The rapid advancement of technology has created unprecedented opportunities for brands to engage with their existing and potential consumers through digitally enriched products. One such technology that enables the digital enrichment of analog products is augmented reality (AR). Through AR, consumers are able to directly interact with brands, for example, by scanning a product to unlock animated digital content that prompts them to take reciprocal actions. Recognizing that technologies that fail to actively engage consumers may struggle to realize their full potential, our study incorporates consumer brand engagement as a key factor of investigation. Consumer engagement with the brand signifies a higher level of commitment and aids in building lasting and beneficial relationships, as well as enhancing brand knowledge, ultimately positively influencing consumer-based brand equity.

The development and application of NFTs has gained great attentions. Especially, with the eyes on the potential of Metaverse and Web 3.0, NFTs are regarded as one of the foundational parts of the future internet. The main contribution of NFTs is the innovative solution for creating digital uniqueness through its property of non-fungibility. With this property, the ubiquity caused by replicable data on the current internet can be advanced with NFT-backed uniqueness, which can assist in certifying authenticity, authorship, and possessions of contents, products, and assets online. This has tremendous meaning for the luxury brand industry, which has been struggling with the ubiquity of the internet for years. The emergence of NFTs, however, represents hope and a potential mean to represent scarcity in a digital context. By the use of NFTs, luxury brands’ conservative digital marketing strategies and their ways of production design, marketing, consumer management could be fundamentally changed. This study aims to discuss the NFT marketing strategy from the perspective of luxury brands. Particularly, the study will investigate the desirability strategies in these luxury NFT cases. To do so, the study uses a socio-technical perspective to understand how luxury brands embody the desirability strategy through NFTs, by considering the technical factors of NFTs (i.e., design, issuance, and ecosystem functioning) and social factors of desirability (i.e., exclusivity, rarity, prestige, and creative leadership). The study explores applicable strategy of how to realize luxury desirability through NFT technics. As a result, this study investigates 39 luxury NFT cases from 2021 to 2022, including the NFTs launched by famous luxury brands such as Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana, and KARL LAGERFELD. The study showcases three within-case analyses to exhibit vivid examples of NFT innovations. Besides, the study generates a common framework by a complete cross-case analysis. The framework contains three domains and seven dimensions to guide further luxury NFT innovations and contributes to theory development in the field of NFT marketing and branding.

The challenge of adjusting to new travel trends has led to a quest to find ways to motivate people to travel again and to make the industry more resilient long term. The implementation of phygital marketing as an information source seems promising. This is the first study considering phygital marketing initiatives as an approach to trigger people’s travel intentions. An online questionnaire incorporating a scenario-based 2x2 factorial designed experiment with a longitudinal prospective (2 waves) explored the impact of a technology-based peer-to-peer versus human-machine interaction phygital marketing initiatives as an innovative approach to trigger travel intentions for long-distance and short distance destinations. Study 1 (n=330) shows that the experience of using phygital initiatives not only builds trust but also encourages people to visit destinations, leading to a dynamic experience. Study 2 is currently in the field which means after all most of the pandemic related restrictions have been removed to compare to Study 1’s results. Alongside theoretical contributions, this study presents practical implications on how destinations could implement phygital marketing initiatives.