Compared to the prevalence of advertising targeted at teens, our understanding of their vulnerability to advertising has been limited due to the cognitive/developmental view adopted by most previous research. However, cognitive development is not the most significant aspect that differentiates adolescents from adults. Adolescence is when teenagers start to take on more responsibility in defining themselves and become more skilled at using consumption to construct and signal their identity. On one hand, teens have a growing desire to express their unique identity as autonomous and distinctive individuals, separate from their family and differentiated from others. On the other hand, they are nearly obsessed with what others think about them, striving to belong to a group and feeling devastated by signs of disapproval from peers. This conflict between the need for assimilation and the need for differentiation is especially pronounced during adolescence when teenagers increasingly seek the approval of their peers while expressing their uniqueness. As a result, their sense of self is in a constant state of flux. This "shaky" self-identity has been shown in previous research to coincide with low self-esteem, which is associated with a high level of materialism.

Driving to the store, finding parking, defective carts, difficulties in finding items, poor product info, long lines for checkout, unclear receipts, carrying heavy shopping bags home, and forgotten items are some of the most common barriers experienced by grocery shoppers. These are also the most common reasons why shoppers decide to switch to alternative retailers or to online grocery channels. COVID-19 accelerated this trend with online grocery shopping and home delivery services became prevalent and grew significantly during the pandemic (Gupta & Mukhejee, 2022). Today, e-grocery has reached 11% of the total grocery sales and being expected to reach 19% by 2025 in US (source: Statista, 2022). Brick and mortar grocery retailers declare to suffer from low loyalty of their customer and margin pressure. On the other side, the recent investments of online pure players such as Amazon and Alibaba in physical retail, including grocery, show that the physical shopping has still potential to lead retailers’ growth, also within grocery. Grocery retailers should therefore find new ways to attract and retain customers to their stores. Offering a better customer experience (CE) may be a valuable strategy to this end. A great CE has emerged at the base of a sustainable competitive advantage for companies, and it is at the heart of customer loyalty (Grewal et al., 2017) in several sectors but has often been neglected within grocery selling.

Relationship between consumers and brands has become an important issue both for managers and marketing scholars (Fournier 1998, Fournier et al 2012,Alba and Lutz 2013, Loureiro 2015). This becomes even more important when brands misbehave. This paper studies the situation in which consumers are disappointed with the brand and feel hate toward it. Building on the Triangular Theory of Hate (Stenberg 2003), a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of 349 posts written on a facebook public group, is performed. The goal of the analysis is twofold: i) understanding which are the more recurrent types of hate for consumers and its causes; ii) testing, in light of the expressing writing theory, whether writing and sharing their brand hate online is a way for consumers to vent away their feelings and hence to restore their wellbeing. Results show that consumers mainly experience burning hate that is composed by anger, disgust and devaluation and wish the brand death. Also, given the specific relationship consumers have with the brand, the catharsis effect does not take place for them.

We investigate the construct of privacy concern and its dimensions, together with its expected counterbalance, trust in the information collector, on willingness to disclose different information types to a digital seller in a multicountry study. This issue is critical, given the evolution of technologies that now allow for the collection and analysis of a huge amount of data. We conceptualise consumers’ privacy concerns as the extent to which a consumer is concerned about (Milberg, et al., 2000; Rose, 2006): (1) the general collection of personal information (data collection), (2) unauthorised secondary use (data secondary usage), (3) improper access (data access) and (4) errors (data accuracy). The first contribution of our research is that we will verify the validity of the four dimensions of information privacy concern in a multiple-country study. We then develop a model by testing the impacts of privacy concern and trust on the willingness to disclose sensitive and non-sensitive information. First, our results validate the privacy concern scale based on the four dimensions (data collection, data secondary usage, data access and data accuracy) in eight countries and show that information disclosure can contain an inner trap based on customer training to disclose information that may transform information disclosure in an habit that increases willingness to share that may overcome the effects of privacy concern and trust on customers’ intended behaviours, opening possibilities of potential harmful behaviours on the part of companies to get data from their prospects that should be carefully monitored and managed.