This study enrolled enterprise business owners/managers in the U.S. as the subjects to investigate the relationship among four factors: personal motivation, the social expectation of stakeholders, business performance, and their CSR toward the local community. The research results showed that: (1) small enterprise’s perceived expectation from stakeholders has a positive effect on their decision to engage in CSR toward community; (2) their perception of business performance has a positive effect on their decision to engage in CSR toward the community. Based on these research results, public policymakers or relevant units are advised to further achieve the goal of nurturing a flourishing community by increasing awareness of stakeholder’s expectations for small enterprise’s CSR commitment. Also, it is clearly pronounced in this study that regardless of their personal motivation to support the local community, unless financially successful, small businesses are less likely to engage in CSR toward the local community. This result makes a good sense that having a successful business operation is a necessary condition for small enterprises to pay attention to a higher-level value such as CSR toward the local community.

This study examined factors that influence purchase intention of ethically produced fashion products. Theory of Reasoned Action was used to understand consumer attitude formation and purchase intention of ethically produced fashion products. Two unique variables were studied (environmental awareness, environmental concern) with the consumer attitude toward the purchase intention of ethically produced products. The influence of subjective norms on purchase intention was also examined. The results showed the influence of environmental concern on both attitude and purchase intention along with the influence of attitude on purchase intention. The findings of this study contribute to the body of the existing knowledge in the area of ethical production by providing explanations and a broad understanding of the factors that influence purchase intention of ethically produced fashion products. The results will also provide insight to firms wanting to effectively convey pro-environmental efforts to consumers that will help branding, positioning, and potential sales increase.

A company’s collaborative competence to seamlessly engage with its customers within the service industry becomes one of the primary sources of competitive advantage. Increasingly more customers expect more personalized and contextualized services to maximize the value they can obtain from each transaction, and companies are actively seeking opportunities to listen and learn from customers to enhance their value proposition. Scholars in the service marketing literature suggest that service recovery encounter represent one of the situations where a company can effectively leverage its collaborative competence to restore the company-customer relationship damaged due to an initial service failure. One of the important benefits customers can obtain from actively engaging in recovery is enhanced control. However, they are required to put additional personal resources which count as an increased cost for customers. Also, depending on the nature of a collaborative outcome (positive vs. negative), customers tend to ascribe responsibility differently (more credit to oneself for a positive result and less blame for an adverse result). This study attempts to 1) investigate the role of enhanced control and increased self-effort in customers’ equity perception toward a service recovery encounter and 2) examine how attributional bias intervene in the process. A 2 x 2 web-based experiment with a service recovery scenario was designed and administered to collect the data. The results indicate that when the resulting outcome is not desirable, the increased self-effort from customers counteracts the positive effect of enhanced control. When the recovery outcome is positive, on the other hand, customers with a low level of involvement in recovery process tend to overestimate their self-effort. However, such effect does not exist for customers with a high level of engagement. This study contributes to the extant literature by contemplating adverse impacts of effort and positive impacts of empowering customers with more control. It also provides valuable insight into the usefulness of customer engagement as a pre-emptive recovery strategy.

As brands’ use of social media to connect with customers becomes increasingly important, there is a need to continually monitor and examine activities in social networks. An important aspect of the social network communications is its unique ways of concentrating and dispersing information among participants (actors) – density and centrality of the network. By looking at both density and centrality, the relationships among actors and their ability to influence others are revealed, allowing deeper understanding into networked behaviors. In this manner, examining whole and ego network patterns, the unique roles of individual actors, can provide brands significant insight in understanding how influencers form and how users connect and spread information. Based on the social network analysis, which represents a combination of theory and analytical methods of networked relationships, this study analyzed Twitter networks of two multi-brand cosmetics and beauty retailers, Sephora (global brand) and Ulta Beauty (U.S. domestic brand). Using NodeXL, daily Twitter data for both brands were gathered to investigate network activities. By examining both ego-networks and the whole networks, the results showed that while ego-networks for brands were quite similar to one another, there was a big difference between the ego-networks and whole networks in regards to the number of actors, type of connectivity, as well as the prominence of brands. Sephora was often not an important part of its hashtag network, and thus was not able to maintain strong control over communications and messages in these networks whereas Ulta maintained its control over its networks. The findings from analyzing these network patterns, the unique roles of individual actors, and the brands within the networks provide significant insights in understanding how influencers form and develop the ability to connect and spread information.