The hospitality industry is widely using customer data to develop successful personalized marketing communication. However, in the event of information leakage, personalized advertising may escalate customers’ privacy distress. Building on Conservation of Resources theory, this study proposes three dimensions for privacy threats that impact the relationship between personalized hospitality advertising and consumer responses. Findings from six experiments across high and low involvement hospitality products demonstrate diverging effects of personalized advertising depending on the type of privacy threat communicated. Results further indicate that customers’ psychological comfort mediates the relationship between high-personalized advertising and the customer response to the advertising when privacy threat is high. Additionally, when the perceived severity and distance of the announced privacy threat are high and low respectively, rational appeals generate higher levels of psychological comfort, while the same happens for emotional appeals when the perceived scope of the threat is high. The study concludes with value-adding theoretical and managerial implications for the hospitality industry.

The use of brand communities have been hailed as an effective tool for marketers to develop relationships between their brands and consumers, with the ultimate goal to create and sustain brand loyalty. The majority of theoretical assertions regarding brand communities are underpinned by the use of social identity theory (Tajfel, 1982). Social identity theory posits that individuals have a need to construct and display a ‘self-concept’ and a strategy to communicate this is the process of identification with groups. As the focus of a brand community is the brand itself it is clear that brand community identification and brand identification must be correlated, but little research has explored this relationship or its effects. This study aimed to fill a gap within the knowledge by further exploring the relationship between brand identification and brand community identification by providing more insight into the role which an individuals’ identification with a brand community (Muniz and O’Guinn, 2001) has within their relationship with the focal brand and their loyalty to that brand. Specifically, this research aimed to gain a greater understanding of the different effect brand community identification had upon the relationship between brand identification and both public and private brand loyalty. This was explored through the utilisation of a survey of fans of a professional basketball team within the UK (n=298). The data and subsequent analysis supported the hypotheses that individuals’ brand community identification has a positive relationship with both public and private forms of brand loyalty. More importantly it also presented brand community identification as a mediator in the relationship between brand identification and public brand loyalty. Therefore, this study is the first to present brand community identification as critical within consumers’ development of publicly displayed brand loyalty. Managerially this understanding provides support for the proactive utilisation of brand communities by marketers. It also provides guidance for the context in which brand communities are critical for the success of the brand. This research delivers support for marketers, to utilise brand communities proactively when trying to motivate consumers to participate in publicly displayed pro-brand behaviour. This guides the re-allocation of budget away from pure brand identification activities to brand community engagement strategies.

This research was conducted in order to examine the reverse effect of brand loyalty on the emotional attachment to the place-of-origin. Results indicate that consumers that are highly loyal to a brand tend to be more emotionally attached to the place-of-origin; the effect is mediated by affective place image. Affective place image also partially mediates the brand loyalty–place attachment relationship in cases when the brand is authentic in the place. Human beings tend to extend their affect towards one object based on another object related to the first one. Building on this notion researchers have been trying to understand two related concepts—a place, and a brand originating from that place. In this endeavor, one literature stream has been focusing on place-based branding from the perspective of international marketing, including work on country-of-origin (COO) or product-country image (Baldauf et al., 2009; Hong & Wyer Jr, 1989). Another stream focusing on place branding adapts traditional marketing theory to market a place (Kotler 2002), and focuses on destination image (Bramwell & Rawding, 1996; Lee & Lockshin, 2012; Qu, Kim & Im, 2011), and place attachment (Gross & Brown 2006). Notwithstanding the above, there is a dearth of research combining these two aforementioned streams. One of few exceptions is Lee and Lockshin (2014), who explored the reverse COO effect of product perceptions on destination image. However, they focused on consumers’ cognitive beliefs and, thus, the underlying mechanism of the relationship is yet to be examined. Hence, the current research aims to answer the following questions: can brand loyalty be leveraged to consumers’ relationship with the place-of-origin as a tourism destination? And, if so, what is the mechanism underlying the effect? We present a global survey with consumers of place-based wine brands as a means to understand whether consumers’ loyalty to a brand will influence their emotional attachment to the place where the wine brand origins. A moderated mediation model is proposed. Affective destination image mediates the positive effect of brand loyalty on place attachment, which is positively moderated by authenticity of the brand-place associations. The study contributes to the tourisms marketing field by identifying the emotional linkage between brand loyalty and place attachment. It serves as a starting point for further investigation of how company or product branding could benefit place marketing and branding theory. Affective components are suggested to play a vital role in the relationships between a place and a brand. It further enriches understanding of the role of brand authenticity. Place marketers need to understand the role of brand loyalty in the decision-making process of tourism consumption.

The growing pace of market globalization has enabled firms to find it increasingly attractive to exploit growth opportunities abroad. To this end, predicting firms’ success and growth in foreign markets has become an important issue to international business researchers and managers. The international business literature suggests that different internal firm and foreign market specific environment factors drive internationalization of firms including firms’ structure, strategy, orientations, capabilities and nature of foreign market competition. Researchers interested in the field of international entrepreneurship have also given attention to firms’ international entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) as a potential driver of firms’ internationalization behavior, with few recent studies reporting investigations into the relationship between IEO and internationalization scope. The entrepreneurship literature suggests that variations in entrepreneurial behaviors may lead to exploitation of “new entry” (Oviatt & McDougall, 2005; Cavusgil & Knight, 2015). Within the international entrepreneurship discipline, international new entry is construed to entail identification and exploitation of new product-market opportunities abroad, or a pursuit of internationalization scope (Dai et al., 2014). Internationalization scope is defined as the process of seeking new market opportunities across multiple foreign markets, and is operationalized variously with indicators that tap the percentage of overseas revenue to total revenue, and the number of foreign countries and geographic regions from which a firm receives its sales. Thus, internationalization scope is viewed to be inherent and essential to the exhibition of an IEO, and may be driven by firms’ entrepreneurial proclivity. While a few studies have looked at how IEO impacts percentage of revenue firms obtain from foreign markets (Dai et al., 2014), little studies have studied how and when IEO drives regional expansion. This is notwithstanding the fact that traditional internationalization theory points to regional expansion as an antecedent to global expansion. Indeed, international business scholars have argued that a combination of increasing informal exporting activities, rising liberalization of regional economies, colonial bias, regional economic blocs and the emergence of middle class in many regional markets has created opportunities for firms to internationalize within neighboring geographical regions. Additionally, it has been argued that the benefits and costs of regional protection can motivate firms to pursue regionalization strategy as an antecedent or an alternative to globalization strategy. In drawing insights from earlier works, therefore, the present study focuses on the regional expansion of exporting firms in a Sub-Sahara African economy – Ghana, and examines how international entrepreneurial-oriented behaviors drive the firms’ intra-Africa expansion. African markets are noted for their diversity in national laws, cultures, geography, and infrastructural development. Particularly relevant to internationalizing African firms is the diversity and imperfection of marketing channels across African markets. An important implication for African firms, therefore, is how they can leverage their comparative advantage of handling diversity and imperfection of marketing channels in their home African market to successfully compete in overseas host markets with similar conditions. Accordingly, we further empirically examine how a firm’s ability to manage heterogeneous and imperfect marketing channels moderates the effect of IEO behaviors on regional expansion. We posit that the extent to which firms develop managerial and organizational capabilities to successfully compete in conditions of high market channel diversity and imperfection is a major contingency factor that can help explain when entrepreneurial behaviors influence regional expansion. By empirically examining these questions, this study brings new insights to IEO research by showing that IEO behaviors are differentially related to regionalization strategy depending on firms’ capability to manage heterogeneous and imperfect regional marketing channels. Specifically, findings from our study of small and medium sized firms in Ghana doing business in regional African markets show that regional expansion increases when levels of product innovation intensity, competitive aggressiveness and autonomous behavior are high and when regional channel management capability increases in magnitude. Additionally, the study provides evidence to show that increases in risking-taking behavior decrease regional expansion when regional channel management capability is high. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that although product innovation novelty and proactiveness are directly related to regional expansion their effects are cancelled out when levels of regional channel management capability are high.