The popularity of live streaming is driving the emergence of a new business model, known as live-streaming commerce (LSC). While there are more and more broadcasters in LSC, their behaviors and performance of them are significantly different. To have a better understanding of broadcasters, we employ different machine learning models to identify different portraits in both static and dynamic dimensions. We collect a rich live-streaming dataset from one leading platform in China. Our dataset features information for both broadcasters and viewers, including viewers’ purchasing behaviors, viewers’ records of posting words, broadcasters’ gender, the number of followers for broadcasters, and the live streaming show information, including the start and end time, and the viewers in each live streaming show. The rich textual information in broadcasters’ profile induction provides us a good opportunity to uncover different static portraits and the records in live streaming shows give us a chance to identify different dynamic behavioral portraits for broadcasters.

Frontline employees (hereinafter FLEs) act as boundary spanners, primary representatives, and intermediaries between consumers and service organizations. They are often directly responsible for service delivery and are the customers’ first impression of service organizations. Therefore, maximizing FLE performance is vital for service organizations. Leaders have been argued to play a critical role in fostering FLE performance for a variety of reasons, one of which is to achieve goal-related results. To achieve those results, they often feel a pressing need to discipline their subordinates’ actions. Consequently, leaders may take corrective measures that display controlling behaviors to press subordinates’ best performance. This type of leadership style is known as Authoritarian Leadership (hereinafter AL), which refers to leaders with paternal attributes who utilize absolute authority and control over their subordinates with the expectation of unquestionable obedience. The literature, however, has reported mixed findings of the performance benefits of AL.

Throughout recent years, many physical establishments were forced to close, and events were canceled due to the outbreak of Covid-19. Consequently, brands, especially luxury brands, saw their contact with consumers greatly diminished and revenues decreased significantly (D’Arpizio et al., 2021). On the contrary, the global gaming industry saw its demand, exposure, and revenues increase. In fact, this industry is expected to exceed $200 billion by the end of 2023 (Gilliland, 2020), and there were more than 2.6 billion players worldwide in 2020 (Palframan, 2021). Thus, in 2020, many luxury brands opted to significantly upsurge their investments in the world of online gaming. The adoption of game advertising also represents a way for the luxury industry to adapt to its current target, as 81% of Gen Z and 77% of Millennials are gamers (Jain, 2021). By 2025, both generations are expected to account for 50% of the market, making them important players in the sector. However, there is still little empirical research regarding consumers’ perceptions of game advertising in the context of luxury brands. Thus, this research aims to study the impact that brand credibility and the use of game advertising have on the perceived coolness of luxury brands and, subsequently, on their equity.

Voice assistant devices (VADs), driven and improved by artificial intelligence, have been adapted for consumers (e.g., Hey Google and Alexa) and are widely used for their daily lives (Guha et al., 2022; Rabassa, Sabri, & Spaletta, 2022). Consumers benefit from the use of a VAD as it makes their daily lives more convenient, more comfortable, and simpler (Zierau et al., 2022). At the same time, companies can also benefit from interactions with VADs by collecting consumer-related data and storing it in large databases for marketing purposes (Guha et al., 2022; Rabassa et al., 2022).

While social media marketing opens a variety of new windows for enlightening brand–customer relationships, a gritty puzzle is that brand recognition does not invariably echo with customers’ perceived value. This provokes the need to uncover the missing pieces in bridging the gap between brand recognition and customer perceived value. This research falls within the innovative new work in the marketing literature in positing co-creation as a crucial mediator in facilitating the impact of brand recognition on customers’ perceived value. Based on social identity theory, we also investigated how co-creation is moderated by virtual communication identification in influencing customers’ perceived value towards a brand. We conducted a survey via a sample of 386 current Gogoro customers. Gogoro is the biggest and most well-known Taiwanese producer of electric scooters. Our findings contribute to the extant marketing research by emphasizing that the key stimulus of increased customer perceived value towards a brand is active co-creation initiatives via virtual brand communities, and that the effects of co-creation are further strengthened when customers’ virtual communication identification is high.

The capability for Artificial Intelligence in the beauty industry is enormous, as customers are demanding increasingly customized offers that only these strategies can offer. However, there is still a scarcity of empirical research on customer experiences enabled by AI, which highlights this research's relevance, which we intend to bridge.

Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Robotics are emerging as a new way of improving services, readjusting and impacting all business industries and relationships among people (Loureiro et al., 2021; Makridakis, 2017; Mingotto et al., 2020). The hospitality industry is no exception to this (Mingotto et al., 2020) since a quick growth in the use of robots and AI in this industry has been seen, registering a turnover of 249 million U.S. dollars (International Federation of Robots, 2021). This demonstrates that these technologies have a huge potential to grow, being relevant to deeply study them. Since very few of the existing studies highlight the robot-human interactions, further studies on the enhancement of human well-being through transhumanistic technologies, close relationship marketing capabilities, and the evolution of the engagement process between humans and AI-enabled machines are needed (Loureiro et al., 2021). To address the existing gaps and consider Susan Fournier’s (1998) study on customer-brand relationships, the main goal of this study is to find support for this researcher by associating customer-brand relationship studies with a customer-robot relationship. It also aims to understand individuals’ attitudes towards different types of social robots and the relationship process between social robots and humans, in the hospitality industry, and the influence of identification in the creation of attachment, connection, and commitment. The possible contributions of the customer-robot emotional relationship on customers’ feelings of wellness were also studied.

The use of AI chatbots in frontline customer service is beneficial as it can provide quick service responses, cost-saving on human employees and accelerate customers’ decision-making process. However, implementing chatbots can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, companies benefit from the use of chatbots. On the other hand, it may hurt customer experience as customers perceive chatbots are less trustworthy and show less social presence. Service failures today have become more unpredictable with the increasing complexity of social environments. Aligning with the trends of online customer service, customers are most likely to encounter a chatbot when seeking online customer service to solve service failures. With most of the previous literature investigating customers’ perceptions of chatbots and chatbot-related service failures, little research has focused on the area where chatbots as service recovery agents and how customers perceive the use of chatbots handling their service requests after service failures.

As environmental pollution and natural resource depletion are seriously threatening human beings’ well-being, consumers’ concern about environmental issues has substantially increased. Accordingly, increasing consumers consider themselves to be environmentalists and support environmental protection by consuming green products. In response, more and more firms follow the popular trend by conducting green marketing practices. As a result, green markets are demonstrating greater growth compared to conventional markets these days. On the other hand, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming the way of consumer-firm interactions in various industries including the green industry. More and more industries and firms adopt AI agents to replace or assist human employees. Deposit the pervasive and rapid nature of the transformation, however, we have limited knowledge of how the transformation of consumer-firm interaction influences green product marketing practices. Accordingly, the current research aims to investigate how the adoption of AI agents in green marketing strategies impacts consumers’ responses and further explore which mechanism underlying the process. To examine our hypotheses, we conducted a series of studies, and we collected the data through an online survey platform. Our findings demonstrated that consumers’ reaction was sufficiently different when they interact with AI agent compared to human agent in a green consumption context. Our findings contribute to enriching prior literature on green and AI by integrating each other and also provide practical implications for marketers in the related industries.

The spread of COVID-19 changes consumer preferences and behaviors greatly across the world. Extant literature has demonstrated that when there is a threat to disease, people stay away from those who do not seem healthy as they can be potentially infectious. Based on the previous literature, this research shows that individuals exposed to disease threat avoid products of which designs are high in visual complexity. When disease threat was present, individuals had lower purchase intention for products with complex designs. The perceived uncleanliness mediated the effect of visual complexity and disease threat on purchase intention. The findings provide a novel insight into the effect of disease salience on consumer perception of product design.

Recently, the luxury sector has witnessed a significant rise in luxury consumption, reaching £233 Billion in 2022 (Statista, 2022). This rise demonstrates the growing popularity of the luxury consumption phenomenon globally. However, the climate crisis may impact future trends in luxury consumption (Gardetti and Muthu, 2019). The luxury sector has endorsed a considerable growing demand for sustainability from environmental and ethical luxury consumers. In recent years, concerns have grown around the ethicality of supply chains, where consumers develop contradictory feelings and beliefs, veering between conscious and hedonistic decision-making (Kleinhaus, 2011; Helm, 2020; Wang et al. 2021). Moreover, consumers face a conflict between choosing what they believe is ethically right and indulgence (Hennigs et al. 2013). The supply chain plays an important role in achieving sustainability goals, and yet some researchers argue that the luxury supply chain can involve ethical and environmental breaches in terms of labour and raw materials, such as use of leather and fur (Klerk et al. 2018). However, some luxury brands such as Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood are focused on sustainability and the use of vegan raw materials (YNAP, 2021).

Livestreaming commerce is a form of e-commerce that embedded real-time video presentation and social interaction. It provides immersive shopping experience reinforced by high levels of interactivity and instant bidirectional communication. China, as one of the biggest livestreaming markets, has reached 2.3 trillion (CNY) livestreaming commerce market value in 2022. In a 2020 survey, two-thirds of Chinese consumers experienced livestreaming shopping in the previous year. Accordingly, luxury brands, such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton have started to implement livestreaming commerce in China. However, for years, luxury brands have struggled with online commerce as it may impact upon perceptions of exclusivity and dilute brand value. Research on the efficacy of live commerce emerged in recent years and mostly focused on non-luxury brands. However, luxury brands cannot simply copy digital marketing strategies that proved to be effective for non-luxury brands. To date, limited academic attention has been devoted to the luxury commerce in a livestreaming context.

As part of an effort to promote the circular economy, an effective marketing communication is needed to convince consumers to choose the environmentally-friendly products. How a marketer frames a communication message, together with a consumer characteristic which shapes how a consumer thinks and feels, should influence consumer perception, as well as their decision regarding the green purchase. There remains a literature gap in this area in which the current research seeks to add its contribution. This paper investigated how message framing and self-construal influences consumer perception in supporting the environment. A 2 (holistic versus analytical message frame) x 2 (independent versus interdependent) self-construal between-subject experiment was designed. The research context is an apparel industry. It was found that independent (vs interdependent) self-construal respondents have higher environmental perception of the product. This surprising result is actually not in line with the hypothesis, yet yields insightful finding that opens up discussion and new avenue for the future research in this area.

In the past decade the level of prosocial behavior has raised some concerns, whereas an empathic concern, one of the main predictors of prosocial behavior, is decreasing. Lack of empathy and less forgiving attitudes are one of the main characteristics of entitlement Entitlement, or feeling of deserving more than others, is negatively related to pro-social behavior (Campbell et al., 2004). In H1, we suggest that entitled individuals engage in prosocial behavior more when there is an opportunity to self-enhance vs. when there is no opportunity to self-enhance.

A new type of food created in laboratories – lab grown meat (LGM) is an alternative to traditional animal farming and attracting attention of media, industry experts and consumers. Why is this new product so controversial? It is claimed that cell-based meat production is more environmentally friendly, ethical and sustainable than traditional methods that involve animals. Hence, being less harmful and potentially slowing down environmental degradation that leads to climate change. However, consumers have concerns regarding product quality, sourcing of cells used for production and use of growth serums. So many differing views are present, even before LGM is introduced as a marketable product. This paper examines what drives public discourse regarding how this new industry can be regulated, technology and how social media posts, fake news and publicly available rhetoric address consumer concerns and consumer acceptance regarding this new food category.

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.

The objective of this study is to compare the efficiency of VR and 2D in the tourism industry as marketing tools, using affective forecasting and purchase intention. Accordingly, this study has two primary research aims. The first is to examine if a higher level of mental imagery (resulting from VR) is more effective than a lower level (2D) in a tourism marketing context. To evaluate this, the researchers use experimental method, measuring predicted dominance, predicted pleasure and predicted arousal, as well as purchase intention towards the hotel. Relevant to the tourism industry, tourism products are spatially and temporally distant (vs. near). This study aims to investigate how differently mental imagery, resulting from VR (versus 2D) experience, generates affective forecasting of a tourism product when tourists plan distant (versus near) future trips (temporal distance).

Expressing political stances is not rare among service providers such as taxi drivers and chefs. For instance, in 2021, a restaurant owner angry at the death of U.S. soldiers during the evacuation of Afghanistan posted a sign on the front door telling Biden supporters to eat elsewhere (Miller 2021). Given findings from research on brand activism, consumers can be expected to have less favorable attitudes toward service providers who are more politically different from them. However, if service providers who are politically opposite are more competent than ones who are politically identical, would consumers still choose politically identical but less competent service providers? To our knowledge, no research has been conducted to examine what factors influence consumers’ choices between more competent but politically opposite service providers and less competent but politically identical service providers. To fill that gap, in our research, we examined the role of consumers’ political ideology (i.e., conservative vs. liberal) in making trade-offs between more competent but politically opposite service providers and less competent but politically identical ones.

B2B marketers increasingly encounter a pressure to be digitally present in digital channels and to generate content that is tempting in driving potential customers to interact with the company online (Wiersema, 2013; Andersson & Wikström 2017). This is what B2B lead nurturing is about as the objective of lead nurturing is to provide the audience with relevant and valuable content which leads to an increased brand interest and awareness, with the goal of bringing in new customers (Marketo, 2023). To better understand how prospects and leads react to digital content, companies can build lead scoring into a strategic tool for the salespeople to qualify the prospective customers down to a list of leads, meaning prospects who are considered the most likely to convert to a positive business outcome and to be contacted in person by the salespeople (Järvinen & Taiminen 2016; Paschen et al. 2020).

This research focuses on analyzing the impact of a recommendation system on customer behavior in the e-commerce industry. The study examines the use of big data-driven product recommendations and tailored promotions to enhance customer engagement, conversion rates, and revenue generation. The importance of prioritizing customer engagement in the early stages of the purchasing process is emphasized, and key statistics related to customer behavior in e-commerce are presented. The objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of a recommendation system in influencing customer behavior and driving conversions in the e-commerce industry. The research design incorporates a case study analysis of a prominent marketplace in Indonesia. Data was collected from three automation trigger campaigns: browsing abandonment, wishlist/cart abandonment, and purchase reminders. The findings of the research indicate that a recommendation system based on big data has a significant impact on costumer behavior in the e-commerce industry. The research highlights the importance of prioritizing customer engagement and implementing effective recommendation systems to drive conversion rates and revenue in the e-commerce industry.