sustainable value affect Chinese youngsters’ purchase intention to rent fashion-clothing. This empirical study contributes to a better understanding of the changing consumption attitudes and patterns of Generation Z consumers in China.

Consumer studies on millennials have focused on shopper behavioural differences with their old baby boomer generation. A significant distinction between these two groups have been their relationship and interaction with technology across all facets of life, including shopping. Millennials are generally regarded as early adopters of digital technology and its use in daily activities, hence their reference to digital natives. Compared to the baby boomers, who are late adopters and are called digital immigrants. Africa's millennials constitute at least 30% of Africa's population, making them a key attraction for marketers, yet their interests are often treated as a homogenous segment similar to global millennials from advanced economies.

With the raise of artificial intelligence (AI), a new form of influencers has entered the proposition of marketing strategies for brands. Virtual influencers (VI’s) have shown their potential for brands in general, fashion lifestyle, or fashion luxury, even being more impactful in specific aspects than traditional influencers. Zooming in on sports, the VI space has been discovered by some brands already, yet for lifestyle sports products only. The performance sports products environment is still untouched. This study aims to identify the potential goals to be achieved for sports brands creating human-like virtual influencers to implement in their performance range of products strategy.

Product’s warranty is used strategically by firms to create differentiation and attract consumers. Hence, the effect of warranties on consumer decision making is of interest to both marketers and consumer researchers and his research has received much attention in the consumer behavior literature. Studies have shown that product warranty plays an important role for consumers. It influences the expectations and subjective assessments of product's efficacy and thus can signal quality, reduce risks and encourages purchases, based on the belief that offering a warranty for a product that has a high failure rate is not profitable for companies. However, this article documents a new phenomenon, extending the known capabilities of product warranty. Labeling products with a Long-term product warranty, versus products without warranty, improved consumers' objective performance, even when motivation to perform better was unlikely to explain the improvement. Results from three experiments indicate that the efficacy of products carrying “3 YEARS WARRANTY” labels were better than the efficacy of the same products without these labels. Specifically, we compared performance of participants utilizing a product (sunglasses, earmuffs, or chamomile tea) said to assist task performance (visual, auditory, or concentration, respectively) when it carried “3 YEARS WARRANTY” label versus no label. Participants facing a glaring light were asked to read printed words as accurately and as quickly as they could, receiving compensation proportional to their performance. Those wearing sunglasses carried “3 YEARS WARRANTY” label were able to read more quickly yet with fewer errors than those wearing sunglasses without label that were otherwise identical. Similarly, ear-muffs blocked noise more effectively, and chamomile tea improved mental focus more, when otherwise identical target products carried long-term product warranty.

Consumer studies mainly take a cross-sectional approach to understand leisure and home consumption. This paper takes the mundane workplace as a unit of consumption and adopts a processual view to understand what and how cultural capital for impression management is acquired and changes over career trajectories. Integrating the theories of Goffman (1959) and Bourdieu (1977; 1984; 1990), the study explores how embodied habitual practices (habitus) enables and shapes impression management to build desirable work identity (Hallett, 2003). The walking-with interviews are used to seek conversations with senior executives in Hong Kong along their work routes. It proves to be a proficient approach and data collection technique to explore mundane consumption practices where knowledge is incorporated with people’s competence and artefacts (Mak, Lai, Tsaousi, & Davies, 2022). Among different resources for impression management, dining knowledge emerged as a significant cultural practices for performative self and building up of social capital.

Promotion of brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI) is a modern managerial issue, as BSI seems to impact not only sustainability but also consumer psychology toward a brand. In this regard, the author has extended self-congruity theory and suggested the concept of brand-sustainability-self-congruence (BSSC) as the image congruence of the triad comprising brand, BSI, and self-concept. Former surveys report predictive effects of BSSC on consumers’ brand evaluation, leading to increased brand equity (Kumagai, 2022, 2023).

We are living in a world that is increasingly digital and undergoing dramatic changes as a result. In particular for luxury fashion, growing numbers of online customers as well as fast changing business environment, luxury retailers face the challenge of differentiating themselves by offering a better online customer experience (Chen et al. 2021). By doing so, luxury fashion retailers are increasingly deploying chatbots in their service encounters to enhance customer experience (Roy & Naidoo, 2021). Chatbots are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Hoyer et al. 2020) and are an example of AI robot that can provide human-computer interactions on a retail website (Lee et al. 2017). Intended to enhance the online customer experience, chatbots have the potential to provide a better understanding of the product performance, enable efficient use of customer time, and help build crucial customer relationships (Rese et al. 2020; Wilson-Nash et al. 2020; Xu et al. 2022). Therefore, chatbots’ potential has been highly valued by fashion retail industry and academia (Jiang et al. 2022).

Green consumption behavior (GCB) is desirable for a better world. The trend of GCB is expected to rise in the coming years. As such, it is imperative to understand the enablers of GCB. A significant majority of the investigated drivers of GCB are consumer-level factors. Studies focusing on the consumer-level showed that factors such as values, intentions, and personal norms could influence GCB. However, it is argued that compared to values or intentions, self-determined motivation can better predict GCB. The effect of self-determined motivation types (i.e., autonomous and controlled motivation) on GCB remains unclear due to prevailing gaps and contradictory findings. Furthermore, it is posited that people exhibit more self-determined behavior if they have strong self-awareness. Higher self-awareness can be achieved through mindfulness; therefore, differences in mindfulness level could affect the motivation-behavior relationship.

Since time immemorial company’s interaction with its customers plays a vital role in co-creation of values and shared lifestyle. Similarly, for Japanese department stores passing through the declining stage of the life cycle, strategy based on maintaining relationships is important for renovating their business models. This study examines the importance of “Retail Brand Community” for Japanese department stores, considering from the perspective of Brand community and Social Identity Theory.

Many retailers and food service providers offer programs as part of their loyalty programs in which customers are given stamps for each purchase of a qualifying product or service and redeemed for a reward once a certain number of stamps have been accumulated. We identify which stimuli in such goal-directed motivational promotions induce customers to participate in the program.

Service encounters increasingly feature AI-powered inputs such as add-ons recommendations or aftercare solutions. These novel forms of customer service, provided by AI rather than humans, can shape customers’ sense of agency throughout the customer journey. Customers find themselves in a form of competitive collaboration with AI, sharing tasks, resources, inputs, and decisions. This research conceptualises and develops a scale to measure shared agency power during customer-AI interactions. Understanding the role of agency in AI- customer interactions is important, as agency represents a source, mechanism, delimiter and effect of a human’s or a machine’s actions. Agency may differ across various service encounters and with it, the type of perceived risks associated with human-AI interactions. Future research may use the shared agency power scale to better understand the nature and impact of customer-AI interactions in a service context on traditional marketing factors.

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

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

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

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

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

Gastro-tourism extends beyond what to eat, but also the attractiveness and the environment. It encompasses a tourist experience journey starting from pre, during, until post-travel. Gastro tourism in the new normal engages with traditional vs novel value of experiences. This study aims to answer how Gen Z experiences gastro tourism and the impact of digital technologies using surveys on Tiktok Ads followed by an experiment with an immersive culinary adventure using 3D visual technology.

This study extends the previously classified typology of unplanned purchases to accommodate the increase in online purchases. We also measured the impact of unplanned purchases on shoppers from an emotional perspective. As a result, new types of unplanned purchases, such as "novelty," "recall," "salience," "reference price," "risk aversion," and "embodied cognition," were derived. Furthermore, among unplanned purchases, salience purchases were found to significantly increase shoppers' interest. This result indicate that the importance of marketing strategies that take salience into account for manufacturers and retailers.

In the current study, we directly measure consumers’ physiological responses (i.e., brain waves via electroencephalogram [EEG]) to advertising stimuli (digital storyteller vs. human storyteller) to confirm the narrative transportation process of storytelling immersion.

Consumer brand engagement (CBE) signals propensity for brand purchase. A scale proposes three dimensions of CBE (i.e., cognitive, affective and activation dimensions) but the dimensions prominent and driving brand purchase intentions in an Instagram cosmetic purchase context need examination. In this context, this study tests Hollebeek, Glynn and Brodie’s (2014) 10-items/3 dimensions scale and examines an outcome of cosmetics brand purchase intention on Instagram. Data was quantitatively collected from 203 consumers who were students and non-students using convenience and snowballing non- probability sampling method. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were used to analyse the data. The results revealed that although the three CBE dimensions were identified in a Cosmetic Instagram purchase context, it was the affective and activation dimensions that positively predicted consumers’ intentions to purchase cosmetic brands after engaging with the brand on Instagram. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.