An important segment, tourism e-commerce live streaming (TEcLS) has emerged as a new marketing channel actively embraced by destination marketing organizations (DMO) and tourist firms due to the COVID-19 pandemic. China, Japan, Australia, and many other nations have been selling such tourism products on various platforms. Live e-commerce generates a real-time interactive virtual environment that can be called a livescape. However, many tourism destinations or companies are unaware of the marketing science implications of live streaming and are unsure of their effectiveness or the intricacies of marketing live streaming. Previous research has explored the factors influencing consumer purchase behavior from the product, technology, and live-streamer perspectives, arguing that the advantages of breaking through time and space constraints, strong interactivity, the experience of reality, technological ease of use and usefulness, and celebrity aura encourage online purchases. However, limited investigation has been carried out on the impact of customers’ value-co-creation in livescape when watching tourism live streaming on their purchase intentions considering the key role of engagement. This calls for specific investigation of the phenomenon to facilitate live streaming design and tourism marketing. This study aims to explores the factors influencing consumer purchase intentions in the livescape based on a value co-creation research framework. Compared to traditional e-commerce, livescapes provides the “many-to-many” social presence and an immersive value co-creation platform. Thus, we focus on why and how social presence inspires customer engagement, ultimately leading to purchase intentions. This study finds that, as a crucial marketing tool, the social presence of tourism livescapes can promotes customer engagement, which in turn results in intentions to purchase tourism live-streaming products. Additionally, the mediating role of inspiration (inspired-by and inspired-to) between social presence and customer engagement is examined to reveal the influence mechanism in the tourism context. Finally, this study examines how to create an effective tourism livescape to enhance tourists social presence experience and inspire their engagement, which in turn increases their purchase intention.

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.

Today, the metaverse is everywhere; it has become a major buzzword. The term was first coined in an American writer’s 1992 science fiction novel, Snow Crash, as a portmanteau of meta (Greek prefix meaning beyond) and universe. Nearly three decades later today, it is no longer the setting of a science fiction epic. Rather, it is becoming as real as the physical world. In the current time, the metaverse is used as a concept to describe a seamless convergence of the physical and digital worlds, or a virtual community where people can work, play-to-earn, transact and socialize (J.P. Morgan, 2022).

The extensive application of robots in hospitality and tourism service has transformed the original human-contact into contact-less, so it is necessary to understand the transformation of customers consumption behaviors under this new service mode. While studies have started investigating how service robots enhance the consumer autonomy, the impact of such technology on customers consumption behaviors remains largely unexplored and its underlying mechanism are still unclear. To address this issue, we explore how service robots shape customers autonomous behaviors in hospitality and tourism services. Drawing on the social impact theory, we presented an underlying process in terms of social discomfort, and reveal the boundary conditions.

With the infusion of advanced technology, interactions between customers and firms’ representatives take place in brick-and-mortar stores, 2D online sites, and even 3D metaverse environments. In the metaverse, a firm’s sales avatars interact with other users while representing the firm, recommend, and sell virtual items. Previous literature about the effectiveness of sales representatives agrees that a firm representatives’ smiling faces engender customer satisfaction and better interactions. However, it is unclear whether smiling faces of sales avatars will work the same way in the metaverse as they do in the real world. The current research examines whether a firm’s sales avatars with sad facial expression (vs. those with smiling facial expression) stimulate higher user intentions to interact with firm representative avatars, to purchase virtual items from the representative avatars, and to spread positive WOM about their experience in the metaverse. Moreover, focusing on subcultural appeal, we investigate why this unconventional phenomenon happens in the metaverse unlike in real world. We conducted two experiments to manipulate a firm representative avatar’s facial expression (smiling vs. sad) in the metaverse. We newly designed a metaverse place, and participants who put on a virtual reality headset are exposed to either a hat (Experiment 1) or shoes (Experiment 2) store where they can purchase a virtual hat or shoes. Experiments 1 and 2 basically tested the same things repeatedly. However, to improve internal validity and generalizability, Experiment 2 used human-like sales avatars instead of cartoon character-like sales avatars in Experiment 1, changed virtual stores from a hat store to shoes store, and finally controlled for various extraneous variables such as attractiveness, warmth, and competence of sales avatars, and user’s previous experience about metaverse. Sales representatives with a smile are believed to contribute to beneficial consumers’ attitudes and behaviors in offline stores. However, our experiments demonstrate that this well-received belief does not necessarily apply in the metaverse, where subcultural appeal plays a more critical role. In the metaverse, users evaluate sales avatars with sad facial expression (vs. with smiling facial expression) as more unique and cool (i.e., higher subcultural appeal), leading to their higher intention to interact with the sad sales avatar, to purchase a virtual item, and to spread positive WOM about their experiences. Our results imply that previous findings supported in the offline or 2D online sites may not work the same way in the 3D metaverse.

Customer experience is a top priority for business executives and a competitive ground for marketing. Business-to-business (B2B) customer experience is more intricate as it involves multiple actors with distinct roles and objectives, necessitating more customization and knowledge. Hence, it is paramount for organizations operating in the B2B space to understand and enhance the customer experience to gain a competitive edge. This complexity is further amplified in cross-border settings where partners face additional differences and distances, requiring even more mutual adaptations than in domestic business interactions. In such scenarios, individuals involved may significantly differ in terms of culture, language, and business practices.

Crowdfunding is an increasingly popular fundraising tool where project creators solicit capital from potential backers in return for monetary rewards or presales of products/services. Potential backers in crowdfunding are looking for potential cues to reduce uncertainty and predict new venture success when making their capital contributions. To increase their funding success, project creators strategically use project descriptions as a marketing tool to attract potential backers and funding.

The purpose of this paper is to explore underlying antecedents for inconspicuous luxury motivations by developing and testing a conceptual model under the self-concept mechanism with the influence of cultural capital. A questionnaire-based survey is used to collect data, and structural equation modeling is applied to analyze the data. Although growing interests in academia focus on the relationship between cultural capital and inconspicuous luxury, quantitative studies are scant. This research contributes to the literature by empirically investigating the impact of cultural capital in the relationship within the construct of consumers’ self-concept and inconspicuous luxury motivations.

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.

This study investigates social media posts on Twitter concerning cryptocurrency marketing. We applied unsupervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to 98,716 tweets to examine the Twitter content for subjects and sentiments related to cryptocurrency. We discovered that tweets about cryptocurrency fell into four categories, with “cryptocurrency trading,” “NFT airdrop,” “cryptocurrency affiliate program,” and “Dogecoin on social media” being the most popular. Most of the topics had positive sentiments. Theoretical and practical implications for developing cryptocurrency marketing communication strategies are discussed.

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.

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.

Organizations are increasingly implementing recommendation systems on their websites. A growing body of research is focusing on how the characteristics of online message content affect consumers’ consumption intentions, taking into account consumers’ static personal information, such as demographics. However, limited research has explored how the social context of consumers and online message content characteristics can affect the consumers’ intention to consume events. To address this gap, the present study investigates the joint effects of consumers' social context and arousal potential cues on their intention to attend cultural events. Based on the Target-arousal level theory, we suggest that people who anticipate solo consumption (i.e., accompanied by no one) will tend to attend cultural events promoted by a low arousal potential cue ("A calming experience."), while those who anticipate social consumption (i.e., accompanied by one or more companions) will tend to attend cultural events promoted by a high arousal potential cue ("An exciting experience”). Furthermore, we argue that anticipated enjoyment will mediate this relationship. The joint impact of the social context and arousal potential cues of a cultural event on consumers' intention to attend, as well as the mediating role of anticipated enjoyment, were demonstrated through two studies. The use of message cues and personalized recommendation algorithms as tools to target consumers and improve attendance rates is discussed. References available upon request.

Metaverse blends the physical and virtual worlds, transforming the customer's shopping experience. This study aims to identify the psychological mechanism in the metaverse environment and the relationship between metaverse experience and consumer happiness. To identify metaverse experiences, both behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies were conducted. In a behavioral study, we found that consumers' happiness increased when participants were in an immersive metaverse space. In the fMRI study, we found greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and lateral occipital cortex (LOC) regions in the high level of the immersive metaverse and found a positive relationship with consumers' happiness. This paper is the first attempt in marketing to provide an integrative brain map for the metaverse experience. This brain map helps marketers better understand the consumer experience. This study suggests that only in the immersive metaverse space where virtual and physical experiences interact can consumers become one with the virtual space and maximize customer experience values.

The remote sensing technique of measuring the magnetic field was applied first to sunspots by Hale (1908). Later Babcock (1961) showed that the solar surface magnetic field on a global scale is a dipole in first-order approximation and that this dipole field reverses once every solar cycle. The Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) supplies the spherical harmonics coefficients of the solar corona magnetic field of each Carrington Rotation, calculated based on the remotely-sensed photospheric magnetic field of the solar surface. To infer the internal current system producing the global solar coronal magnetic field structure and evolution of the Sun, we calculate the multipole components of the solar magnetic field using the WSO data from 1976 to 2019. The prominent cycle components over the last 4 solar activity cycles are axis-symmetric fields of the dipole and octupole. This implies that the current inversion driving the solar magnetic field reversal originates from the equatorial region and spreads to the whole globe. Thus, a more accurate solar dynamo model must include an explanation of the origin and evolution of such solar internal current dynamics.

The GMT-Consortium Large Earth Finder (G-CLEF) is the first instrument for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). G-CLEF is a fiber feed, optical band echelle spectrograph that is capable of extremely precise radial velocity measurement. G-CLEF Flexure Control Camera (FCC) is included as a part in G-CLEF Front End Assembly (GCFEA), which monitors the field images focused on a fiber mirror to control the flexure and the focus errors within GCFEA. FCC consists of an optical bench on which five optical components are installed. The order of the optical train is: a collimator, neutral density filters, a focus analyzer, a reimager and a detector (Andor iKon-L 936 CCD camera). The collimator consists of a triplet lens and receives the beam reflected by a fiber mirror. The neutral density filters make it possible a broad range star brightness as a target or a guide. The focus analyzer is used to measure a focus offset. The reimager focuses the beam from the collimator onto the CCD detector focal plane. The detector module includes a linear translator and a field de-rotator. We performed thermoelastic stress analysis for lenses and their mounts to confirm the physical safety of the lens materials. We also conducted the global structure analysis for various gravitational orientations to verify the image stability requirement during the operation of the telescope and the instrument. In this article, we present the opto-mechanical detailed design of G-CLEF FCC and describe the consequence of the numerical finite element analyses for the design.

The development of functional carbon materials using waste biomass as raw materials is one of the research hotspots of lithium-sulfur batteries in recent years. In this work, used a natural high-quality carbon source—coffee grounds, which contain more than 58% carbon and less than 1% ash. Honeycomb-like S and N dual-doped graded porous carbon (SNHPC) was successfully prepared by hydrothermal carbonization and chemical activation, and the amount of thiourea used in the activation process was investigated. The prepared SNHPC showed excellent electrochemical energy storage characteristics. For example, SNHPC-2 has a large pore volume (1.85 cm3·g− 1), a high mesoporous ratio (36.76%), and a synergistic effect (S, N interaction). As the cathode material of lithium-sulfur batteries, SNHPC-2/S (sulfur content is 71.61%) has the highest specific capacity. Its initial discharge-specific capacity at 0.2 C is 1106.7 mAh·g−1, and its discharge-specific capacity after 200 cycles is still as high as 636.5 mAh·g−1.

In this work, subabul wood biomass was used to prepare carbon adsorbents by physical and chemical activation methods at various carbonization temperatures. The properties of the carbon adsorbents were estimated through characterization techniques such as X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X–ray photo electron spectroscopy, laser Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, CHNS-elemental analysis and N2 adsorption studies. Subabul-derived carbon adsorbents were used for CO2 capture in the temperature range of 25–70 °C. A detailed adsorption kinetic study was also carried out. The characterization results indicated that these carbons contain high surface area with microporosity. Surface properties were depended on treatment method and carbonization temperature. Among the carbons, the carbon prepared after treatment of H3PO4 and carbonization at 800 °C exhibited high adsorption capacity of 4.52 m.mol/g at 25 °C. The reason for high adsorption capacity of the adsorbents was explained based on their physicochemical characteristics. The adsorbents showed easy desorption and recyclability up to ten cycle with consistent activity.

The present studies explored the possibility of immobilizing phosphocholine (PC) liposomes on the surface of graphene oxide (GO) which was pre-adsorbed with two kinds of enzymes, horseradish peroxidase and glucose oxidase. The transmission electron microscope images showed that the PC liposomes adsorbed onto the GO surface kept integrity. By using 2,2′-azino-bis(3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid) (ABTS)-encapsulated liposomes, a one-step colorimetric assay for glucose was developed. In the presence of glucose, the GO nanocomposites catalyzed the cascade enzymatic reaction producing colorimetric signals directly. Under the optimal conditions, the GO nanocomposites produced linearly increased colorimetric signal with increased concentrations of glucose ranging from 50 to 500 μM. The detection limit was 33 μM. The GO nanocomposites also exhibited good selectivity for the detection of glucose and were able to detect glucose in human serum.

In recent years, people are increasingly interested in CO2 hydrogenation to produce value-added chemicals and fuels ( CH4, CH3OH, etc.). In the quest for an efficient treatment in CO2 methanation and methanolization, several technologies have been practiced, and DBD plasma technology gain attention due to its easily handling, mild operating conditions, strong activation ability, and high product selectivity. In addition, its reaction mechanism and the effect of packing materials and reaction parameters are still controversial. To address these problems efficiently, a summary of the reaction mechanism is presented. A discussion on plasma-catalyzed CO2 hydrogenation including packing materials, reaction parameters, and optimizing methods is addressed. In this review, the overall status and recent findings in DBD plasma-catalyzed CO2 hydrogenation are presented, and the possible directions of future development are discussed.