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This chapter provides an overview of the strategic implications of chatbot use and implementation, including potential applications in marketing, and factors affecting customer acceptance. After presenting a brief history and a classification of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, the authors provide an in-depth review at the crossroads between marketing, business, and human–computer interaction, to outline the main factors that drive users' perceptions and acceptance of chatbots. In particular, the authors describe technology-related factors and chatbot design characteristics, such as anthropomorphism, gender, identity, and emotional design; context-related factors, such as the product type, task orientation, and consumption contexts; and users-related factors such as sociodemographic and psychographic characteristics. Next, the authors detail the strategic importance of chatbots in the field of marketing and their impact on consumers' perceived service quality, satisfaction, trust, and loyalty. After discussing the ethical implications related to chatbots implementation, the authors conclude with an exploration of future opportunities and potential strategies related to new generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT. Throughout the chapter, the authors offer theoretical insights and practical implications for incorporating conversational AI into marketing strategies.

Industry 4.0 with artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things, and automation are giving way to Industry 5.0 which places emphasis on workers' well-being, people, and society. The new era accentuates interaction between humans and smart machines to drive prosperity and induce sustainable contribution of industry to society. It must build a resilient economy to cope with future uncertainties or external shocks. Moreover, the sustainability effort of companies demanded by consumers, employees, shareholders, governments, and civil society requires sustainability transformation of business strategies. Applying sustainability principles in product design implies the consideration of a product's entire life cycle. Technologies accelerate sustainable production and support using natural resources efficiently taking into consideration planetary boundaries. This condition also makes for a novel perception of products, including financial products. Under the current circumstances of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment, the focus on consumers and recognition of their dominance play a pivotal role in business models to maintain customer relationships. Thus, the digital, sustainable, human-centric industry is emerging. This chapter deals with digital products to enable twin transition and accomplish a sustainable business strategy simultaneously. It examines the reciprocal reinforcement of sustainability and digitalization and discusses the impact of digital sustainability on products. In this sense, this chapter also outlines the business contribution to sustainable development through digitalization. Finally, a holistic model for a hypothetical financial remittance product is offered to demonstrate how a digital product can contribute to sustainable development.

This essay charts an intellectual journey. Geoffrey M. Hodgson became an institutional economist in the 1980s. He explains how he discovered institutional economics and what strains of institutional thought were attractive for him. Another issue raised in this essay is how institutional researchers organize and move forward. Hodgson argues for an interdisciplinary approach, but this is not without its problems.

The smart destination can be defined as a destination that deploys information communications technologies (ICTs) and other technological tools for interactive/participative engagement with prospective visitors. The rationale is to enhance the residents' quality of life as well as the tourists' experiences of the destinations they visit. This chapter discusses about digitization strategies and on marketing superstructures affecting destinations. It advances a conceptual framework through the development of an Attracting, Stay, and Return (ASR) Model that is suitable for smart destinations. It relies on descriptive case studies to conceptualize smart tourism destinations. This contribution reiterates the importance of having a well-designed website that presents appropriate content to entice the prospective travelers' curiosity about destinations. It offers valuable insights and advances new knowledge on smart marketing approaches that are intended to increase the destination management organizations' outreach with tourists at each stage of the ASR Model.

This research work explores the perception of children's experiences as spectators of a sporting event. The study focusses on the 19th Mediterranean Games hosted by Oran in the summer of 2022 and aims to analyse the trace of emotions and memories that the event left in their minds. A qualitative survey was conducted with 22 resident children who attended the event as spectators. The results show that a child's experience at a sporting event is holistic, appearing in several dimensions: a cognitive dimension, referring to what the child learnt from the event, and an affective dimension, which is important for creating strong and meaningful experiences for children at sporting events.

In this chapter, I take a symbolic interactionist look at the anthropomorphic projections of 38 people in four large Canadian cities who report having encountered ghosts. As part of a larger project on perceived encounters with ghosts, I interviewed these people using audiotape, transcribed the interviews, and identified themes within them. Together, they mentioned 195 ghosts and described their appearances and actions. I identified anthropomorphic projections in four areas: (1) Physicality – pertaining to the bodies of the ghosts, (2) Relational – pertaining to kinship ties, e.g., mothers, fathers, grandmothers, (3) Rational – the ghosts' motivations and justifications, and (4) Affective – pertaining to the ghosts' emotions. These anthropomorphic projections were the respondents' efforts at sense making after having encountered what they believed to be phantasmal.

Many corporations engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities voluntarily, but there is an ongoing debate about whether the government should intervene in CSR, particularly in countries with challenging institutional contexts. While some have argued that CSR should remain a discretionary exercise, as any attempt to make CSR mandatory through any form of state intervention will negate the meaning and objectives of CSR. However, drawing on the institutional theory, this chapter argues for the need to have some form of legislated CSR for banks operating in countries with challenging institutional contexts. The chapter further acknowledges that a universal CSR framework would be difficult to achieve due to differences in institutional contexts between countries; consequently, the nature, scope, and application of CSR legislation would vary significantly amongst countries as CSR is context dependent. Nonetheless, given the crucial role banks plays in society besides acting as the country's payment system, banks also transform illiquid liabilities into liquid assets, therefore making the banks the drivers of national economic developments globally. Governments in developing and emerging markets (DEMs) should ensure that banks' CSR initiatives are not only meaningful but also impactful by implementing a limited legislated CSR framework. This framework would require banks to establish a CSR committee of the board, make mandatory non-financial disclosures on their CSR activities in their Annual Reports, provide mandatory CSR continuous professional development (CPD) training for bankers, and mandate banks to contribute a certain percentage of their yearly profits before tax to agreed CSR initiatives, among other requirements.