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This paper aims to present a review of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) literature on the adoption of technology for marketing with the objective the knowledge trajectory from SMEs to tourism SMEs (TSMEs) and presents a research agenda for the adoption of digital marketing among TSMEs.

The quantitative literature review method is adopted to analyze 50 articles published in high-ranking journals from 2011–2021. The selected papers were reviewed to quantitatively present the popular theoretical frameworks, constructs and research methods used for the adoption of digital marketing among SMEs and to present a future research agenda in the context of TSMEs.

The findings present a review of theoretical approaches, research design, methods, and models used by researchers, and identify new directions for future research in the context of the adoption of digital marketing among TSMEs. The paper presents a theoretical critique of the technology adoption theories and builds on diffusion of innovation theory, technology–organization–environment (TOE), and institutional theory to propose an expanded model to study digital marketing adoption among TSMEs.

The article presents a significant advancement in the theoretical understanding of the adoption of digital marketing by offering the application of the TOE framework with moderating role of mimetic and normative pressures. Thus, the study contributes to the scarce research on institutional theory in the context of services (tourism) and offers an alternative and holistic perception to study digital marketing. The research model serves as an organizing tool for future researchers and practitioners to probe and further augment knowledge development in tourism and TSMEs.

Negligible published work on TSMEs makes this study valuable and the proposed model gives strategic information in the given context.

Health-care marketing typically entails a coordinated set of outreach and communications designed to attract consumers (patients in the health-care context) who require services for a better health outcome and guide them throughout their health-care journey to achieve a higher quality of life. The purpose of this study is to understand the progress and trends in healthcare marketing strategy (HMS) literature between 2018 and 2022, with a special emphasis on the pre- and post-Covid-19 periods.

The authors examine 885 HMS-related documents from the WOS database between 2018 and 2022 that were extracted using a keyword-based search strategy. After that, the authors present the descriptive statistics related to the corpus. Finally, the authors use author co-citation analysis (ACA) and bibliographic coupling (BC) techniques to examine the corpus.

The authors present the descriptive statistics as research themes, emerging sub-research areas, leading journals, organisations, funding agencies and nations. Further, the bibliometric analysis reveals the existence of five thematic clusters: Cluster 1: macroeconomic and demographic determinants of healthcare service delivery; Cluster 2: strategies in healthcare marketing; Cluster 3: socioeconomics in healthcare service delivery; Cluster 4: data analytics and healthcare service delivery; Cluster 5: healthcare product and process innovations.

This study provides an in-depth analysis of the advancements made in HMS-related research between 2018 and 2022. In addition, this study describes the evolution of research in this field from before to after the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings of this study have both research and practical significance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind to use bibliometric analysis to identify advancements and trends in HMS-related research and to examine the pattern before and after Covid-19 pandemic.

This study explores whether and how four main factors of short-branded video content (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) facilitate consumer engagement (likes, comments and shares), as well as the moderating effect of the release time (morning, afternoon and evening) in such relationships.

This study uses Python to write programs to crawl relevant data information, such as consumer engagement and short video release time. It combines coding methods to empirically analyze the impact of short-branded video content characteristics on consumer engagement. A total of 10,240 Weibo short videos (total duration: 238.645 h) from 122 well-known brands are utilized as research objects.

Empirical results show that the content characteristics of short videos significantly affected consumer engagement. Furthermore, the release time of videos significantly moderated the relationship between the emotionality of short videos and consumer engagement. Content released in the morning enhanced the positive impact of warmth, excitement and joy on consumer engagement, compared to that released in the afternoon.

The findings provide new insights for the dissemination of products and brand culture through short videos. The authors suggest that enterprises that use brand videos consider content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality in their design.

From a broader perspective, this study constructs a new method for comprehensively evaluating short-branded video content, based on four dimensions (content matching, information relevance, storytelling and emotionality) and explores the value of these dimensions for creating social media marketing success, such as via consumer engagement.

Based on the key dimensions of the Metaverse environment (immersiveness, fidelity and sociability), this paper aims to develop the concept of sensory word-of-mouth (WOM) in Metaverse – the metaWOM. It attempts to upgrade the Reviewchain model and suggests the utilization of non-transferable tokens (NTTs) in curbing the explosion of fake WOM.

Following Macinnis’ (2011) approach to conceptual contributions, the authors browsed the currently available literature on WOM, Metaverse and NTT to portray the emergence of metaWOM.

By relying on Metaverse’s three building blocks, the authors map out the persuasiveness of metaWOM in the Metaverse-like environment. By incorporating NTT in the Reviewchain model, the authors upgraded it to provide a transparent, safe and trusted review ecosystem. An array of emerging research directions and research questions is presented.

This paper comprehensively analyzes the implications of a Metaverse-like environment on WOM and debates on technologies that can enhance the metaWOM persuasiveness. The proposed model in this paper can assist various stakeholders in understanding the complex nature of virtual information-seeking and giving.

This is the original attempt to delineate the sensory aspect of WOM in the Metaverse based on three crucial aspects of the Metaverse environment: immersiveness, fidelity and sociability. This paper extends the discussion on the issue of fake reviews and offers viable suggestions to curb the ever-growing number of fraudulent WOM.

This study aims to answer two significant questions: What are the relative consumer and firm-level effects of marketing through metaverse compared to conventional marketing endeavours? What are the current trends in utilizing the metaverse as reported in the recent literature?

This study uses a systematic literature review methodology, using a Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses flowchart to synthesize existing research. A total of 35 articles written in English were selected and analysed from two databases, Web of Science and EBSCO Host.

The findings indicate that consumer-level effects of the metaverse include consumer loyalty and brand attachment. The firm-level benefits are decentralization and cost reductions. The paper proposes a framework indicating variables that could attenuate or enhance the association between immersive components of the metaverse and their resultant effects.

This study contributes to understanding the role of metaverse in marketing practices related to the marketing mix components. The study conceptualizes a novel framework for the metaverse and its resultant effects.

Endorsement marketing has been widely used to generate consumer attention, interest and purchase decisions among targeted audiences. Internet celebrities who become famous on the Internet are dependent on strategic intimacy to appeal to their followers. Our study aims to examine how multiple exposures to Internet celebrity endorsements influence consumers’ click and purchase decisions in the context of influencer marketing.

Based on a unique and representative dataset, the authors first model consumers’ choices for clicks and purchases with two panel fixed-effect logit models linking clicks and purchases with the frequency of exposure to Internet celebrity endorsement. To further control the endogeneity produced by the intercorrelation between the click and purchase models, the authors also adopt the two-stage Heckman probit structure to jointly estimate the two models using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. Robustness checks confirm the effectiveness of the models.

The results suggest that Internet celebrity endorsement plays a significant role in bringing referral traffic to e-commerce sites but is less helpful in affecting conversion to sales. The impact of repetitive Internet celebrity endorsements on consumers’ click decisions is U-shaped, but the role of Internet celebrities as online retailers will “shape-flip” this relationship to a negative linear relation.

Our study is the first to investigate the repetitive exposure effect of Internet celebrity endorsement. The results show a contradictory pattern with a wear-out effect of repetition in the advertising literature. This is the first study to show how the endorsing self, which is a common business model in influencer marketing, moderates the effectiveness of influencer marketing.

Large-scale text-based data increasingly poses methodological challenges due to its size, scope and nature, requiring sophisticated methods for managing, visualizing, analyzing and interpreting such data. This paper aims to propose semantic network analysis (SemNA) as one possible solution to these challenges, showcasing its potential for consumer and marketing researchers through three application areas in phygital contexts.

This paper outlines three general application areas for SemNA in phygital contexts and presents specific use cases, data collection methodologies, analyses, findings and discussions for each application area.

The paper uncovers three application areas and use cases where SemNA holds promise for providing valuable insights and driving further adoption of the method: (1) Investigating phygital experiences and consumption phenomena; (2) Exploring phygital consumer and market discourse, trends and practices; and (3) Capturing phygital social constructs.

The limitations section highlights the specific challenges of the qualitative, interpretivist approach to SemNA, along with general methodological constraints.

Practical implications highlight SemNA as a pragmatic tool for managers to analyze and visualize company-/brand-related data, supporting strategic decision-making in physical, digital and phygital spaces.

This paper contributes to the expanding body of computational, tool-based methods by providing an overview of application areas for the qualitative, interpretivist approach to SemNA in consumer and marketing research. It emphasizes the diversity of research contexts and data, where the boundaries between physical and digital spaces have become increasingly intertwined with physical and digital elements closely integrated – a phenomenon known as phygital.

As avatars are increasingly becoming popular, both scholars and businesses are acknowledging the vast potential that avatars hold for the future. Despite this growing interest in avatars, no review articles have attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of avatar literature and its implications for consumers. The present review addresses this gap using the combination of descriptive analysis (for corpus performance), bibliometric analysis (for corpus performance and emerging themes), and thematic analysis (for emerging themes and implications as well as future research opportunities). We conducted a review of 47 Scopus-indexed articles from 34 journals between year 2006 and 2023. By examining the corpus performance of avatar literature, the emerging themes, and future research opportunities, this review offers scholars a comprehensive overview of the subject matter.

With the advancement of digital transformation, it is important for e-retailers to use artificial intelligence (AI) for customer engagement (CE), as CE enables e-retail brands to succeed. Essentially, AI e-marketing (AIeMktg) is the use of AI technological approaches in e-marketing by blending customer data, and Retail 4.0 is the digitisation of the physical shopping experience. Therefore, in the era of Retail 4.0, this study investigates the factors influencing the use of AIeMktg for transforming CE.

The primary data were collected from 305 e-retailer customers, and the analysis was performed using a quantitative methodology.

The results reveal that AIeMktg has tremendous applications in Retail 4.0 for CE. First, it enables marketers to swiftly and responsibly use data to anticipate and predict customer demands and to provide relevant personalised messages and offers with location-based e-marketing. Second, through a continuous feedback loop, AIeMktg improves offerings by analysing and incorporating insights from a 360-degree view of CE.

The main contribution of this study is to provide theoretical underpinnings of CE, AIeMktg, factors influencing the use of AIeMktg, and customer commitment in the era of Retail 4.0. Subsequently, it builds and validates structural relationships among such theoretical underpinning variables in transforming CE with AIeMktg, which is important for customers to expect a different type of shopping experience across digital channels.

As brands progressively become instruments for consumers to advocate for social change, many feel pressure to engage in social purpose branding (SPB) through addressing social issues. In a rush to remain socially relevant, brands have approached SPB differently; some genuinely intend to advance the social issue, while some intend to capitalise on social movements to mobilise the brand. This paper aims to explain these differences by theoretically outlining various approaches to SPB.

This mixed method paper draws on theory, interviews with marketing practitioners, and practical exemplars to present a typology of SPB approaches. 

Using institutional logics theory, SPB is categorised into four approaches: social purpose-driving, social purpose-driven, social purpose-aligning and social purpose-washing.

The typological framework for SPB advances this domain to outline effective and ineffective ways for brands to engage with social issues. A detailed agenda for further research is provided to guide ongoing SPB research. 

The typology presented reduces complexity and helps marketers understand the different approaches to engaging with a social issue. Given the growing intertwinement of brands and social issues, this research is essential for brands seeking to advance a social issue and remain relevant.

This paper offers a novel conceptualisation of SPB by defining it, identifying a framework of its characteristics, and detailing four SPB approaches.