While there is an increasing number of studies highlighting the power of videos in influencing audience attitudes and behavior, academic research in tourism is largely behind due to the methodological challenges of analyzing unstructured video data. This study adopts an automatic video analytics approach to examine the relationship between content features of pro-environmental videos and audience engagement in tourism. Artificial intelligence was used to extract video content features by detecting scenes and shots as well as labels (e.g., trees). Our findings suggest that there exists an inverted U-shape relationship between video informativeness and audience engagement. This study makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions to extant tourism literature by theoretically explaining and empirically testing how video content features influence audience engagement in pro-environmental video communications in tourism.

From the past to the present, we are living in an age of social comparison. Above all, upward social comparison to those who are superior in terms of their social and economic status makes individuals feel psychologically deficient and threatened. As a result, individuals oftentimes exhibit compensatory consumption to relieve their unfulfilled desires such as stress, disappointment, and self-esteem deficiency by purchasing high-end products or brands (Mandel, Petrova, & Cialdini, 2006; Pettit & Sivanathan, 2011).

To successfully expand their business activities in overseas markets, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must first acquire a thorough knowledge and understanding of prevailing environmental and market conditions. This study examines the crucial role that a learning orientation can play in the generation of relevant foreign market knowledge. It also investigates the impact of foreign market knowledge on strengthening internationalizing SMEs’ operational adjustment agility and market capitalizing agility, which in turn enhance firms’ international venture performance. Our empirical effort is based on data collected from 209 Nigerian industrial SMEs which internationalize their efforts. To test our research model and hypotheses we collected data by means of a survey conducted among Nigerian small- and medium-sized firms (i.e., employing 250 or less people) which internationalize their efforts and launch their products in B2B markets. The positive role of learning orientation, foreign market knowledge and organizational agility is confirmed by our results on driving international venture performance.

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).

Virtual reality (VR) has been set with an expectation of becoming the technology to enable new electronic businesses on metaverse platforms. VR is an application of three-dimensional computer graphics to create a convincing virtual environment where users can interact (Cowan & Ketron, 2019). The most used immersive VR devices are head-mounted displays. Importantly, in addition to visual sense, auditory, haptic, and olfactory senses stimulating devices are used in conjunction with head-mounted displays to reach a multi-sensory VR experience (Xi & Hamari, 2021). VR has been part of the brand strategy for various marketing endeavours (Cowan & Ketron, 2019) such as viewing furniture or kitchen setups by IKEA or creating virtual customer experiences in the real estate sector. However, VR’s impact on the consumer thought model has not been thoroughly examined. This extended abstract contributes to this shortcoming.

Destination branding has become an important trend in modern tourism. The development of destination brands has become a strategic tool worldwide because of the growing competition between destinations. In recent years, many tourist destinations have combined unique, creative, and attractive elements to transform themselves into “cool” tourist destinations. Destination brand coolness refers to tourists’ subjective and positive perception of tourist destinations and their beliefs that the destination brand offer distinctive, novel characteristics and attributes that the visitors are attracted to. Creating destination brand coolness can help tourist destinations differentiate themselves from their competitive counterparts, thereby attracting tourists. However, no study has conceptualized the construct of destination brand coolness, let alone developing scales that measure destination brand coolness.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has brought significant changes to today’s life. Human contact is regarded as a source of risk. Thus, the low-contact services provided by service robots have gained more attention in the hospitality industry. However, a relatively smaller proportion of empirical research exists about service robots on the consumer side. Moreover, technology acceptance theories were mostly used in the adoption of new technology products, but the psychological aspects of consumers were rarely explored. Therefore, the stimulus- organism-response model (SOR model) was applied to explore consumers’ acceptance of adopting service robots and to understand what factors will successfully stimulate consumers’ subsequent value and behavioral responses. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship among stimulus (coolness and affinity), organism (utilitarian value and hedonic value) and response (intention to use and word-of-mouth recommendation). This study used convenience sampling and tested the hypotheses with SPSS and Smart PLS.

Even though more than half a century has passed since the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) emerged, many people still have an interest in CSR. According to a survey, eighty-seven percent of American consumers said they would purchase a product produced by a corporation that supported at least one specific social issue. Also, more than three-quarters (76%) would refuse to buy a product if they found out the company endorsed the issue contrary to their beliefs. These numbers align with consumers’ intent to purchase or boycott based on CSR commitment. Do CSR activities affect sales? Many studies have been conducted to answer this question in the academic field, but the results have not been consistent. Some articles reported that CSR activities positively impact the firm’s various aspects, including financial performance. But other studies reported that the impact of CSR on firms’ performance is unclear or even harmful.

The decision between standardization and localization (or adaptation) of advertising strategy is crucial for the performance of product/service in foreign markets. Since the online advertising media have diluted the physical boundaries between countries, decision making related to international advertising has focused more on message strategy rather than media strategy. In this paper, the authors utilize movie poster images as a typical example of online advertising of service business. Employing image deep learning approach, the researchers calculate the level of localization and its effect on the financial performance in a foreign market. This research will expand the academic discussion in international advertising strategy and movie marketing.

Smart technologies are critical for businesses to develop these dynamic connections, as technologies enable them to network with others and exchange resources seamlessly. This fact makes it possible to modify the tasks performed by employees of tourism organizations that are in contact with consumers/tourists.

Based on the metaverse situation, this paper explores the influence of perceived usefulness and usability on brand experience. The brand experience include two dimensions of sensory experience and behavioral experience. And then, based on 329 valid data collected through online experiment, it makes an empirical analysis by structural equation model and hierarchical regression. Results show that, metaverse situational perceived usefulness and usability have significant effects on customer sensory experience and behavioral experience, and sensory experience plays a mediating role in the effects of usefulness and usability on behavioral experience. Social presence plays a positive moderating role in the influence path of usefulness and usability on sensory experience and behavioral experience.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an important pillar in business practice. Luxury brands are no exception to this trend and have invested deeply in different types of CSR, and this is evident with companies such as Prada and LVMH. However, empirical research has demonstrated the paradox between CSR and luxury and has identified certain undesirable effects. The reason for this inconsistency in the results to date, is the lack of a comprehensive CSR categorization system. To be more specific, we integrated two dimensions - visibility and relevance - and have proposed a novel CSR type in four types, which is external-embedded, external-peripheral, internal-embedded and internal-peripheral. We can easily classify the CSR initiatives into this category, which means the source of undesirable effects can be clearly shown for luxury brands.

In this research, we investigate the influence of Chinese consumers’ generation on the perception of “Made in China” luxury. This issue is of utmost importance for the Chinese government as Chinese consumers have now become the first luxury consumers in the world while China remains a non-legitimate dwarf in luxury manufacturing. To bridge this gap, we carried a quantitative survey involving 300 Chinese luxury consumers and tested the effect of consumers’ age on Chinese luxury products perceived luxury. Potential mediators are considered in our analyses, including consumers’ ethnocentrism and innovativeness, materialism, and cultural orientations (i.e., preference for individualism and tradition). The data are currently being collected. Our results will be discussed at the 2023 Global Marketing Conference in Seoul if this research is selected for presentation. They should help position current and future “Made in China” luxury brands and target Chinese luxury consumers.

Over the past decade, in-feed native advertising has become one of the most popular forms of online advertising, attracting attention from both academia and industry. Compared to traditional online ads, in-feed native ads are less intrusive and have more engaging content, effectively reducing users' tendency to avoid ads and improving advertising effectiveness. Despite existing review studies, most of them focus on specific aspects of in-feed native advertising, such as ad identification, disclosure, or regulation, and lack an overview of the relevant literature. Moreover, with the diversified development of digital media forms, the widespread application of AI technologies, and the improvement of consumers' ad literacy, in-feed native ad research faces new issues and practical challenges. Thus, a systematic review of existing research is necessary to identify valuable future research directions.

This research intends to examine whether these types of data – behavioral versus social networking data – affect consumer response to personalized ads. With the advancement in technology, marketers have access to various types of personal data, including their online/offline behaviors and social networking activities, and use those data to retarget consumers. Moreover, this research examines the moderating role of SNS privacy concerns on consumer response to different types of retargeted ads. The findings of this research may offer theoretical and practical implications to understand consumers' responses to retargeted ads that use social networking information.

The hotel industry is facing a complex business environment due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing competition. The ability to build resilience in adverse conditions is key to the survival and sustained growth of hotel enterprises. Against this backdrop, as a Chinese domestic hotel group, Huazhu Group actively embraces digital technology and takes the lead in developing and adopting digital measures such as hotel smart robots and digital platforms to effectively improve work efficiency, reduce employee burden, manage supplier and owner relationships, and achieve digital transformation.However, the issue of how digitalization enables hotels to form resilience, the process and mechanism of empowerment, and the dimensions of hotel enterprise resilience have not been explored in detail from a theoretical perspective. Therefore, this study adopts an inductive qualitative research method and a single-case study approach, selecting Huazhu Group's subsidiary hotels as the research objects. The aim is to explore the practical aspects of digital empowerment and construct a framework for achieving hotel enterprise resilience through digital empowerment.

Last-mile delivery is the quintessential example of a logistics sector that is ripe for innovation, owing to a powerful confluence in the advancement of technologies and consumption models. Compared to the conventional delivery mode, the delivery robot offers countless advantages, including maintaining social distancing, improving health safety, protecting the environment, and reducing shipping costs and delivery times. Considering the high investments associated with developing and introducing delivery robots, a better understanding is needed of the consumers’ perceptions and willingness to guide practitioners on whether it is worth starting/continuing investing in such innovation. For this reason, this study addresses the following research questions: 1) What are the relevant characteristics of robot delivery and how do consumers cognitively and affectively respond to these characteristics? 2) What are the processes that form consumers’ willingness to reuse the delivery robot and spread the word about it (i.e., WOM)? Drawing on the technology-task fit model, the present study provides three interesting theoretical insights in relation to the post-adoption behaviour on delivery robots. In the first part, the findings enrich the literature by revealing that consumers’ evaluation of the perceived fit of using delivery robots are based on a combination of internal, external and conditional factors. This study found that hedonic motivations, perceived anthropomorphism and robotic service quality exhibited a positive influence on perceived task-technology fit. This indicates that, being able to experience a sense of fun or enjoyment when using novel technologies (e.g., robot services) will encourage future behaviour and push individuals to continue exploring the benefits of this innovation. Also, consumers tend to attribute the human-like robots as more capable and reliable as it gives the feeling that they are interacting with a social entity. The findings also value to current scarcity research and demonstrate the positive influence of service quality in matching the performance and functionality of delivery robots. In the second part, the empirical findings confirm the positive influence of perceived task-technology fit on trust and value-in-use in the emerging context of delivery robots. In the last part, this research goes further, revealing the indirect link between perceived task-technology fit and post-adoption behaviour. In line with consumer behaviour literature that suggests the individual will undergo a psychological state (or mental evaluation) in goal-oriented behavior, this research deepens our understanding of the mechanisms involved in this relationship. It reveals that trust and value-in-use acted as the missing links in bridging the associations through which perceived task-technology fit influences service reuse likelihood and positive word-of-mouth.

This paper investigates the number of scatterings a photon undergoes in random walks before escaping from a medium. The number of scatterings in random walk processes is commonly approximated as τ + τ 2 in the literature, where τ is the optical thickness measured from the center of the medium. However, it is found that this formula is not accurate. In this study, analytical solutions in sphere and slab geometries are derived for both optically thin and optically thick limits, assuming isotropic scattering. These solutions are verified using Monte Carlo simulations. In the optically thick limit, the number of scatterings is found to be 0.5 τ 2 and 1.5 τ 2 in a sphere and slab, respectively. In the optically thin limit, the number of scatterings is ≈ τ in a sphere and ≈ τ (1 − γ − ln τ + τ ) in a slab, where γ ≃ 0.57722 is the Euler-Mascheroni constant. Additionally, we present approximate formulas that reasonably reproduce the simulation results well in intermediate optical depths. These results are applicable to scattering processes that exhibit forward and backward symmetry, including both isotropic and Thomson scattering.

It is difficult to distinguish the pure signal produced by an orbiting planetary companion around giant stars from other possible sources, such as stellar spots, pulsations, or certain activities. Since 2003, we have obtained radial (RV) data from evolved stars using the high-resolution, fiber-fed Bohyunsan Observatory Echelle Spectrograph (BOES) at the Bohyunsan Optical Astronomy Observatory (BOAO). Here, we report the results of RV variations in the binary star HD 135438. We found two significant periods: 494.98 d with eccentricity of 0.23 and 8494.1 d with eccentricity of 0.83. Considering orbital stability, it is impossible to have two companions in such close orbits with high eccentricity. To determine the nature of the changes in the RV variability, we analyzed indicators of stellar spot and stellar chromospheric activity to find that there are no signals related to the significant period of 494.98 d. However, we calculated the upper limits of rotation period of the rotational velocity and found this to be 478–536 d. One possible interpretation is that this may be closely related to the rotational modulation of an orbital inclination at 67–90 degrees. The other signal corresponding to the period of 8494.1 d is probably associated with a stellar companion orbiting the giant star. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation considering a single companion indicates that HD 135438 system hosts a stellar companion with 0.57+0.017 −0.017 M⊙ with an orbital period of 8498 d.

This work presents four high-amplitude variable YSOs (≃3 mag at near- or mid-IR wavelengths) arising from the SPICY catalog. Three outbursts show a duration that is longer than 1 year, and are still ongoing. And additional YSO brightened over the last two epochs of NEOWISE observations and the duration of the outburst is thus unclear. Analysis of the spectra of the four sources confirms them as new members of the eruptive variable class. We find two YSOs that can be firmly classified as bona fide FUors and one object that falls in the V1647 Ori-like class. Given the uncertainty in the duration of its outburst, an additional YSO can only be classified as a candidate FUor. Continued monitoring and follow-up of these particular sources is important to better understand the accretion process of YSOs.