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Effective customer journey design (ECJD) is considered a key variable in customer experience management and an essential source of brand meaning and pro-brand behavior. Although previous research has confirmed its importance for driving brand attitudes and loyalty, the role of consumer-brand identification as a social identity-based influence in this relationship has not yet been discussed. Drawing on construal level and social identity theories, this paper aims to investigate whether effective journeys and the resulting overall journey experience are equally powerful in driving brand loyalty among customers with different levels of consumer-brand identification.

The present article develops and tests a research model using data from the European and US service sectors (N = 1,454) to investigate how and when ECJD affects service brand loyalty.

Across two cultural contexts, four service industries and 33 service brands, the results reveal that ECJD is a crucial driver of service brand loyalty for customers with low consumer-brand identification. Moreover, the findings show that different aspects of journey effectiveness positively impact the valence of customers’ experience related to those journeys – a process that is ultimately decisive for their brand loyalty.

This study is unique because it generates theoretical and practical knowledge by combining the literature streams of customer journey design, customer experience and branding. Furthermore, this work demonstrates that consumer-brand identification is a critical boundary condition to be considered in the relationship between ECJD and brand loyalty in services.

The paper has a twofold purpose: (1) to test the application of means-end theory to providers of hospitality goods and services, and (2) to explore this question in the context of winery tasting rooms when they had a unique opportunity to restructure their hospitality experience due to government restrictions in response to COVID.

A qualitative approach was adopted, and a convenience sample was used to conduct semi-structured laddering interviews. Forty interview transcripts were coded as means-end ladders, which were analyzed using a custom computer program to develop the implication matrix and the hierarchical value map.

This paper demonstrates that means-end is a useful approach to investigate the values and behaviors of the producer, specifically hospitality hosts. It finds that the principal goal of tasting rooms is to generate sales, and offering a compelling guest experience is the characteristic that contributes the most to achieving that goal. The staff and the atmosphere created for the guests are the two factors with the greatest influence on the guest experience.

This is the first paper to use means-end theory to study the hospitality host, or the producer of goods and services in general, and the first to study winery hospitality primarily through the lens of means-end theory. The study also helps fill a gap in research on tasting room sales focused on the winery’s goals.

An AI concierge is a technologically advanced, intelligent and personalized assistant that is designated to an individual customer, proactively taking care of that customer’s needs throughout the service journey. This article envisions the idea of AI concierges and discusses how to leverage AI concierges in the customer journey.

This article takes a conceptual approach and draws insights from literature in service management, marketing, psychology, human-computer interaction and ethics.

This article delineates the fundamental forms of AI concierges: dialog interface (no embodiment), virtual avatar (embodiment in the virtual world), holographic projection (projection in the physical world) and tangible service robot (embodiment in the physical world). Key attributes of AI concierges are the ability to exhibit semantic understanding of auditory and visual inputs, maintain an emotional connection with the customer, demonstrate proactivity in refining the customer’s experience and ensure omnipresence through continuous availability in various forms to attend to service throughout the customer journey. Furthermore, the article explores the multifaceted roles that AI concierges can play across the pre-encounter, encounter and post-encounter stages of the customer journey and explores the opportunities and challenges associated with AI concierges.

This paper provides insights for professionals in hospitality, retail, travel, and healthcare on leveraging AI concierges to enhance the customer experience. By broadening AI concierge services, organizations can deliver personalized assistance and refined services across the entire customer journey.

This article is the first to introduce the concept of the AI concierge. It offers a novel perspective by defining AI concierges’ fundamental forms, key attributes and exploring their diverse roles in the customer journey. Additionally, it lays out a research agenda aimed at further advancing this domain.

This paper aims to develop an alternative perspective on marketing informed by service scholarship to resolve marketing’s challenges as a discipline and practice.

This paper is conceptual and builds on the ongoing debate regarding marketing’s challenges and on service research to develop a new alternative marketing perspective and model, which could contribute to reforming marketing.

An analysis of the current understanding of marketing showed that the discipline’s myopic focus on activities, which disregards what marketing is as a phenomenon, is the primary reason for the prevailing problems and failure to reform marketing. Based on research into service logic (SL), the paper demonstrates that a higher level view of service can be characterized as the provision of help to the users of goods and services to ensure that these goods and services deliver meaningful assistance in their lives and work. This suggests that the ultimate objective for marketing is to make firms meaningful to the users of their goods and services.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, since this paper is the first to conceptually develop a perspective on marketing and a corresponding model informed by service scholarship, more conceptual and empirical research is necessary. Developing the new meaningfulness-based perspective and model for marketing brings a new approach to the process of resolving marketing’s current troubled situation.

The meaningfulness approach to marketing enables customer-centered marketing strategies to be implemented. Such strategies include both demand-stimulating and demand-satisfying programs.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to examine marketing’s troubled situation from a service research and SL perspective.

Technologies are dramatically reshaping various aspects of the store space, modifying design, services and usage. Accordingly, several studies tackled technology impact on each of these aspects, investigating design, service and usage singularly, but lacking a holistic viewpoint. Thus, this paper aims to identify the different dimensions of the store space (levels) and assess the impact of technology introduction on store space dimensions (levels).

The research employs a qualitative approach based on direct observations of apparel brand stores located in London between March and April 2023. Data collection followed a structured observation protocol covering store information, adopted technologies and their effects across various store space levels, i.e. consumption activities, service environment and customer experience.

Results show that the store space can be defined as the sum of different dimensions consisting of consumption activities, service environment and customer experience. Accordingly, technology introduction holistically influences each of the three store space levels as follows: (1) first, technologies redefine how activities are performed or alters the location where certain activities are consumed; (2) within the service environment, technologies replace traditional elements, fill empty spaces and enhance the atmospherics; finally, (3) customer experience is enhanced in hedonic and/or utilitarian terms due to technology adoption.

This paper defines the space as a dynamic entity, providing a deeper understanding of how the store space is produced, from a holistic point of view and the role of retail technology in this process.

The hospitality and tourism industry is strongly influenced by new and immersive technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), to enhance customer experiences across a diverse set of touchpoints throughout the visitor journey. This paper aims to provide a holistic understanding of AR marketing for this industry context, present a number of fundamental premises of AR marketing within it and establish an agenda for future AR research.

This study reviews current literature on AR marketing, hospitality and tourism and industry use cases for the creation of a proposed conceptual framework to guide scholars and managers. Based on that, the authors propose fundamental premises.

The three fundamental premises of AR marketing presented are the need to clearly differentiate between AR and virtual reality within hospitality and tourism; the use of AR for the on-trip experience; and the combined focus on content, context, customer and computing devices for a successful strategic implementation of AR.

This study serves as a first point of reference for the strategic integration of AR into hospitality and tourism marketing, both from an industry and academic point of view.

The authors provide a number of managerial recommendations based on our three fundamental premises.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to holistically characterize AR marketing in the hospitality and tourism context. It also highlights the fundamental premises of successful AR marketing and future directions of AR research today and in a spatial computing future.

Through the theoretical lens of social practice theory, the aim of this research is to investigate how business-to-business (B2B) high-tech startups build their brands in an omni-digital environment, particularly by focusing on the most important digital touchpoints implemented to interact with stakeholders.

A qualitative analysis was performed by conducting 36 semi-structured interviews with key informants operating in B2B high-tech startups, including founders, CEOs, managing directors, marketing managers and other actors from this sector.

The results reveal the enablers, inhibitors and specific objectives of startups in their brand-building processes across digital touchpoints in an omni-digital environment.

This study offers new theoretical insights into new ventures’ brand management strategies through the development of a theoretical framework in which the enablers, inhibitors and specific objectives of the brand-building process of startups are identified. Although the recent literature has addressed the topic of startup brand building, this is the first study, to the authors’ knowledge, focused on the brand-building process of B2B high-tech startups in an omni-digital environment.

Virtual goods consumption has risen dramatically in recent years. Recognizing the benefits of virtual goods in generating revenue for online game companies, marketers strive to understand the motives behind virtual goods purchases. We investigated the direct and indirect effects of functional, emotional, and social values through player satisfaction on purchase intention toward virtual goods among online players.

In total, we surveyed 332 online game players utilizing a structured questionnaire. We employed a multi-analytic approach combining partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and necessary condition analysis (NCA) to examine the proposed relationships.

The findings show that all dimensions of value and player satisfaction significantly affect the intention to acquire virtual goods. However, social value does not exert a significant effect on player satisfaction. Moreover, we confirmed that player satisfaction mediates the relationships between functional value, emotional value, and purchase intention. Furthermore, NCA results indicated that all predictors in the model are necessary conditions of purchase intention for virtual goods.

These findings contribute to an enhanced understanding of purchase intentions among online game players from a symmetric (PLS-SEM) and asymmetric (NCA) perspective by proposing a multi-analytic approach.

The different dimensions and contexts within which value is co-created has generated varied views of how value is understood or formed. This study aims to examine employee-guest perceived value as important factors for the successful implementation of value co-creation (VCC).

The study employs an interpretive paradigm, using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation in a qualitative design to increase understanding of employee-guest perceived value to aid the implementation of VCC at the dyadic level.

Findings highlight eight value perceptions including value for money, hotel location, physical evidence, mutual respect, appreciation, safety & security, quality & varieties of food and technological characteristics of service as important factors for the successful implementation of VCC at the dyadic level.

Generalisability of the findings is a limitation not only due to the smaller sample size but also due to industry-specific context. The study follows rigorous procedures to minimise biases, yet research limitation is acknowledged from the researcher’s participation in the research process.

The notion that actor’s assess value differently from the same service suggests that diverse service elements might be experienced differently. This study provides insights for hotel managers to recognise not only individuals’ value preferences but also service types that reflect employee-guest collective service preferences for sustainability.

This study integrates and extends extant literature by examining employees’ and guests’ individual and collective views at distinct hotel contexts to gain useful insights into value and VCC. The study proposes a framework that hospitality firms can use to address service failure and competition-related issues.