Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication is generally regarded as good and necessary to inform stakeholders of a company’s CSR deeds. However, research has recently uncovered the practice of “greenhushing” within the context of the hospitality industry (Coles, Warren, Borden, & Dinan, 2017; Font, Elgammal, & Lamond, 2017). Greenhushing means that companies de-emphasize green credentials and CSR activities. Going on holidays is an indulgent act that might result from people feeling they have earned some luxury, including behaving lavishly in terms of resource consumption and responsible behavior. Thus, curtailing this indulgent, irresponsible guest behavior without compromising a guest’s holiday experience is a key challenge for hotels. This paper explores whether the assumption that customers do not want to hear about CSR communication while on holiday is true from the customers’ side and what type of communication achieves to curtail unethical behavioral intentions. Based on 594 usable responses from an online survey, we undertake a moderation analysis with a multi-categorical antecedent variable (different communication stimuli), pro-environmental identity as a moderator and behavioral intentions for “unethical” behavior as a dependent variable using PROCESS 3.0 for SPSS (Hayes, 2018). The results provide partial support for our theoretical predictions.
In an increasingly digital and interactive global marketing landscape, social media
marketing is emerging as one of the most important strategic tools for brand
communication. This is especially true in the luxury fashion context, which
traditionally exploited virtual environments as an effective communicational tool of
brand-related content and product usage information all over the world. A
contemporary consumer cohort that exhibits digital- and virtual-oriented behaviors
are Millennials, which represent the digital native generation highly inclined to
Internet interaction and, thus, a relevant strategic opportunity for social media
marketers in the luxury industry. While the literature reports a positive relationship
between Millennials’ social media usage and purchase intention towards luxury
brand, scant attention has been paid to the underlying mechanisms explaining such a
relationship. To fill this gap, the current research proposes and tests a conceptual
model to provide three main contributions to the social media and brand
communication literature: first, consumers’ perceptions of interactivity – a
multidimensional construct comprised of real-time conversation, no delay/timing,
and engaging/navigation – is hypothesized as an antecedent of social media usage. In
this way, relevant theoretical and practical implications are provided to online luxury
marketers interested in embracing virtual environments for brand communication.
Next, two significant constructs of consumer behavior such as materialism –
comprised of success, hedonism, and happiness – and morality – comprised of moral
judgment and moral intensity – are hypothesized as mediating variables of the
relationship between social media usage and purchase intention towards luxury
brands. Particularly, these materialistic and ethical decision making processes
emerge as relevant for Millennials’ online purchasing activities, with the expectation
of transparent and effective brand-related information through social media. Finally,
these mediating influences are hypothesized to be moderated by two other relevant
constructs in the brand communication process—consumers’ motivation to use social
media and advertising skepticism. In fact, a better assessment of Millennials’
motivation and skepticism toward social media marketing communication result as
crucial for modern strategic marketers. Such hypotheses are tested using
bootstrapped moderated mediation analysis on a sample of 297 Millennials actively
following luxury brand social media activities. Our results confirm the proposed
hypotheses, particularly both materialism and idealism partially mediate the
relationship between social media usage and purchase intention. Moreover,
motivation to use social media improves the effect of social media usage on materialism, whereas advertising skepticism reduces the effect of idealism on
purchase intention. These findings contribute to the social media and brand
communication literature, providing interesting avenues for future research.
The evolution of technology, on one hand, and the transformation of consumers’ behaviors, on the other hand, are taking marketing communication strategies, together with instruments and actors involved in their planning process, to the need of confronting themself with a huge change must consider the consumer polarization and different media attitudes at the same time.
This research project assumes that companies should change their strategic action, if they want to communicate with their changing target. What happens in luxury mature markets?
The intent is to empirically and qualitatively examine how luxury brands communication strategies have been evolving during the latest years towards a stronger relationship with a huge variety of different audiences at the same time. The interaction must follows a continuous path and the contents sharing must be the center of every communication effort in order to enhance the experience of consumers and to establish a strong relationship with the audience. The present research on 75 cases shows that players who have the most authority and esteem are the ones using social media tools and counting a higher number of impressions on social networks and a higher frequency of video views and shares content online.
When communicative language teaching (CLT) was first developed in the 1970s, it was widely seen as the definitive response to the shortcomings of previous approaches and the communication needs of a globalized world. As such, it was exported enthusiastically over the world as a ready-to-use package of ideas and techniques. From the outset, however, there was no clear consensus about its nature,and teachers experienced difficulty in defining and implementing it. There is now a widespread view that teachers need to adapt CLT to suit specific contexts. CLT cannot now be defined in terms of precise characteristics but serves rather as an umbrella term for approaches that aim to develop communicative competence through personally meaningful learning experiences. In this spirit, we should aim to develop principles which help each teacher to develop a form of communication-oriented language teaching (COLT) suited to his or her own specific context.