An increasing number of companies are using service robots, such as physical robots and virtual chatbots, to interact with their customers. Service robots are autonomous agents with the purpose of providing services to customers by performing a variety of physical and nonphysical tasks (Joerling et al., 2019). Conceptual work has suggested that social robots will increasingly be used in the front line of service encounters (Gonzalez-Jimenez, 2018; Van Doorn et al., 2017). Real examples of the inclusion of these robots in retail settings already exist. For instance, some retailers use Softbank´s robot Pepper to greet and inform customers. Social robots such as Pepper can use their sensors and cameras to interpret customer reactions and adapt accordingly. Moreover, the robot can even make product recommendations based on the assessed customer´s mood, age, gender and, if available, purchase history (McKenna, 2018). Not surprisingly, there is a vast market potential associated with these robots, which is expected to grow to 87 billion by 2025 (BCG, 2017).

In this research, we conducted an empirical study using the theory of sociologist Jean Baudrillard to examine the phenomenon of contemporary people in Korea acquiring tattoos. The researcher classified the consumption behavior of modern society, as described by Baudrillard in The Consumer Society, into three keyword phrases: consumption by personal taste, coded consumption, and recyclage of consumption. Using this as the premise of the study, 18 men and women in their 20s and 30s completed questionnaires and interviews, and the results supported labeling tattoo consumption as consumption by personal taste, tattoos as coded consumption, and recyclage of tattoo consumption, similar to the consumption pattern that Baudrillard sees. First, the younger generations have consumed tattoos according to their personal preferences. They express themselves by tattooing for self-complacency, self-marking, pursuing individuality, overcoming the appearance complex, and seeking pleasure. Second, they have consumed socially coded tattoos. They say that tattoos domestically act as negative codes and symbolize individuals. Although tattoos are a symbol of artists who are relatively free from social norms, they are still a symbol of social misfits created as such by negative perceptions. Third, the pattern of tattoo consumption is like that of contemporary consumption. Tattoos already have become part of popular culture in Korea, and there has been a changing trend in tattoo culture. This study has significance in that tattoos were regarded as a consumption behavior that deviated, from the perspective of deviance. That phenomenon of today’s tattoo culture of today was confirmed through the empirical study.

Food environment has been going through significant changes with the introduction of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This study was conducted to investigate the current development status of ICT related to food delivery service by analyzing the relevant registered patents according to consumer buying process. Patents registered between 2002 and 2016 were searched with ‘food’ and ‘delivery’ as main keywords through Korea Intellectual Property Rights Information Service (www.kipris.or.kr). The search resulted in 624 patents among which 219 patents were related to food delivery service; 108 patents based on ICT were selected and analyzed. The patents were examined by applicant and year. The patents were classified into the six steps of consumer buying process: ‘need recognition’, ‘information search’, ‘evaluation’, ‘choice’, ‘purchase’, and ‘postpurchase evaluation’. Patents belonging to more than one step were coded to all the corresponding steps. The patents were registered mainly by domestic companies (50.9%) and individuals (35.2%), having shown dramatic increase of registration since 2012. Over 2/3 (67.6%) of the patents were related to the ‘purchase’ step. About 32% were associated with the 'information search' step. Approximately 18% of the patents were relevant to the 'evaluation' and 'choice’ steps, respectively. The numbers of patents related to the 'postpurchase evaluation (13.9%)’ and 'need recognition (12.0%)' steps were relatively low. The current ICTs related to food delivery service in Korea were largely associated with service providers' profit generation rather than consumers' benefit. There is still much room for technology development that could contribute to increasing consumers' benefit.

Luxury market is changing with new competitors to the market, more modest growth, and new types of customers (Kim and Ko 2012). To stay relevant, luxury houses need to develop experience-based marketing strategies that emphasise interactivity, connectivity and creativity (Atwal and Williams 2009). Subsequently, with the rise of digital marketing of luxury (Okonkwo 2009), consumers have been granted a more active role in the value co-creation of luxury brands. Indeed, adopting more inclusive and consumer-oriented marketing strategies has proven successful to iconic luxury brands such as Burberry (Phan, Thomas & Heine 2011), and Hermes (Robins 2016). Previously, value co-creation has been studied from consumer perspective following resource-based view (Arnould, Price and Malshe 2006) and practice theory (Schau, Muniz, and Arnould 2009). However, in the field of luxury marketing, research on co-creation has been limited to one case study of value co-creation processes (Tynan, McKechnie & Chhuon 2010). In addition, no previous research exists on the role of space and spectacular environment in value co-creation in luxury. This article extends these streams of researchby analysing 42 narratives (Polkinghorne 1995) from consumers that have attended two branded exhibitions of Louis Vuitton: SERIES3 held in London in the fall 2015 and Volez, Voguez, Voyagez in Paris in Spring 2016. In essence, luxury is about seduction; recreating a dream and providing meaningful, personal experiences for its consumers (Kapferer and Bastien 2009). Here, a branded exhibition provides a way to invite consumers to feel, see, and experience the brand in its full splendour. These encounters, in turn, transform the value-creation logic between the brand and the consumer from a one-way affair to a co-creational relation. This article demonstrates how exhibition context allows the consumer to participate in the value co-creation for Louis Vuitton, a prestigious luxury brand. Here, the brand provides a context and props for the consumer’s processes of value co-creation. This, in turn, then results into four types of value; utilitarian, experiential, relational, and symbolic. The contribution of this study is three-fold. First, this study extends the literature on value co-creation (Arnould et al. 2006) by demonstrating the role of space in the process of value co-creation. Second, our results extend previous research on luxury (Tynan et al. 2010) by illustrating the value co-creation from consumer perspective. From managerial perspective, the results show how brand exhibitions may act as platforms for content creation and enable rich self-expression with the brand.

The literature on co-creation of stakeholder and brand identities draws from (and reflects) a focus on cultures with dominant independent selves. However, this type of co-creation in a global context requires understanding of how cultural differences can simultaneously shape identity development and co-construction, from both a brand and a multiple stakeholder point of view. Processes involved in such a reciprocal co-creation of identity, as well as outcomes, are likely to differ across cultures, especially in the way brands, consumers, and, by extension, other stakeholders use one another in their respective identity construction processes. This study offers a first-of-its-kind conceptual framework, together with a set of propositions, that unpacks how cultural differences might affect such reciprocal co-creation processes. Drawing from this framework, the study advances both the cross-cultural and the co-creation literature by (1) offering several overlooked theoretical, managerial, and methodological implications and (2) highlighting important but currently under-developed avenues that future research could apply to more complex, multiple brand–stakeholder relationships.

Advertising signaling theory predicts that the amount that a company invests in advertising impacts on consumers’ perception about the quality of a product (Anand & Shachar, 2009). For this signaling to occur, some specific conditions are necessary, for example, the product must be a repetitive purchasing product and its quality must not be observable at the time of purchase, but only during the consumption of the product (Kirmani & Rao, 2000). Advertising signaling is based on the assumption of a rational consumer, who is expected to perform an objective and deliberate evaluation of the advertising actions, taking into account the amount invested by the company in the advertisement production and media and the level of investments applied by competitors in the same market to perceive the quality signals. However, this strictly rational perspective has been questioned since Simon (1947, 1955) demonstrated that humans’ rationality is limited by several factors, such as cognitive resources and selective memory, which may influence judgments and decision making. More recently, researchers have argued that affect is also a source of bounded rationality, playing an important role in the way people think and make decisions (e.g., Hanoch, 2002; Kaufman, 1999; Muramatsu & Hanoch, 2005). The objective of the present research is to examine advertising signaling theory through the consumer information processing perspective, exploring the influence of the following three variables on these processes: the individual’s mood, the level of information asymmetry about the product’s attributes and the individual’s gender. The study was applied to 390 undergraduate students in France. Three factors were manipulated in the study: the advertising investment, which was manipulated in three levels (below, the average and above the market average advertising investments for similar campaigns), the subject’s mood (two levels, positive and negative) and the level of information asymmetry about the product’s attributes (two levels, high information asymmetry and low information asymmetry). Thus, the research had a 3 x 2 x 2 experimental design. Respondents were asked to declare their gender, which was considered in a subsequent analysis. Students were approached in the university and invited to participate in the study. Twelve booklet models (each booklet contained the activities and scales related to one experimental group) were randomly distributed among the respondents who accepted to participate of the study. The results of an ANOVA analysis showed main effects of mood (F (1, 376) = 13.31, p < .001), level of information asymmetry (F (1, 376) = 135.00, p < .001) and advertising investment (F (2, 376) = 31.06, p< .001) on the respondents’ quality perception. These main effects were obtained in a context of two significant interactions, between the advertising investment and mood (F (2, 376) = 3.68, p < .050) and mood and information asymmetry about the product (F (1, 376) = 19.05, p < .001). Regarding the first significant interaction, the results showed that subjects who were informed that the advertising investment was below the market average showed similar means of product evaluation whether they were in a positive (M = 5.47) or negative (M = 5.46) mood (F (1, 364) = .000, p > .10). Those who were informed that the advertising investment was at the market average evaluated the product as significantly better when in a positive (M = 6.40) than a negative (M = 5.91) mood (F (1, 364) = 6.29, p < .05). In the same way, respondents who were informed that the advertising investment was above the market level evaluated the product as significantly better when they were in a positive (MPA = 6.94) than a negative (MNA = 6.19) mood (F (1, 364) = 14.32, p < .001). The interaction between the individual’s mood and the level of information asymmetry about the product demonstrated that subjects who were exposed to a slight level of information asymmetry, receiving some information about the product’s attributes, showed similar means of product evaluation whether they were in a positive (M = 6.71) or a negative (M = 6.74) mood (F (1, 364) = .04, p > .10). By contrast, those who were not given any information about the product characteristics, being exposed to a severe level of information asymmetry, evaluated the product as significantly better when in a positive (M = 5.83) than a negative (M = 4.96) mood (F (1, 364) = 27.63, p < .001). A second ANOVA model was conducted to examine the influence of the advertising investment and the individual’s gender on the perceived product quality. The results showed main effects of the advertising investment (F (2, 376) = 31.56, p < .001) and gender (F (1, 376) = 9.77, p < .005) on the subjects’ quality perception. These main effects were qualified by a significant interaction between the advertising investment and the subjects’ gender (F (2, 376) = 5.28, p < .010). Women evaluated the product quality as better (MW = 5.81) than men (MM = 4.71) in the context of advertising investments below the market average (F (1, 370) = 19.05, p < .001). This difference disappeared in the contexts of advertising investment at the market average (MW = 6.19, MM = 6.14, F (1, 370) = .04, p > .10) and above the market average (MW = 6.70, MM = 6.52, F (1, 370) = .55, p > .10), in which men and women showed similar means of perceived product quality. The results show that positive mood influences in the individuals’ perceived product quality specifically in situations of advertising investment at the market average and above the market average. When individuals were informed that a level of advertising below the market average was invested, they demonstrated similar means of product evaluation irrespective of their mood. By contrast, in situations in which they were informed that the company invested approximately the same as competitors in similar advertising campaigns, or even above this amount, respondents who were in a positive mood evaluated the product as significantly better than those who were in a negative mood. The fact that the advertising investment interacts with the individual’s mood suggests that both variables are likely processed by the same information processing route, namely, the peripheral route (Elaboration Likelihood Model, Petty, Cacioppo and Schumann, 1983). That is, although individuals are expected to compute the information related to the advertising investment through the central route, the signal emitted through the advertising investment is more likely processed by the peripheral route. Thus, this signal is also a heuristic element on which individuals based their product evaluations. Our findings also demonstrate gender differences in the processing of the information signaled through the advertising investment only in situations of advertising investment below the market average. In the contexts in which the advertising investment was manipulated below the market average, women evaluated the product as better than men. Nevertheless, in situations in which the advertising investments were manipulated at the market average and above the market average, men and women showed similar levels of perceived product quality. An explanation for this effect is that women are better able than men to process the information sent through the advertising investment and, thus, to perceive the advertising signal only at a specific level of advertising investment. Above a certain level of advertising investment, men are as motivated as women to process this information, causing the gender differences to disappear. This finding is consistent with the Selectivity Model (Meyers-Levy, 1989), which predicts that some situational elements may stimulate men and women to engage in an effortful and detailed processing of the information that can eliminate the differences between the genders. Thus, in situations in which the investment in advertising is sufficient to encourage both women and men to process it, the genders become equally sensitive to the advertising signaling.