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.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) service robots is on the rise. With service frontlines gradually shifting to human–robot interactions, the question of whether AI robots should be humanlike or machinelike has emerged. While many firms use robots that resemble humans in their appearance and actions, others use machinelike robots, assuming that very humanlike robots may lead to uncanny valley effects. There is no consensus on whether the anthropomorphism of service robots facilitates or constrains consumers’ experiences. To fill this gap, this article examines when and how service companies should use anthropomorphic AI service robots.

Technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are emerging as a new way to improve 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 registered a turnover of 249 million U.S. dollars (International Federation of Robots, 2021). However, very few of the existing studies highlight the customers’ perspective and sentiments on service robots (Luo et al., 2021) or the robot-human interactions/ customer service experience (Choi et al., 2021). Thus, further studies in 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 necessary (Loureiro et al., 2021). This research intends to understand how different types of robots influence customers’ perception of the service provided. Therefore, the following research questions are proposed; Can humans develop feelings of identification with a service robot? Can the identification that customers perceive between themselves, and service robots be strong enough to influence the creation of a close relationship between both parties? What are the features of service robots that heighten customer well-being?

A secure digital platform (SDP) can provide B2B marketers with confidence to use communications technology (CT) and engage in information sharing that facilitates resource utilization. Interlinked digital platforms constitute the company’s ecosystem and barriers in the form of a lack of skills and knowledge in relation to governance and compliance can be overcome through organizational intervention that is external to an individual’s capability of control. A framework for an SDP was developed by utilizing network theory and data were collected via an online survey and analysed (n=207) using SEM, AMOS. Organizational intervention through an SDP can help B2B marketers to increase the organization’s resource capability through improved interaction. It can also help individuals to become pro-actively compliant and be less at risk from various threats (e.g., fake news) as the organization provides a safer digital environment.

지금껏 시행된 성별 다양성 정책의 목적은 주로 남성 중심으로 제도화된 차별적인 문화와 그로 인한 여성의 과소 활용을 해소하기 위함이었다. 따라서 그동안의 성별 다양성 연구는 여성을 소수집단으로 전제하고 이들을 우대하는 성별 다양성 정책을 펼친 경우에만 집중되었다. 하지만 주류집단과 소수집단의 개념은 맥락에 따라 달라질 수 있으 며, 사회에는 여성 중심적 직업군 역시 상당수 존재한다. 이에 본 연구자들은 남성이 수혜자가 되는 다양성 정책에 대하여 남성과 여성 구직자가 각각 어떠한 반응을 보이는지를 탐구하였다. 본 연구는 대학생 329명(남성 156명, 여성 173명)을 대상으로 2(성별: 남성, 여성) × 2(다양성: 유리, 불리)의 참가자 간 실험 설계로 진행되었다. 참가자들은 가상 기업의 신입사원 채용 공고에 제시된 다양성 단서를 보고, 해당 기업에 대한 조직 공정성 및 조직 매력도를 평가하였다. 그 결과, 먼저 구직자들은 채용 공고에 제시된 다양성 단서가 본인에게 유리(vs. 불리)할 경우 성별에 따라 조직의 분배공정성 및 절차공정성을 다르게 인식하였다. 구체적으로 남성 구직자보다 여성 구직자가 채용 공고 에서 본인에게 유리(vs. 불리)한 다양성 단서를 접하게 되었을 때 조직의 분배공정성 및 절차공정성을 높게 인식하였 다. 또, 다양성 단서와 조직 매력도의 관계를 조직 공정성 인식이 매개하였고, 이 매개효과가 성별에 의해 조절되었 다. 이때 여성의 경우에는 다양성 단서와 조직 매력도의 관계에서 조직의 분배공정성 및 절차공정성 인식을 통한 매개효과가 둘 다 유의하였으나, 남성의 경우에는 조직의 절차공정성 인식을 통한 매개효과만이 유의하였다. 이 결 과는 같은 내용이나 수준의 다양성 관리라 하더라도 개인의 사회적 지위나 소속집단에 따라 다르게 인식되며, 이로 인해 차별화된 태도 및 행동으로까지 이어질 수 있다는 점을 시사한다.