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The COVID pandemic has prompted B2B and industrial marketing scholars to understand more about how external disruptions impact parties involved in B2B transactions. This paper aims to adopt an ecosystem perspective to conceptually classify the interactions between actors involved in B2B ecosystems.

This conceptual paper presents a framework across multiple levels of ecosystem interactions (at micro, meso and macrolevels) to illustrate how value cocreation and knowledge flows (as mechanisms underlying B2B relationships) are related to firm performance.

Based on this framework, this paper offers propositions and several research questions about the effects of disruptions and how they propagate among these essential business ecosystem elements.

This conceptual framework underscores the vital role of relationships and interactions in shaping B2B ecosystems, especially during disruptive periods. With a greater understanding of how these interactions operate across levels (micro, meso and macro), scholars and practitioners may be better able to navigate disruptive periods.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interactive effects of a firm’s strategic sustainability orientation (SSO) and customer relationship capital (CRC) on sustainable product design practices (SPDP).

The authors examine the interactive effects of two firm resources, namely, SSO and CRC, as they relate to SPDP, using survey data from 132 manufacturers in Malaysia.

The findings show that the effect of SSO on SPDP is stronger when CRC is low, than otherwise. The authors also find that the interactive effects of the firm-level resources stated above are stronger when customer pressures (CPs) are higher than when they are low.

The authors contribute to the literature by studying the effects of firm-level strategic resources and their interactions as they relate to SPDP. An important limitation of this research is the usage of single-source data and single-period data.

Managerially, this research provides new insights into how organizations should respond to CPs while understanding the counterintuitive but disabling effects of customer relationship assets.

The findings are important to society because most of the environmental impact arising from the production, consumption and disposal of products is a direct consequence of decisions made at the product design stage and an unintended consequence of the marketing decision-making processes that underlie marketing strategy formulation that fails to recognize ecosystems impact as a standard decision influence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to study the effects of firm-level strategic resources and their interactions as they relate to SPDP.

This study evaluates the factors related to the creation of a human brand in the brand inception stage.

Employing content analysis of expert reviews, we establish the role played by valence (positiveness), depth (number of statements) and timing of subjective and objective critical reviews for human brands. To address these issues, we employ generalized estimating equations to model numerical ratings of celebrity reviews evaluating a nascent human brand.

The findings show that subjective reviews have the potential to influence the probability of survival of a human brand in the brand inception period, are increasingly consequential during the inception period stages and are more influential than objective reviews. We also found that the valence of objective reviews can negatively and significantly relate to human brands in their late inception stage.

This is the first research to demonstrate the importance of critical reviews in building human brands, with a focus on the first moment of a brand's inception. More importantly, this research enriches our understanding of the larger process of personal brand building as it may emerge over time.

Based on persuasion theories, the purpose of this paper is to examine relationships between four types of interactive consumer activities (viewing, liking, sharing and commenting) on hotel brand social networking sites (SNSs) and their cognitive and emotional responses to understand the psychological states underlying such actions and assess their influence on brand attitude and the brand–consumer relationship.

A survey was administrated using an online platform. Participants who had been following a hotel brand on any of its SNSs were screened to fill out the questionnaire. Eventually, 226 valid responses were collected and analyzed using structure equation modeling.

The findings suggest that although both emotional and cognitive involvement can enhance a consumer’s hotel brand attitude, cognitive involvement is associated with a slightly stronger effect in the context of SNSs. Three of the four interactive actions – viewing, liking and sharing – were found to be positively associated with emotional involvement, but only two actions – viewing and liking – were found to be positively related to cognitive involvement. No connection was identified for commenting.

The study suggests that practitioners should turn their attention to the emotional and cognitive responses their SNSs provoke in consumers, rather than simply on the number of likes, shares and comments they induce.

A recent research trend indicates widespread interest in the button functions offered by SNSs (such as “like,” “share” and “comment”) and many studies have tested means of stimulating such physical actions. This study is one of the few to explore the psychological states behind such actions and assess their influence on brand attitude and the self-brand connection.

The author identifies the traits of consumer resilience in emerging markets, classifies these major traits into five categories and analyses the influence relationships among them with distinctive focus on the psychological and personal resilience aspects.

The influence relations among the traits of consumer resilience from an expert perspective were identified with typical focus on electronic supply chains, and later the same was analysed through an intelligent influence modelling method, the grey causal modelling (GCM).

The major traits were analysed using the GCM, where the cause–consequence relations were observed for various objectives and the situational effects are noted. By constructing a magnitude plot and further a causal magnitude table, the important influence traits of consumer resilience for the considered case were observed and the same were auxiliary validated using an interpretive structural modelling (ISM) based approach.

As perceived from the results, it is evident that social support and recommendations from customers emerge as the principal influence traits of consumer resilience from an expert perspective, considering the case. The study can be further extended empirically to validate the findings.

Altogether, the author can recommend for practitioners that the influence of family, society, friends, peers as well as ratings from the customers can determine the level of consumer resilience. Hence, practitioners of customer relationship management can focus on improving the product and brand awareness among customers, so that more customers may recommend for typical products.

Consumer resilience depend on several factors, where the author has identified 25 major traits of the same and classified them into five major categories, including individual psychological factors, individual attitudes, individual socio demographic factors, micro environmental factors and macro environmental factors and the influence relations among them were studied from an expert perspective.

This study aims to examine whether social capital contributes to service firms' resilience during crisis.

This study measures social capital via environmental and social (ES) ratings and firm performance via buy-and-hold-abnormal returns derived from Refinitiv ESG and CRSP databases. Using a sample of 404 US service firms, this study runs cross-sectional regressions to estimate the effect of social capital on service firms' crisis returns.

This study finds that high-social capital service firms outperformed in the first quarter of 2020. The crisis response is heterogeneous among service sub-sectors and diverges (i.e. calming or deepening) over time depending on social capital. Service sub-sector analysis notably posits that social capital impact is positively related to returns of Health- and Business Services and firms with utilitarian nature. The study also indicates that ES commitments targeting internal stakeholders contribute more to resilience. Overall, social capital might be a relevant value driver, generate real impact and provide insurance-like protection for service firms during turmoil.

The service industry is one of the most severely hit industries during COVID-19. However, there is limited knowledge about whether and when social capital creates value in the service industry during crises. This study makes two main contributions: first, it extends to the continuous efforts toward the role of social capital in firm performance, and second, it provides important insights related to the resilience search for service firms.

In line with rapidly developing digitalized marketing technologies, extended service quality has been actively investigated in the exhibition industry. The importance of distinct perceived value linked to service quality has also been emphasized for increasing customer satisfaction. Further, customer loyalty facilitators, such as trust, commitment, and inertia, have been actively discussed in building long-term relationships between firms and their customers. Because establishing an iterative customer loyalty journey is the key to a marketing strategy, the purpose of this study was to clarify how the trinity of extended service quality, distinct perceived value, and customer loyalty facilitators works in that journey.

Partial least squares-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to examine the model fit, composite reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity of the constructs. PLS-SEM was also used to assess direct and indirect (i.e. mediating) effects.

First, the conceptual framework necessary for establishing an iterative customer loyalty journey has been empirically identified. Second, service technology is a key construct of extended service quality as exhibitions transform into digitalized communication platforms. Third, both distinct perceived value and satisfaction act as significant mediators between extended service quality and customer loyalty facilitators.

An effective framework for the iterative customer loyalty journey is theoretically designed and empirically confirmed by drawing a complex but comprehensive map of the trinity (i.e. extended service quality, distinct perceived value, and customer loyalty facilitators).