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The purpose of this study is to compare the communication practices of Chinese and US companies on YouTube and explores the effectiveness of different communication strategies at the topic level.

The author selected 22 Chinese companies and 22 US firms and compared the content of their English language corporate YouTube channels through content analysis, sentiment analysis and cluster analysis.

The results revealed that the three communication strategies (information, response and involvement) in general were not significantly different regarding their engagement rates, but they generated different comment scores when communicating topics of corporate social responsibility. The results also showed that Chinese companies were more likely than American firms to display the speeches of corporate leaders, use collectivistic references and present human interest messages in YouTube videos.

This study sheds light on how national institutional environment shapes corporate communication on YouTube.

This study challenges the infatuation with the involvement strategy and offers some advice for practitioners on topic selection and user comment function management.

This study makes a novel contribution to the literature of corporate communication on YouTube by adopting a cross-national comparative approach. A conceptual framework of major factors influencing stakeholder responses on YouTube was presented.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-02-2023-0061

The article explores the linkages between the type of environmental strategy (ES), the use of internal communication (IC), and the greening of organizational culture (OC). Moreover, the article empirically examines whether company size matters in the use of environmental IC practices in the green context. Additionally, the article considers differences between people employed at different organizational hierarchy levels. The basis for such a comparison is their opinions about the effectiveness of communication practices.

Empirical research employed a survey method done on 199 organizations in 2020. Statistical analyses used the chi-squared test, Kendall’s Tau-b correlation coefficient, and the Mann–Whitney U test.

The research showed that companies with a proactive green strategy more often use different communication practices related to ES and have a greener culture. The study proved that larger companies more often use the analyzed communication practices. However, we found no significant difference in opinion between middle managers and line employees about the effectiveness of these practices.

The main contribution to business practice is the exploratory model based on the empirical study, which allows organizations to successfully implement the ES.

Studies rarely combine the three organizational elements: IC, OC, and ES. This article provides new empirical evidence on relationships between features of OC, green strategy types, and communication practices.

In this study, we applied the strategy-as-practice (SAP) framework to analyse strategic communication practices. SAP implies approaching strategy as something that organisational members do and is useful for understanding the tensions between emergence and formalisation and between planning and improvisation that characterise the everyday communication work of communication practitioners.

The paper is based on an ethnographic study of a record company and on qualitative interviews with various actors from the music industry.

Tensions exist between the emergence of inputs from active consumers that require flexibility and attempts to strategically formalise and continuously adapt plans and encourage consumers to act in anticipated ways. The findings revealed five strategic communication practices—meetings, working in the office, gathering and analysing consumer engagement and related data, collaboration and storytelling—that practitioners used to conduct strategic communication and navigate the tensions.

The study contributes to understanding the role of strategic communication practices in contemporary organisations and how practitioners manage the tensions within them. The study shows that an SAP approach can account for improvisation and emergence, as well as planning and formalisation. It also shows how SAP resonates with emergent and agile strategic communication frameworks.

When companies face a crisis, they sometimes deliver blame-shifting communications, trying to shift blame onto another actor to protect their reputation. While previous research has considered how different features of the message affect its persuasiveness, little is known about whether specific senders can blame more effectively. This paper aims to contribute to research in this domain through an investigation of the sender’s social perception as a critical moderator to the persuasiveness of blame shifting.

The authors conduct four between-subjects scenario experiments to test the research hypotheses. In each experiment, participants are presented with a realistic crisis scenario and the crisis communications delivered by the company. The authors assess the extent to which perceptions of the sender influence the message’s ability to reduce negative word-of-mouth intentions and to increase purchase intentions.

The authors show that blame shifting is more likely to be effective when deployed by senders that are small (Study 1) or have a positive CSR track record (Study 2). Furthermore, The authors find that even large senders can successfully deploy blame shifting if they can benefit from being known for their CSR programs (Study 3). Finally, the authors show that the effect of blame shifting depends on the receiver’s level of concern about the crisis: stakeholders significantly concerned by the crisis reject blame-shifting communications (Study 4).

Further research should examine the impact of information about brand competence on blame-shifting effectiveness. Further research is also needed to explore sender effects for other defensive crisis communication strategies such as denial or the use of excuses or justifications.

The study offers critical information for marketers considering the use of defensive crisis communications strategies such as blame shifting.

The study extends the understanding of how sender effects influence blame-shifting communications. The analysis allows us to clarify why this strategy is effective for certain senders and certain receivers while, for others, it tends to backfire. Blame shifting backfires for large senders unless they can boast a strong CSR record.

This paper aimed to test a proposed framework highlighting strategic green marketing initiatives and how they drive new technology implementation towards green corporate performance, underpinned by institutional isomorphism.

The study used a quantitative method and convenience sampling approach in gathering data using adapted questionnaires to solicit first-hand information from 225 employees of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the tourism and hospitality sector underpinned by the theory of institutional isomorphism.

The study shows that green communication and green strategy alignment have significant predictive effects on new technology implementation. Cultural isomorphism significantly moderated the effects of implementing new technology (i.e. green communication and strategy alignment). In addition, “new technology implementation had a significant predictive effect on green corporate performance”. Meanwhile, the moderation effect of “green creative behaviour on the new technology-green corporate performance dyad was positive but insignificant.”

The study’s novel framework confirms how green communication strategy and green strategy alignment complement cultural isomorphism to explain the impact of new technology implementation on green corporate performance, underpinned by institutional isomorphism.

This study aims to capture how the association between a multichannel relational communication strategy (MRCS) and customer performance is contingent upon such customer performance (low- versus high-performance customers) and to reconcile past contradictory results in this marketing-related topic. To this end, the authors propose and validate the method of quantile regression as an unconventional, yet effective, means to proceed to that reconciliation.

This study collected data from 4,934 customers of a private pension fund firm and accounted for both firm- and customer-initiated relational communication channels (RCCs) and for customer lifetime value (CLV). This study estimated a generalized linear model and then a quantile regression model was used to account for customer performance heterogeneity.

This study finds that specific RCCs present different levels of association with performance for low- versus high-performance customers, where outcome customer performance is the dependent variable. For example, the relation between firm-initiated communication (FIC) and performance is stronger for low-CLV customers, whereas the relation between customer-initiated communication (CIC) and performance is increasingly stronger for high-CLV customers but not for low-CLV ones. This study also finds that combining different forms of FIC can result in a negative association with customer performance, especially for low-CLV customers.

The authors tested the conceptual model in one single firm in the specific context of financial services and with cross-sectional data, so there should be caution when extrapolating this study’s findings.

This study offers nuanced and precise managerial insights on recommended resource allocation along with relational communication efforts, showing how managers can benefit from adopting a differentiated-customer performance approach when designing their MRCS.

This study provides an overview of the state of the art of MRCS, proposes a contingency analysis of the relationship between MRCS and performance based on customer performance heterogeneity and suggests the quantile method to perform such analysis and help reconcile past contradictory findings. This study shows how the association between RCCs and CLV varies across the conditional quantiles of the distribution of customer performance. This study also addresses a recent call for a more holistic perspective on the relationships between independent and dependent variables.

Negotiation as a communication process is most prevalent in the business world. So, most research and work to date has focused on exploring the specifics of this area. The fundamental difference between business or everyday negotiation and crisis negotiation is that a crisis creates special environmental conditions in which it is impossible to continue normal operations and the problem that has arisen must be resolved. Therefore, the focus of this chapter is on negotiations in crisis situations, which carry greater potential responsibility than ordinary business negotiations. This study looks at strategies and tactics for negotiating in crisis situations, examines specific strategies and tactics, and determines whether there are certain regularities in negotiating in crisis situations. Crisis situations also require an urgent solution to the problem, as the cost of not reaching an agreement is high. The phenomenon of negotiation is seen as a communication process. The specific objective is to investigate the importance of communication in the negotiation process in different crisis situations. The research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with 15 interviewees from different countries in Europe and the Middle East who have experience in crisis negotiations. Each of them had a specific negotiation situation and the only thing they have in common is the experience of negotiating in a crisis. The results indicate that in the different areas of negotiation, the focus is on building long-term relationships, an integrative negotiation strategy and attention to ethical negotiation tactics.

The current work aims to present a review of academic literature that systematizes the body of knowledge related to marketing and consumer behavior in order to identify the most effective variables that encourage the consumer towards a proper and better lifestyle, accordingly the paradigm of management, marketing and technology efforts to promote a “better” society preventing obesity.

A literature review was carried out to examine the studies of marketing and consumer behavior published in international peer-reviewed journals over the last twenty-three years (2000–2023). Our review finally considered a total amount of 46 articles.

Findings elucidate three overarching themes and associated sub-hemes, encompassing: (1) Product design for obesity prevention, including aspects such as labeling, nomenclature, packaging and assortment; (2) Technology-supported preventive measures, involving mobile applications, self-monitoring, short message services and digital therapeutics; and (3) Marketing and communication strategies, incorporating social advertising, nudge, social influence and initiatives targeting childhood obesity prevention. Furthermore, a comprehensive research agenda is presented, delineating potential avenues for future investigations predicated on the utility of the results in fostering subsequent endeavors within the realms of: efficacy and effectiveness studies; personalization and tailoring; behavioral change techniques and gamification; user experience and acceptance; cost-effectiveness and implementation; as well as ethical and privacy concerns.

Main limitations are related to the characteristics of the analyzed literature, resulting in only English journal articles, book chapter and so on. Thus, other relevant contributions in different languages discussing interesting insights might have been neglected.

This study offers several insights to managers, marketers and policymakers involved in the issue of the obesity prevention. Since obesity represents a crucial challenge for public health at a global level, with its incidence reaching epidemic proportions in recent decades, the results may be extremely useful and powerful because suggesting – by employing a robust resulting corpus of knowledge on this domain – several practical features, actions and tactics to face such an important challenge. Moreover, this paper offers for scholar and researcher a systematized knowledge around the issues of obesity prevention, together with a detailed research agenda emerging by the critical analysis of the emerging insights, and to practitioners systematized useful insights to project and develop their future business strategies.

By providing several actions and tactics for obesity prevention (e.g. as for product labeling, naming, packaging, assortment; the exploitation of new technologies for mobile applications design, self-monitoring, short message service (SMS) alert systems, digital therapeutics; the role of social advertising, nudge, social influence) this work perfectly match the emerging societal orientation related to business, marketing and technology efforts to create a “better” society.

The study shed lights the need for a holistic approach to obesity prevention, involving interaction between individual main topics. Importantly this is the first study to analyze the issue of obesity prevention by considering a multidisciplinary corpus of literature, analyzed trough an individual-centric orientation.

The term strategic communication has become firmly established in recent years. The emergence of the term was associated with the hope of finding a more fitting description for overlapping communication processes, since existing approaches can hardly fulfill these expectations. To date, the research has been dominated by communication-focused and, in particular, organization-focused approaches that show little interest in the alternative perspective. An integrating perspective can overcome the wall that exists between the communication level and the organizational level.

The integrating communication and organizational theory framework is developed on the basis of Niklas Luhmann’s “Theory of Social Systems” (TSS), which can be attributed to the “Communication Constitutes Organization” (CCO) perspective. This perspective seems appropriate because its communication theory integrates the sender and addressee perspectives, and its extended organization theory can be used to describe in detail the organizational structures of strategic communication.

The communication theoretical framework states that one of the functions of strategic communication is to reduce complexity to a single follow-up option. From the sender’s perspective, strategic communication can be defined as an attempt to encourage acceptance of a follow-up option proposed out of self-interest. The organizational theory framework that both builds on this and is linked to it first shows the diversity of strategic organizational communications before explaining their formal and informal structures.

This paper is the first to offer a comprehensive framework that integrates concrete strategic communication activities as well as the (in)formal organizational structures that lead to their emergence. On the one hand, this enables a more differentiated description of all relevant aspects of communication theory (e.g. tonality, clarity vs. ambiguity and technical dissemination medium). On the other, the organizational theoretical framework offers a systematization that can be used to describe various formal and informal structures comparatively. Above all, this kind of inclusive, integrating framework is the prerequisite for research that relates the diverse concrete strategic communication activities to an organization’s formal and informal rules and thus understands them as (primarily) the result of organizational decisions.

This study addresses the pivotal role of digital transformation (DT) in the post-pandemic business landscape, identifying a notable gap in comprehending strategic adaptations and digital communication amidst the complexities of the digital era. It seeks to illuminate practical insights for businesses navigating through DT by intertwining its technological and organizational aspects.

Employing a conceptual approach, this paper synthesizes existing literature and theoretical frameworks related to DT, integrating its technological, strategic and organizational dimensions. It utilizes real-world instances to elucidate the digital era’s practical implications and strategic adaptations. The study also proposes a research agenda that spotlights pressing DT issues, challenges and actionable strategies for businesses.

Despite DT’s inherent complexity, the paper reveals that it is crucial for businesses navigating the contemporary digital landscape. It underscores the importance of strategic adaptations in DT, highlighting their implications on customer experiences and organizational structures amidst the evolving technological and market dynamics. Moreover, it accentuates the significance of effective digital communication strategies in enhancing user experiences and conveying value propositions adeptly.

This paper brings vital aspects of DT impacting modern organizations, offering invaluable insights for practitioners and scholars aiming to comprehend and navigate DT’s complexities. The identified research gaps underscore the necessity for further exploration, aiming to broaden DT’s theoretical and practical facets.