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The purpose of this paper is to introduce and define social food pleasure as a new conceptual framework that can promote pleasurable and healthy food experiences.

By reviewing the literature related to food well-being and pleasure primarily from marketing and management fields and by looking at current trends appealing to food consumers and food enjoyers, the authors propose a new conceptual framework of social food pleasure.

The authors conceptualize social food pleasure as “the enjoyment derived from the acts of sharing food experiences offline, online, and for society at large, that positively contributes to consumers’ overall pleasure and satisfaction with consumer’s food consumption”. Moreover, the authors identify three key contexts of applications of social food pleasure. Sharing offline relates to the social activities that can help achieve pleasure with food. Sharing online concerns new media tools which allow for the connection between consumers and food to enhance food pleasure. Sharing for society considers the current pleasure of consumers derived from having a positive social experience based on food consumption.

By defining social food pleasure and proposing a conceptual framework of the three contexts of application, the authors advance the understanding of what constitutes pleasurable food experiences, connecting it to healthy food choices and well-being.

This study aims to explore the phenomenon of visceral food pleasure, described as a unitary experience that, after an initial sense of pleasure and relief generated by the satisfaction of eating impulses, is followed by negative feelings – such as guilt and worry – linked to the consumption of hedonic or unhealthy foods.

An exploratory approach has been adopted. In particular, the critical incident technique among 87 individuals has been used to extract insights about visceral food pleasure.

Contrary to previous research results, this study shows that viscearl food pleasure is not a unitary phenomenon, identifying four types of different facets, two of which have a negative valence in terms of felt emotions post-consumption and psychological well-being (i.e. the “greedy” and the “maladaptive” experiences). More importantly, the other two facets are associated with positive consequences in terms of emotions felt post-consumption and perceived psychological well-being (i.e. the “social” and the “fair sin” experiences).

Companies that provide food experiences can prime meanings that influence consumers’ perceptions of the episode to elicit positive emotions post-consumption and psychological well-being.

Promoting a more holistic view of food consumption and psychological well-being can free consumers from negative emotions during food consumption episodes. Priming a particular meaning can be a way to do that. However, as visceral experience can still lead to health issues, this must be combined with an education process that makes consumers aware of their food habits.

This research challenges the idea that visceral food experiences are always negative. Indeed, when associated with particular meanings (i.e. social and reward), they have a positive valence post-consumption.

This paper aims to strengthen the process of design thinking by aligning it with netnography, specifically auto-netnography, which this paper asserts is particularly suited to the task of studying and enriching the actions of “designerly types” who seek to fashion monetisable businesses.

This paper conducts an auto-netnography with a structure divined from established design thinking theory – that of empathising, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing – to afford an understanding of how a popular health food influencer designs a successful vegan restaurant.

This paper illustrates the empathetic relationship between a long-term audience member and an entrepreneur/designer/marketer. The intimate cultural analysis reveals the nature of their symbiotic entwinement. In a way that few other methods could, the method shows how this sense of reciprocity, deepens over time.

Conducting an auto-netnography is a prolonged and difficult task. Nonetheless, by revealing the rituals, expectations, roles and routines of content creators, designers and followers, this paper illustrates exciting possibilities for the enactment and development of design thinking in the marketing field.

Designerly types such as marketers and content creators should closely study, listen to and interact with consumers by using a similarly staged process that draws equally from design thinking and auto-netnography.

Prior to this study, existing research has not previously linked design thinking with either netnographic or auto-netnographic research.

Insufficient attention to the specific nature of healthy food experiences might limit the success of related innovations. The purpose of this article is to adopt a value‐in‐use perspective to conceptualize healthy food consumption as experiential and emotional, rather than the mere intake of nutrition, and to examine the development of healthy food communication with a service science approach.

With a service science approach, this study proposes a virtual healthy food platform for children. The key data come from internal project documents, workshops with children and other stakeholders (e.g. parents, teachers), and interviews with project team members.

The simultaneity of functional and hedonic benefits, implications for multiple stakeholders, social norms, and need for expertise characterize healthy food experiences. The proposed framework accounts for enablers, principles, outcomes, and challenges affecting the development of communication integral to healthy food experiences, using project data and tools as illustrations.

This study contributes to growing literature on service science by introducing key principles and contingency factors that influence the success of experience‐centric service innovations. Quantitative research should validate the established framework and investigate the elements' relative usefulness for developing healthy food communication.

The service science approach involves multiple stakeholders, empathic data collection, and visual tools to develop an entertaining platform to help children learn about healthy food.

This research conceptualizes and validates healthy food experiences as value‐in‐use offerings. The proposed service science approach accounts for the interactions among stakeholders, the holistic nature, and specificities of a real‐life decision context for improving healthy food experiences.

This study aims, first, to understand consumers’ perception of chefs as human brands (i.e. study one). Second, tests were run to assess the validity of a new conceptual model of the relationships between the factors of chef image, luxury restaurant image, both images’ congruity and consumers’ hedonic and novelty experiences and happiness and well-being (i.e. study two).

The first qualitative study involved using Leximancer software to analyse the data drawn from 43 interviews with luxury restaurant clients. In the second quantitative study, 993 valid survey questionnaires were collected, and the proposed model was tested using structural equation modelling.

The results reveal that consumers perceive chefs as human brands and the associated narratives include both performance- and popularity-based characteristics. The findings support the conclusion that individuals give great importance to chefs’ image and the congruence between chefs and their restaurant’s image. In addition, luxury restaurant image only affects novelty experiences, and both hedonic and novelty experiences have a positive effect on customers’ happiness and well-being.

This research focused on Portuguese luxury restaurants. The consumers’ happiness and well-being needs to be replaced by other outcomes to confirm if the model produces consistent results.

The results should help luxury restaurant managers understand more fully which pull factors are valued by their clients and which aspects contribute the most to their pleasure and welfare.

This study adds to the extant literature by exploring consumers’ perceptions of chefs as human brands and the role these chefs’ image play in customers’ luxury restaurant experiences and perceived happiness and well-being.

This article addresses the lack of scholarly attention paid to the sharing economy from a sociological perspective, with respect to the technology-mediated interactions between sharing economy users. The paper provides a critical overview of the sharing economy and its impact on business and communities and explores how information technology can facilitate authentic, genuine sharing through exercising and enabling conviviality and non-direct reciprocity.

The paper begins with a critique of the technology-mediated sharing economy, introduces the concept of conviviality as a tool to grow and shape community and sustainability within the sharing economy and then explores reciprocity and sharing behaviour. Finally, the paper draws upon social exchange theory to illustrate conviviality and reciprocity, using four case studies of technology-enabled sharing.

The paper contributes to the emerging debate around how the sharing economy, driven by information systems and technology, affects social cohesion and personal relationships. The paper elucidates the central role conviviality and reciprocity play in explaining the paradoxes, tensions and impact of the sharing economy on society. Conviviality and reciprocity are positioned as key capabilities of a more sustainable version of the sharing economy, enabled via information technology.

The findings reveal that information technology-mediated sharing enterprises should promote conviviality and reciprocity in order to deliver more positive environmental, economic and social benefits. The diversity of existing operations indicated by the findings and the controversies discussed will guide the critical study of the social potential of sharing economy to avoid treating all sharing alike.

The paper aims to examine how employees influence their employer’s brand by applying Taylor’s (1999) six segment message strategy wheel in an employee influencer context.

The research uses a content analysis of employees’ public social media posts – including captions and images – to analyze the message strategies employees use to promote their employers.

While ego and social were popular message strategies in both the images and captions, the findings evidence the varying message strategies employees use in text-based versus image-based messages. Four “imagined audiences” of employee influencers are identified: current customers, prospective customers, current employees and prospective employees.

The research provides insight into how employees act as influencers in building their employer brand on social media.

A unique measurement tool is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.

This research contributes to theory and practice in the following important ways. First, the research provides a modernization of an existing framework from an offline setting to an applied industry context in an online setting. Second, this research focuses on a subtype of social media influencer, the employee influencer, which is an underdeveloped area of research. Third, a unique measurement tool to analyze text-based and image-based social media data is developed that can be used by companies and future researchers to decode employees’ online communications.