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The purpose of this paper is to validate Tsiotsou’s (2012) sport team brand personality scale in a new country (Australia) and segment (Generation Y) and extend its use from sport teams to individual athletes. This paper also explores the scale’s predictive power in an athlete’s role model influence.

An online panel survey with 560 responses from Australian Generation Y consumers was obtained. Structural equation modelling was used to test and validate the scale.

This paper confirmed the sport team brand personality scale can be applied to an individual athlete. Three dimensions of the scale, namely, competitiveness, morality and authenticity, were found to have predictive power in an athlete’s role model influence. Authenticity was the strongest predictor, followed by morality and competitiveness.

Individual athlete brand personality is powerful in influencing how Australian Generation Y consumers identify with their favourite athlete as a role model. These insights assist brand and marketing managers to use athletes as part of their communication strategies regarding brand and product endorsements.

This research addresses Tsiotsou’s (2012) call to test the robustness and external validity of the sport team brand personality scale and to empirically test how the scale can predict outcomes. The authors succeeded in validating and extending the sport brand personality scale to an individual athlete level in a new country and consumer segment. The scale was found to have predictive power in an athlete’s role model influence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether business students' gender, age and culturally‐anchored values affect their perceptions of their university course experience.

Culturally diverse business students (n=548) studying at an Australian university were surveyed using previously established scales. Multivariate analysis was used to test six hypotheses.

High uncertainty avoidance explained unique variation in the six dependent variables analysed using OLS regressions. These dependent variables were: goals, generic skills, good teaching, intellectual motivation, learning community and learning resources. Each of these variables identified different dimensions of a students' university education experience. High collectivism also explained unique variation for all except for goals. High masculinity only explained unique variation for learning resources. Age only produced a unique variance explanation for good teaching, and gender did not produce any. Nevertheless, most of the six independent variables had significant zero‐order correlations with the six dimensions of university experience examined in this study.

Changes in business students' perceptions over time is a limitation of this study, as it was an exploratory cross‐sectional one.

This study's findings may help universities improve their relationship with their total student population by recognising the non‐homogeneous nature of this business student cohort, especially their culturally‐anchored values.

This paper suggests that it may be both possible and useful to identify different student customer segments based on students' culturally‐anchored value orientations, which may be valuable to universities in their efforts to attract, retain and grow an ongoing relationship with students, especially international full‐fee paying students.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether the Generation Y segment in Australia perceive athletes as role models, and if so, do they engage in positive word‐of‐mouth (POWM) recommendation behaviour. This paper also explores the influence of gender and English language enculturation on PWOM recommendation behaviours of Generation Y.

Interviewer administered questionnaires were conducted on members of Generation Y in Melbourne, Australia. A series of correlation and OLS regression analyses were performed on a sample of 221 Generation Y consumers.

This study found that Generation Y generally perceives athletes as role models and this influenced the Generation Y segment to engage in POWM recommendation behaviours for products/services/brands endorsed by the athlete role model. The results indicate that gender does not play a significant role in this process. However non‐English language enculturated members of Generation Y were found to be more likely to engage in POWM recommendation behaviours for endorsed products/services/brands.

Athlete endorsement strategies are expected to be effective in reaching and communicating with the lucrative Generation Y population. As a result, firms and marketing practitioners should strongly consider utilising favourite athletes of Generation Y to endorse products/services/brands to this consumer segment.

Past studies suggest that gender is a common differentiator in Generation Y's willingness to engage in POWM recommendation behaviour about endorsed products/services/brands by their favourite athlete. This study suggests that English language enculturation may be more effective in differentiating such behaviour, particularly in an Australian context.

This paper aims to investigate the antecedents to attitudinal and behavioural loyalty of customers of Internet service providers (ISPs). In addition, this study endeavours to identify the relationship between overall service quality and cognitive as well as affective evaluations of customers. An assessment of service quality dimensions is also included to fill the void of research on modelling service quality in high tech services.

The paper reviews the most cited articles on the topic published in academic journals with a view to identify dimensions that customers use to evaluate the quality of a service providers, and to determine loyalty formation through customer cognitive and affective evaluations in Internet industry.

The exogenous constructs of the conceptual model include influential factors such as network quality, customer service, information support and security which make up the perception of overall service quality. The endogenous constructs include cognitive and affective determinants such as customers’ trust, satisfaction, commitment, value and resultants – attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty.

The study proposes that by enhancing service quality, firms can influence customers’ satisfaction, trust, commitment and value, and ultimately loyalty, which are critical for an ISP’s success and long-term sustainability. Moreover, applying the findings of this study, ISPs can strategise in making customers more central in their day to day operations, which would create competitive advantage for the companies.

This study aims to investigate the antecedents to service quality and their relationship with affective evaluations of customers of internet service providers (ISPs) in Thailand.

In order to achieve the research objectives, a model is proposed. The literature review and formulation of hypotheses related to each construct are then discussed.

The findings reveal that service quality is influenced by network quality, customer service, information support, privacy and security. Service quality in turn also impacts customer loyalty attributes, including satisfaction, value, trust and commitment. Satisfaction is a determinant of customer trust, whereas the direct relationship between value and customer commitment is not supported.

The model in this study was tested in the Thai ISP context which may be different in other service industries as well as in other countries.

By enhancing service quality, firms can influence customers' satisfaction, value, trust and commitment, which are critical for an ISP's success and long-term sustainability.

By applying the findings of this study, ISPs can strategise in making customers more central in their day-to-day operations, which would create competitive advantage for them.

As one rewinds the clock to the early days of the twenty‐first century, it can be quite surprising to realise how much the consumer landscape has changed from what it is today. This paper aims to introduce the special issue and attempts to take stock of the last decade and reflect on the transformation of key areas of the changing marketplace and its impact on consumption.

A critical and integrative appraisal of emerging issues in consumer marketing is used to develop a framework for reviewing the relationship between demand‐side and supply‐side trends in the consumer landscape.

In reviewing major developments and trends of the last decade, the paper argues that the consumption landscape now operates in a rapidly changing environment that can be characterised as both turbulent and disruptive. These major shifts are emerging from the physical environment, technological innovation and the transformation of major markets. In all these scenarios, significant events are being experienced which disrupt the ways in which consumers behave and a retrospective of the first decade underscores several of these major shifts.

All of the papers included in this special issue have used one or more methods of inquiry based on conceptual, qualitative and/or quantitative approaches and open up fascinating avenues for future research in areas such as social marketing, branding, anti‐consumption, co‐creation, and social networking to name a few.

The last decade saw a great deal of attention given to social marketing and tackling the “dark side” of marketing to selected groups, often identified as vulnerable consumers. In other cases, such as with “anti‐consumption”, consumers totally avoid consuming certain products which, as a result, may have negative consequences not only for them but for the whole of society such as is the case with the avoidance of vaccination.

This paper is a unique examination of the last decade and its impact on consumer marketing backed up by a collection of strong contributions in emerging areas such as anti‐consumption, social networking, health promotion and addictive products, consumer co‐creation, sustainability and fair trade, branding and multicultural markets.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way technology affects the provision of prehospital emergency care, upgrading the quality of services offered and significantly reducing the risk of premature termination of the patients.

The paper presents the development of the eEKAB, a pilot emergency medical information system that simulates the main services offered by the Greek National Instant Aid Centre (EKAB). The eEKAB was developed on an agile system methodology. From a technical perspective, the features and the technology were mainly chosen to provide reliable and user-friendly interfaces that will attract many users. eEKAB is based on three important pillars for offering health care to the patients: the “On-time Incident Reporting”, the “On-time Arrival at the Incident” and “Transfer to the Health Center”. According to the literature review, the emergency medical services (EMS) systems that combine all the features are very few.

It reduces the total time of the EMS procedures and it allows for an easier management of EMS, by providing a better allocation of human resources and a better geographical distribution of ambulances. The evaluation displayed that it is a very helpful application for the ambulance drivers as it reduces the ambulance response time to arrive in the patient's location and contributes significantly to the general performance of the prehospital medical care system. Also, the survey verified the importance of implementing eEKAB on a larger scale beyond the pilot usage. It is worth mentioning that the younger ambulance drivers had a more positive view for the purpose of the application.

The paper clearly identifies implications for further research. Regarding interoperability, the mobile app cooperates with the Operational Center of EKAB, while further collaboration could be achieved with other operational ambulance handling center, mainly, of the private sector. The system can evolve to include better communications among the EKAB departments. Particularly, the ambulance crew as well as the doctors should be informed with more incident features such as the emergency signal so that they know whether to open the siren, the patient's name, etc. The authors are currently working on implementing some features to provide effective medical health services to the patient in the ambulance.

eEKAB will have very significant implications in case of its enforcement, such as the reduction of the total time of EMS procedures with a corresponding reduction of the operating costs of an accident management system and an ambulance fleet handling system while in parallel informing in time the doctors/clinics. It will provide better distribution of ambulances as well as of total human resources. It will greatly assist ambulance drivers, while reducing ambulance response time to reach the patient's location. In other words, the authors will have a better performance of the whole prehospital care system.

Providing emergency care before the hospital is of great importance for upgrading the quality of health services provided at the accident site, thus significantly reducing the risk of premature death of patients. This in itself has a significant social implication.

The paper demonstrates a solid understanding in the field of the EMS systems and the corresponding medical services offered. It proposes the development of an effective, feasible and innovative EMS information system that will improve the existing emergency health care system in Greece (EKAB). An in depth literature review and presentation of the adopted new technologies and the respective architecture take place. An evaluation and statistical validation were conducted for proving the high applicability of eEKAB in case of real-life running.

The purpose of this study is threefold. First, human brands are conceptualized and the distinction between them and personal brands is established. Second, human-brand research is reviewed in light of a strategic brand management framework and gaps in the knowledge that may suggest new research pathways are identified. Third, the extent to which a brand management model designed for products could be applied to human brands is explored.

A systematic literature review was conducted in this study. The content analysis of the selected set of papers allowed the assessment of the state of this field of brand management and the identification of proposals for future research.

Substantial research exists on different aspects of human brands. However, these studies are fragmented in nature, thus highlighting the need for specific and complete human-brand management models.

A limitation of this literature review is that it is based on a sample of papers collected by one specific criterion; furthermore, the way the papers were classified may be challenged. However, this study provides a comprehensive picture of studies on human brands available today.

A parsimonious distinction and connectivity between human and personal brands suggest a branding-by-individual continuum. Additionally, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first identifiable one that summarizes the growing literature on human brands, reveals important gaps in the knowledge and calls for the development of particular human-brand management models.