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This study aims to address a lack of studies on the attributes of ethnic restaurants that influence customers’ perceptions of authenticity. Particularly, this study extended Gilmore and Pine’s authenticity framework (is the offering true to itself and is the offering what it says it is) by incorporating a servicescape factor (i.e. employees).

This study used a 2 × 2 × 2 between-participants design which examined the effects of using an authentic sauce in a dish, advertising “authenticity” and employing staff from the native culture of the ethnic food on authentic experiences. Follow-up contact was made by phone and mail to assess their memory of ethnic Korean food tried in experimental conditions. Participants were asked how clearly and vividly they could recollect the food experience.

The results showed that all of the tested factors significantly influenced the subjects’ perceived authenticity of the food and recollection of the food experience. However, the authors did not find any significant interaction effects.

This study suggests factors that influence customers’ authentic experiences and memory. Thus, the findings provide important implications for delivering authentic and memorable experiences.

Previous researchers have emphasized the importance and urgency of providing authentic and memorable experiences. However, it is still unclear what specific attributes of ethnic restaurants influence individuals’ perceptions of authenticity and memory.

The extant gastronomy literature has rarely examined a connection between authentic gastronomic experiences and destinations. Specifically, ethnic enclaves, which are unique gastronomic and cultural destinations providing ethnic cuisine and cultural experiences to visitors, have been under-researched. Thus, this study aims to address this knowledge gap.

Using a 2 (history: long vs short) × 2 (location: Central Business District vs rural; main street vs alleyway) × 2 size/ownership type (big vs small; chain vs independent) between-subjects design, two experiments were conducted using a sample of 557 British consumers to test the effect of history, location and size of ethnic enclaves and ethnic restaurants on consumers’ authentic cultural and gastronomic experiences in a UK context.

In Study 1, ethnic enclave’s size affected consumers’ authentic cultural experiences. In Study 2, restaurants’ history and ownership type positively influenced consumers’ authentic gastronomic experiences. Both studies consistently reported the positive relationship between authentic experiences and behavioural intentions.

For ethnic enclaves, the management team may consider expanding the size of ethnic enclaves to increase consumers’ authentic cultural experience. For those ethnic restaurants within the ethnic enclave, any independent or old ethnic restaurants should actively promote both characteristics in their marketing materials to create a feeling of offering authentic gastronomic experiences to customers.

This study identified important ethnic enclave-related factors and ethnic restaurant-related factors forming consumers’ authentic cultural and gastronomic experiences.

Rapid advancements in augmented reality (AR) technology have created new opportunities for service providers and customers to cocreate value. Using AR as a platform for generating authentic experiences, the purpose of this study is to explore the impact of authentic experiences on customers' intention to cocreate value while considering the mediating influence of perceived ethics and customer engagement on this relationship.

An online survey was used to collect data. Participants were asked to download and try the “IKEA PLACE” AR application. The responses were used as inputs into a structural equation model.

The findings reveal that AR generates perceptions of authentic experiences but no direct relationship between authentic experiences and intention to cocreate value was found. On the other hand, the authentic experiences generated through AR increases customer perceptions of ethics and customer engagement, both of which lead to an increased intention to cocreate value.

The findings from this study highlight the importance of authentic experiences within the cocreation process. The results provide a unique understanding of the relationship between authentic experiences generated through AR technology on the intention to cocreate with the service provider, which is fully mediated by perceived ethics and customer engagement. The findings of this study extend the understanding of the cocreation process and the role of technology within this process.

This study examines the impact of incidental pride on consumer preference for attention-grabbing products. This effect is mediated by the desire to gain attention. This study also shows that the effect of incidental pride is qualified by visibility of consumption.

Using two studies with between-subjects designs, this research examines the difference in preferences for attention-grabbing products between hubristic and authentic pride.

Individuals who experience hubristic pride (vs authentic pride) show greater preference for attention-grabbing products and have a strong desire to gain attention from others. However, when consumption is perceived as private (vs public), preferences for attention-grabbing products weaken for those who experience hubristic pride.

This research studies the effect of incidental pride on consumer preference. By examining dispositional pride effects, future research may expand these findings, which enrich the literature on emotion. Future research can identify the potential mechanism for the relationship between authentic pride and preference for attention-grabbing products in the context of private consumption.

Marketers and salespersons can guide and recommend products with attention-grabbing features to customers celebrating a friend’s success in recognition of their innate ability. Second, marketers may encourage consumers to buy attention-grabbing products with targeted advertising or emotion-eliciting advertising (i.e., evoke a certain type of pride).

While prior studies focused on basic emotions, this research has investigated self-conscious emotions that are central to consumer behavior. This research contributes to the understanding of self-conscious emotions that affect consumers’ behavioral responses in unrelated situations. Investigating the two facets of pride, the findings show the impact of pride on the preference for attention-grabbing products and reveals that visibility of consumption moderates the effect of pride.

This research aims to investigate how consumers’ authentic pride versus hubristic pride affects different construal levels of mind-sets and subsequent product evaluation by activating local versus global cognitive appraisal tendencies. Furthermore, this research also examines how lay theories impact the effects of pride on construal levels and how power moderates the effect of hubristic versus authentic pride on product preferences varying in construal levels.

Drawing on cognitive appraisal and construal level theories, this research conducts eight experimental studies to test the hypotheses with an ANOVA, bootstrap analysis and binary logistic regression analysis. The details of the experiments are presented in the paper.

The results show that people feeling authentic (hubristic) pride dominantly adopt a lower (higher) level of construal, and consequently put more weight on feasibility over desirability (desirability over feasibility) attributes. Authentic pride’s inclination to appeal behavior-specific appraisals triggers local appraisal tendencies and bestows lower construal levels, whereas hubristic pride’s inclination to connect the entire self triggers global appraisal tendencies and confers higher construal levels. Incremental (vs entity) theorists are likely to attribute the pride experience to their efforts (traits), and thus feel authentic (hubristic) pride. Furthermore, the product preferences of people experiencing authentic vs hubristic pride depend on their power state.

Notwithstanding the importance of this research, it is worthwhile to note some of its limitations to encourage future research. First, eight studies in the lab were conducted, but no real behavior study was conducted. Although there is a high correlation between the results of lab studies and those of real behavior studies, the authors encourage future researches to elicit the consumers’ pride in the actual consumption situation using a real behavior study. Furthermore, this research mainly focuses on pride, and does not examine other positive emotions, e.g. happiness. Therefore, the authors encourage future research to examine other positive emotions.

The findings suggest that it is appropriate to use construal levels to match consumers’ pride types. In fact, marketers can induce hubristic pride or authentic pride in ads by simply using words or sentences (“feeling proud because of your hard work” or “feeling proud, you are so superior and remarkably unique”), and present either higher- or lower-level construal of desired behaviors to improve advertising effects.

The research contributes to literature by documenting how hubristic/authentic pride can affect distinct construal levels via activating global/local appraisal tendencies. And this research thoroughly illustrates the mechanism by which hubristic/authentic pride activates global versus local appraisal tendencies. More importantly, this research finds how lay theories affect construal level given a pride experience and it also corroborates the moderating effects of power in the proposed relationship, which establish the boundary conditions of the effects of prides on construal levels.

Iran is considered an emerging destination that remains largely under-toured, even as the recent lifting of strict economic sanctions and new international agreements is making it easier to obtain a visa-on-arrival. The Facebook page “See You in Iran” is used to promote the destination and communicate the “real” image of Iran (with numerous updates daily), with semblances of authenticity portrayed through user-generated content (UGC). UGC allows people to post and explore new places, and to interact with those who have just visited. This chapter assesses UGC using an interpretative framework: authentic inquiry (the need for unknown insight into a new awareness), authentic encounter (through relationships, connections, communitas, and belonging), and authentic production (based on feelings, emotions, and sensations).

Marketing researchers currently lack a systematic and empirical understanding of digital social viewing strategies. Drawing on social impact theory, this study aims to investigate if and how firm-initiated digital social viewing strategies (livestreaming vs pre-recorded) influence consumer viewing experiences and consequential behavioral intentions.

A scenario-based experiment was conducted with 462 participants. The study involved social viewing strategies in a new product launch context. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

This study demonstrates that social influence cues (social presence and synchronicity) inherent in a livestreaming strategy induce a more authentic consumer viewing experience than a pre-recorded strategy, which in turn increases consumers’ searching and subscribing intention. However, a company’s social viewing strategy does not moderate the effect of search and subscribe intention on purchase intention.

This study extends the application of social impact theory by showing that social presence and synchronicity impact authentic consumer viewing experiences, which influence consumers’ searching, subscribing and purchasing intention.

This study validates the importance of using social viewing as a viable digital marketing strategy for practitioners. The paper provides marketers ways to increase consumer purchase intention via livestreaming marketing content, particularly for new products.

This study extends the traditional research on social viewing into the realm of digital social viewing. It is among the first to delineate the advantages of both livestreaming and pre-recorded social viewing approaches.

The aim of the study is to capture consumers' conceptualization of ethnic food and ethnic restaurants, focusing on what it takes for ethnic restaurants to be perceived authentic.

Qualitative research, based on semi-structured in-depth interviews which were transcribed and subjected to inductive thematic analysis.

The findings conceptualize what ethnic food and ethnic-authentic restaurant are, leading to formulating the criteria that authentic ethnic restaurant should meet.

Findings have practical implications for restaurateurs interested in establishing themselves as ethnically authentic and for businesses focusing on ethnic food. This study was based on Israeli-Jewish participants; studies with other populations will contribute to the findings' trustability.

This study provides novel and critical insights into ethnic restaurant managements and to the customer conceptualization of the concept of ethnic authentic, demonstrating it being a multifaceted concept.

This study examines the relationship between authentic experience and festival identity as well as place identity among tourists visiting the 2018 Lugang Dragon Boat Festival, one of the largest traditional cultural festivals in Taiwan and the festival with the longest history.

Using an on-site survey with convenience sampling, a total of 1,360 valid questionnaires were collected in Lugang Township, a well-known, popular heritage tourism destination in Taiwan. The study also applies structural equation modeling to examine the proposed research model.

The findings of this study establish that the investigated authentic experience has relationships with image, value, satisfaction and identity, thus filling a research gap. In accordance with the theoretical model, the experience of authenticity affects satisfaction through festival image and festival value and strengthens both the attendee's perception of festival identity and place identity.

This research has both theoretical and managerial values. Regarding its theoretical implications, the study explains the relation between authentic experience and festival and place identity. Thus, it fills a research gap resulting from insufficient academic interest in the relationship between festival satisfaction and the formation of festival and place identity. Regarding its managerial implications, to achieve sustainable festival development, festival information services, programs, souvenirs, food and facilities and the convenience of festival activities should be strengthened.

This study aims to examine the role of authenticity in tourists’ destination selection, analyze the factors that influence tourists to form their initial opinions and explore how tourists construct the authenticity of traditional villages. The authors selected Chengkan village in Huizhou district, Huangshan city, as a case. In the study, the authors constructed an attribute-hardware-software research framework and analyzed tourists’ authentic emic experiences from the perspective of constructivism. The findings of this study suggest that tourists’ destination selection is influenced by authenticity. The destination culture brokers who interact with tourists play an essential role in forming authentic experiences. According to differences in how tourists construct authenticity, the study divided tourists into three types: primitive imagination, aesthetic reality and rational cognition. The results of this study provide a deeper understanding of various viewpoints about authenticity research and contribute to the academic discussion on how to understand the authenticity of unique cultural heritage sites such as traditional villages in the context of tourism development.