Plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental problems in the world. In modern society, the consumption of single-use plastics in the food service industry has increased along with the increase in food-away-from-home. The COVID-19 pandemic has attacked the consumption of single-use plastic in the restaurant industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, especially the US has retracted the related laws and policies regarding using single-use plastic for fast food and carry-out food, and customers have increased their use of single-use plastic for fast food and carry-out food due to worries about hygiene. Even though sustainability has been a novel topic in hospitality literature, a majority of studies have focused on the consumers’ perception, attitude, or behavioral willingness toward sustainability. To fill this gap in research, finding an effective way to influence consumers’ behavioral change becomes important and necessary.

Hospitality and tourism industries have recognized that engaging with customers via social media is now a critical element of their marketing strategy. Given the high variability of success with which firms have been attracting customer interest online, businesses are clearly struggling to determine exactly the right methods to use the newest technologies. This study presents a predictive model of attributes for online posts that evoke a high level of customer engagement. The contribution to the literature is a unique set of features that have significant impact on customer engagement, using a big-data set to support findings. In accordance with theories originating from Social Belongingness and Brand Community Marketing, findings indicate that appeals to a sense of community belonging have a significant impact on customer engagement in social media. Specifically, communities have idiomatic vocabularies consisting of “activation words” that are especially effective for engaging customers on social media. This has both theoretical implications in that it constitutes a large-scale, real-world confirmation of belongingness hypotheses, and managerial implications in that it suggests best practices for maintaining an online presence.

Value co-creation has become an emerging venue of the customer engagement research. The purpose of the study is to investigate a model that represents the process (behavior and value) and consequence (satisfaction) of customer co-creation in the restaurant context. Specifically, with the theoretical support of service-dominant logic, the present study explores customer co-creation behavior as a key predictor of co-created value, which in turn leads to customer satisfaction. The results of the study confirm that customer value cocreation is a subtle process by examining the relationship between customer co-creation behavior at the “co-production” stage and co-created value at the “co-creation of value” stage. The findings of the study contribute to the evolving knowledge of customer cocreation of value, and offer practitioners in the hospitality and tourism industry effective marketing strategies based on re-examining customer relationships and engagement, thereby maximizing customer value.