The focus of this research is on midlife women. Middle age is a pivotal period in one’s life course in terms of finding a new or renewed purpose in life, addressing the excesses of youth, reducing work and life stress, and where establishing favorable conditions in early midlife are associated with good health and well-being later in life. Defined as the period between the ages of 45 and 65, midlife is characterised as a time of significant transition and represents 24.6% of the Australian population. Increasing life expectancy has demanded shifting roles and responsibilities for midlife adults especially so for women who tend to have longer life spans and face greater exposure to risk factors such as adverse life events. As midlife women navigate multiple roles and transition though cycles of physical and emotional stress, they have less time for themself, procrastinate through delaying or putting off health related behaviours and experience higher rates of burnout. Understanding how these factors impact on overall psychological wellbeing becomes ever more critical.

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.

This research examines the impact of visualizing virtual luxury products in the metaverse on consumers' perceptions of luxury products in the real world. We explore the metaverse as a marketing platform and investigate the relationship between the quality of visualization of virtual luxury products and consumers’ evaluations of real luxury products. The study hypothesizes that poor visualization quality of virtual luxury products will decrease the evaluation of authentic luxury goods, and this effect will be mediated by decreased perceived authenticity. Additionally, we predict that the negative effect will be mitigated by high-quality visualization.

Blockchain is an immutable ledger that records transactions and tracks assets using a common communication protocol. It stores a copy of the blockchain and implements a consensus function to verify transactions. Blockchain is applied to industries beyond finance, such as retail, to maintain security and transparency. Consumers with knowledge of blockchain technology are likely to be affected when evaluating products with blockchain embedded, impacting their product evaluation. The study investigates the impact of blockchain technology on consumers' product evaluation and how knowledge of blockchain and product quality moderate its effects.

This paper examines how consumers evaluate digital products with multiple Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs), which are blockchain-enabled cryptographic assets that represent proof-of-ownership for digital objects. The study predicts that people prefer fractioned NFTs (unique fractions of a digital object) versus duplicated NFTs (identical digital objects with distinct numbers) due to their preference for uniqueness. The study also examines the moderating role of product attributes, predicting that preferences for fractioned NFTs will be reduced when the product provides unique aspects, such as a serial number.

The market for counterfeit luxury goods is growing rapidly, with estimates suggesting that counterfeit trades are valued at around $4.5 trillion globally, with 60% to 70% of this being made up of counterfeit luxury goods. Research has shown that counterfeits dilute the perceived quality of luxury brands and reduce consumers' purchase intentions. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a form of ownership record that is linked and stored on a blockchain.

For men, there is increasing recognition that middle age (45-70) is significantly underrepresented in health promotion policies designed to improve their health and wellbeing. Middle age or midlife is a pivotal period in one’s life course in terms of finding a new or renewed purpose in life, addressing the excesses of youth, reducing work and home stress, and setting up behavioural patterns that influence positive and healthy aging. From a men’s health perspective, a more nuanced social marketing approach is needed to influence men to be more proactive regarding their health behaviours. Moreover, With the rapid development of digital health today, the lack of ehealth or digital health literacy in men is an urgent problem to address to help foster health and wellbeing.

The focus of this research is on midlife women. Middle age is a pivotal period in one’s life course in terms of finding a new or renewed purpose in life, addressing the excesses of youth, reducing work and life stress, and where establishing favorable conditions in early midlife are associated with good health and well-being later in life. Defined as the period between the ages of 45 and 65, midlife is characterised as a time of significant transition and represents 24.6% of the Australian population. Increasing life expectancy has demanded shifting roles and responsibilities for midlife adults especially so for women who tend to have longer life spans and face greater exposure to risk factors such as adverse life events. As midlife women navigate multiple roles and transition though cycles of physical and emotional stress, they have less time for themself, procrastinate through delaying or putting off health related behaviours and experience higher rates of burnout. Understanding how these factors impact on overall psychological wellbeing becomes ever more critical.

Political conflicts and trade tensions affect entrepreneurial activities. This paper qualitatively evaluates the success factors of a B2B company’s marketing management strategies within the context of trade policy changes. Results indicate that a strong brand, personal ties to customers, retailers and competitors, and international manufacturing sites reduce the risk. Companies not only face the challenge of disruptive innovation caused by global digitalization activities. In addition, disruptions in the macro-environment are actually increasing. One example that impedes the growth of industrial activities is the current, still escalating, US-China trade war. Unusual forms of marketing coalitions and networks in trans-organizational systems are considered key constellations to ensure future company success (Achrol, 1991). What are the success factors for a B2B company’s marketing management strategies within the context of disruptive economic market and industry conditions, e.g., international trade policy changes?

In this paper, we propose a new neural network architecture for item recommendation with structural information. Our model, structural neural recommender (SNR) is based on neural networks and operates on a hierarchy paradigm, aiming to explore the effectiveness of incorporating different structural information for recommendation. Many recent state-of-the-art neural network based recommendation models exploit the nonlinear transformations for modeling the complex user-item interaction patterns and user historical behaviors, ignoring the item-item structural relationship. This structural information, however, is uncomplicated to derive and useful for inferring item characteristics. To utilize this information, SNR simultaneously learns representation from user-item interactions and item-item relationships. Empirical studies on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating such structural information, by outperforming classic and recent baselines. We also conduct detail ablation studies and hyper-parameter analysis to provide further understanding towards the behaviors of our model. Following the model development, we conduct a field experiment to demonstrate that the effectiveness of algorithmic recommender systems can further increase by using different types of message framing when communicating recommendations to consumers. Our results suggest that recommendations framed with a relevance appeal (e.g. “Top 5 brands for you”) are more effective in general, yet recommendations that are framed with a popularity appeal (“Top 5 most popular brands”) are more effective for customers who were acquired via social media (versus non-social media) advertising or for those who have stronger (versus weaker) social orientation.

As Hollywood relies heavily on global markets, it is particularly important for studios to understand how their decisions, including on casts, may affect their movies’ box-office in foreign markets. Anecdotal evidence shows that casting actors with similar facial features may be problematic in foreign markets, often disorienting international audiences.

Food waste is a critical problem for many countries. Food producers and groceries often discard imperfect foods or food by-products that still contain nutritional value. To address this problem, some food manufacturers have turned to upcycling, that is, to convert otherwise discarded ingredients into new food products (e.g., cacao fruit pulp into crunch bites). Consumers’ acceptance of sustainable products is generally lower than that of conventional products due to quality concerns. We speculate that for upcycled food products, consumers’ perception of product quality may vary when different percentages of imperfect ingredients are integrated into the products. Drawing from schema congruity theory, this research examines how the usage of imperfect ingredients can impact the perceived quality of upcycled food products. The implications for marketing upcycled foods are discussed.

Online communities are identified as people gathering online and communicating through the internet to share ideas, objectives, goals, without any geographical boundary. The growth of user-generated content created in online communities has transformed the way consumers search for and share information, particularly in the hospitality industry. Particularly, in the restaurant and food sectors due to the intangible nature of hospitality services, online reviews play an important role on consumer decisions. Furthermore, online reviews on restaurants are not only informational but also, they impact consumers’ choices regarding restaurants. Consequently, the nature of such user-generated content that is produced at a high speed and is diverse and rich should be treated and understood. This study proposes the first tailored BERTopic model together with sentiment analysis based on pre-trained BERT model that takes advantage of its novel sentence embedding for creating interpretable topics into the analysis of restaurant online reviews to determine how the customers elaborate their criteria in the context of certain experiences. An exploratory analysis is presented involving a large-scale review data set of 261,531 restaurant online reviews from 4 different countries retrieved from the eWOM community thefork.com. A broad list of the topics discussed by customers post-dining in restaurants is built. Insights into the behavior, experience, and satisfaction of the customers across the different restaurants are discovered. This approach and findings are encouraging hospitality managers in understanding customers’ perception, through which applicable marketing can be developed to attract and retain potential customers.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has accelerated the promotion and application of service robot in the market. Although technology has provided service robot with increasingly autonomous functions, more research is needed on how service robot with different levels of autonomy affects customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry. Guided by affordance theory, the study examines whether service robot operational and decisional autonomy would have effects on customer satisfaction and explored explanatory mechanism. Adopting an experimental vignette method (EVM), the study reveals that direct effect of service robot operational autonomy and indirect effect of decisional autonomy on customer satisfaction, and functional affordance played a positive mediating role in the impact of service robot autonomy on customer satisfaction. This research extends and enriches the relevant literature on human-machine interaction and customer satisfaction research. Further, the study also provides marketing insights for enterprises to improve autonomous robot design and enhance customer relationships.

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.

To address the existential threat of climate change, it is important to study environmentally sustainable products and marketing strategies to promote such products. A repurposed product is created by transforming old objects into something of greater value that serves a different purpose. For example, transforming an old tie into a coffee cup sleeve or turning a discarded oil can into a drum. Thus, repurposed products are one form of waste reduction via reuse. Repurposed products have become popular in the marketplace. There is, however, little research on repurposed product consumption. Furthermore, Gen Z is a relatively unexplored population in past research on sustainable consumption. To address these research gaps, our study identified segments of Gen Zers based on their perceptions of repurposed products via a person-centered approach. Our results provide strategies for effective marketing of repurposed products. Implications for marketers are provided.

Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that overlays user surroundings with computer-generated images (Baek et al., 2016). It provides users with an enhanced view of their environment with digital content such as text, pictures, videos, three-dimensional (3D) objects, and even tactile and olfactory experiences (Du et al., 2022). This technology has significant potential for use in advertising, enabling realistic product visualisations and virtual product try-ons via social media (Baek et al., 2016).

The economic recession and changes in purchasing habits of young adults (aged 18–25) has led to a decline in the sales of Japanese fashion apparel. This younger generation’s choice of fashion items is primarily based on price. They are not devoted to a favourite brand with a frequent purchase history. Thus, developing customer loyalty and strengthening brand value are essential for the fashion industry. This study explores the improvement in fashion companies’ financial performance (FP) through young generation’s behavioural brand loyalty (BBL) from two aspects: social media brand engagement (BE) and loyalty programmes (LPs). This study listed 14 popular Japanese fashion brands which belonged to 14 publicly traded companies in Japan. Further, we surveyed 183 consumers about their brand related behaviours. The findings reveal the positive and negative effects of the same variable (BE and LPs) on the outcome (short- and long-term FP), indicating that not all activities related to BE and LPs boost FP. FP is influenced by various combinations of these causal factors and complex situations, such as consumers’ demographics and shopping characteristics. The results deepen our understanding of brand loyalty formation and the linkage among BE, LPs, and FP in a realistic marketplace, and offer multiple practical solutions to achieve high levels of short- and long-term FP by targeting the right consumers based on their specific characteristics.

The study investigates how the presence of blockchain technology affects social fairness and selfish monetary decisions. Based on the assumption that blockchain technology enhances transparency and traceability in social exchanges, the study predicts that individuals will make less selfish decisions when blockchain is present. To test these predictions, the study conducted three experiments using a modified version of the dictator game scenario where participants decide how to divide a sum of money among themselves. In Study 1, the results show that individuals took less money for themselves and allocated more to the third player when blockchain technology was present, and the importance of social fairness was higher under the blockchain-presence condition. The mediation analysis indicates that the increase in social fairness mediates the effect of blockchain technology on monetary decisions. Study 2 replicated Study 1 with real monetary incentives. The results showed that individuals took less money for themselves only under the blockchain-image condition, and the importance of social fairness was higher only under the blockchain-image condition. Study 3 examined the moderating effect of the first player's allocation on participants' behavior under the presence or absence of blockchain technology. The study provides empirical evidence that blockchain technology can positively influence social fairness and reduce selfish monetary decisions. The findings have implications for policymakers and blockchain developers to design and implement blockchain systems that promote transparency and traceability in social exchanges, thereby enhancing social fairness.

This study aims to empirically investigate how corporate strategy mitigates consumer boycotts caused by animosity toward economic sanction. First, the study focuses on the cross-culture emotions (i.e., animosity and affinity) and explores the direct and indirect effect of animosity toward economic sanction on boycott attitude (via consumer affinity). Additionally, it focuses on the moderating effect of brand strength and corporate social contribution on boycott attitude. We conduct a longitudinal analysis of boycotts by South Koreans on the Japanese products, which started in South Korea in 2019; and additionally, we employ PROCESS macro to test the moderated mediation hypothesis, using the data collected from South Korea in 2020 and 2021. Our findings reveal that the data collected in 2020 and in 2021 have the same implications. The main findings are as follows. First, while animosity toward economic sanction directly increases boycott attitude, it also indirectly increases boycott attitude via consumer affinity. Second, the assumption that both brand strength and corporate social contribution weaken the positive and direct effects of animosity toward economic sanction on boycott attitude was not supported. Third, we find that corporate social contribution weakens the positive and indirect effect of animosity toward economic sanction on boycott attitude. However, unlike our prediction, brand strength strengthens the positive and indirect effects of animosity to economic sanction on boycott attitude. The three key theoretical implications are as follows. First, while many studies have examined the role of animosity as a cause of boycott, only a few studies have simultaneously addressed the conflicting emotions of affinity (Kim, Yan, Kim, Terasaki, & Furukawa, 2022). This study extends boycott research by exploring the relationship between animosity and boycott attitudes by considering the mediating effect of affinity. Second, to our best knowledge, only a few boycott studies have explored corporate strategies that adequately respond unanticipated country boycotts where the companies are not directly associated with the causes or motives of such boycotts (Kim & Kinoshita, 2023). This study extends boycott research by investigating brand strength and corporate social contribution as corporate strategies in the context of consumer boycotts. Third, although it is known that consumer boycotts change with time, only a few boycott studies are based on longitudinal analyses (Ettenson & Klein, 2005); hence, this study examines consumer boycotts longitudinally to improve the generalization of our findings. Our findings also present some managerial implications for global companies facing unexpected country boycotts by local consumers. When boycotts are caused by economic sanctions between countries, brand strength exerts a two-sided effect. Regarding consumer sentiment, the higher the brand strength, the higher the affinity for the country represented by the brand, and vice versa; however, consumers may also choose to boycott a brand with high strength. Consumers may feel angry and engage in boycotts when they feel betrayed by a brand with strong brand strength. However, corporate social contribution reinforces a sense of closeness in the country it presents and contributes toward mitigating the boycott attitude; this is because consumers consider their corporate social contribution as a beneficial activity for their country. Therefore, global companies that expand overseas should not only use their brand strength, but also engage in activities that are beneficial to the country and enhance the familiarity of the consumers of the country to develop a sense of cultural affinity. In addition, this study also has implications for policymakers. Economic sanctions against a specific country not only lower consumers’ affinity, but also leave a negative impact on the global companies with high brand strength. Therefore, policymakers must proceed with caution when they make an economic sanction for a certain country.