Search results

Young consumers are increasingly using online reviews and celebrity influence to make purchase decisions. The purpose of this study is to ascertain the influence of online customer reviews, celebrity influencer’s attractiveness, celebrity influencer’s credibility on female millennials’ purchase intention of beauty products.

To validate the research questions and hypotheses, data were obtained from young female consumers using an electronic self-administered survey questionnaire that was close ended. A total of 203 valid responses were obtained from which data were analysed by making use of structural equation modelling Mplus and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 28.

The obtained results showed that the seven hypotheses of the study were positive. However, two hypotheses were negative, namely, celebrity influencer attractiveness did not have a significant influence on the attitude of consumers; and brand loyalty was not significantly correlating with young female consumers’ purchase intention of beauty products.

Given that millennials are known to be active users of social media and often consult online peer product reviews, marketers and practitioners of beauty industry should improve the effectiveness and usability of beauty influencers and online reviews to attract female millennial consumers.

This research contributes to understanding young female consumers’ attitudes towards purchasing beauty products, especially the combined influence of group influence (online reviews) and media influence (celebrity beauty influencers) on such attitudes.

This study explores the tourists' behavioral intention toward tasting ethnic food by proposing 'enjoyment’ as an indirect mechanism in improvising the model of Wang. In other words, when affective and cognitive components are triggered positively while reading online gastronomy reviews on social media platforms, enjoyment is aroused, subsequently enhancing the desire to taste ethnic foods displayed online.

Data from 385 visitors from Kashmir, India, were gathered using a purposive sample technique. The research model was put to the test using PLS-SEM.

Direct and indirect mechanisms influence Behavioral Intention. Enjoyment acts as a mediator. Overall, the results validated the presence of three direct and full mediation paths.

This study will help tourism practitioners justify their promotional activities on social networking sites, particularly in endorsing regional ethnic dishes. For example, tourism authorities could collaborate with bloggers on social media and offer incentives to promote attractive images of ethnic food. Similarly, ethnic food outlets can improve online exposure and interactivity by encouraging travelers to leave feedback after visits.

Unlike other studies, this research broadens our understanding by focusing on direct and indirect mechanisms. The inclusion of a mediator enhanced the total variance of the dependent variable.

Fake news stories have become a central element of crises that corporate public relations practitioners have confronted. Whether such stories are rumors, outright lies or deliberate attempts to discredit corporations, they have the same impact and require specific strategies for public relations practitioners to effectively respond. The purpose of this study is to uncover strategies to manage crises that arise from fake news and if and how these strategies differ for other corporate crises.

In this multi-method study of 21 in-depth interviews and a 8-person focus group with senior-level corporate public relations practitioners, authors explored decision-making strategies for responding to fake news crises. Transcripts of interviews and the focus group were thematically analyzed.

Results reveal insights regarding how public relations practitioners determine if and when to respond to fake news crises in corporations; what response strategies public relations practitioners have the autonomy to employ for fake news crises in corporations, and how public relations practitioners control media narratives during fake news crises in corporations.

The findings guide public relations practitioners to craft an autonomous decision-making process and effective online listening strategies—establishing a watchful waiting approach—and determine if the fake news issue is a passing moment or movement swirling into a crisis.

Few studies have examined the perspectives of crisis communication experts about minimizing and managing fake news crises. The study identifies opportunities for future research focused on crises originating from fake news and disinformation.

Food marketing has long been recognized to influence food preferences, consumption and health, yet little is known about the nature and extent of food marketing to young adults – especially with respect to their real-world encounters with food marketing and the appeals they find persuasive. This study aims to engage young adults to explore the persuasive power of food marketing and its platforms of exposure.

Participatory research with 45 young adults, who used a specially designed mobile app to capture the food marketing they encountered for seven days, including information on brand, product, platform and “power” (i.e. the specific techniques that made the advertisement persuasive).

A total of 618 ads were captured for analysis. Results revealed the dominance of digital platforms (especially Instagram, comprising 43% of ads), fast food and beverage brands (48% of ads) and the top persuasive techniques of visual style, special offer and theme.

This study uniquely draws from framing theory to advance the notions of selection and salience to understand food marketing power. It is the first study of its kind to provide a comprehensive look at the platforms and persuasive techniques of food marketing to adults as selected, captured and tagged by participants. It provides timely insights into young adults and food marketing to adults, including where it is encountered, the (generally unhealthy) brands and products promoted and how it is made meaningful.

This paper aims to clarify the impact of information asymmetry on users' payment rates and examine the role of perceived uncertainty (PU) and acceptable price (AP) in the relationship between information asymmetry and users' payment rates.

To test the influences of information asymmetry on users' payment rates, this paper collects 18,489 transaction data from the Chinese knowledge payment platform Zhihu with a Python crawler. This paper constructs a mediation model to define the relationship between information asymmetry and users' payment rates by introducing PU and AP as the mediators.

Information asymmetry negatively affects users' payment rates. In addition, PU and AP mediate the information asymmetry in users' payment rates bond.

This study only explores the mediators of the information asymmetry users’ payment rates bond, ignoring the effect of potential moderators, which would be an important direction for future research.

The findings of this paper suggest that information communication is essential in knowledge market transactions. Knowledge providers, as well as knowledge platforms, should enhance information exchange with consumers in order to increase product sales.

This paper provides a new perspective for understanding how information asymmetry affects users' payment rates and helps to guide suppliers to improve product quality. The research framework of this paper is universal to a certain extent.

This paper is one of the first to propose using PU and AP to construct a mediation model to study the information asymmetry between users' payment rates relationship. It provides a new perspective for understanding the channel of information asymmetry in customer behavior.

The role of customers has moved from reactive to proactive, and they require more control over digital touchpoints. The quest for authenticity is their response to the dark side of interactive marketing – forms of faking, manipulation and exploitation. Authenticity becomes a key topic in interactive marketing as it reflects how customers assess digital touchpoints. However, there is a lack of comprehensive knowledge of authenticity in the interactive environment.

This article consolidates the authenticity studies in various digital touchpoints using the entity-referent correspondence framework. This research employs bibliometric analysis and thematic analysis of 103 articles in the last 15 years.

Five research clusters are identified: (1) human, (2) brand-generated content, (3) user-generated content, (4) branded platforms and (5) new technologies-based touchpoints (artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality). Most interactive marketing studies focus on human and content authenticity, and new technologies-based touchpoints lack comprehensive conceptualization. The review synthesizes the types of authenticity used in each touchpoint and highlights the importance of true-to-creator-self and true-to-customer-self in customer evaluation. We further propose a research framework with four antecedent groups and outcomes.

Our research supports managers by highlighting the type of authenticity prioritized in each touchpoint's development.

To answer the call from interactive marketing researchers, this research highlights the distinct definitions of authenticity at various digital touchpoints rather than looking at the overall brand. Trends, gaps and future research agenda of the authenticity concept in technology adoption and customer behavior are discussed.

Users' voluntary forwarding behavior opens a new avenue for companies to promote their brands and products on social networking sites (SNS). However, research on voluntary information disseminators is limited. This paper aims to bring an in-depth understanding of voluntary disseminators by answering the following questions: (1) What is the underlying mechanism by which some users are more enthusiastic to voluntarily forward content of interest? (2) How to identify them? We propose a theoretical model based on the Elaboration-Likelihood Model (ELM) and examine three types of factors that moderate the effect of preference matching on individual forwarding behavior, including personal characteristics, tweet characteristics and sender–receiver relationships.

Via Twitter API, we randomly crawled 1967 Twitter users' data to validate the conceptual framework. Each user’s original tweets and retweeted tweets, profile data such as the number of followers and followees and verification status were obtained. The final corpus contains 163,554 data points composed of 1,634 valid twitterers' retweeting behavior. Tweets produced by these core users' followees were also crawled. These data points constitute an unbalanced panel data and we employ different models — fixed-effects, random-effects and pooled logit models — to test the moderation effects. The robustness test shows consistency among these different models.

Preference matching significantly affects users' forwarding behavior, implying that SNS users are more likely to share contents that align with their preferences. In addition, we find that popular users with lots of followers, heavy SNS users who author tweets or forward other-sourced tweets more frequently and users who tend to produce longer original contents are more enthusiastic to disseminate contents of interest. Furthermore, interaction strength has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between preference matching and individuals' forwarding decisions, suggesting that users are more likely to disseminate content of interest when it comes from strong ties. However, the moderating effect of perceived affinity is significantly negative, indicating that an online community of individuals with many common friends is not an ideal place to engage individuals in sharing information.

This work brings about a deep understanding of users' voluntary forwarding behavior of content of interest. To the best of our knowledge, the current study is the first to examine (1) the underlying mechanism by which some users are more likely to voluntarily forward content of interest; and (2) how to identify these potential voluntary disseminators. By extending the ELM, we examine the moderating effect of tweet characteristics, sender–receiver relationships as well as personal characteristics. Our research findings provide practical guidelines for enterprises and government institutions to choose voluntary endorsers when trying to engage individuals in information dissemination on SNS.

This study aims to provide a holistic review of social media influencers (SMIs) research based on a unique approach of bibliometric analysis and content analysis between 2011 and 2020. The review examines the main influential aspects, themes and research streams to identify research directions for the future.

The sample selection and data collection were done from the Scopus database. The sample dataset was refined based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria to determine the final dataset of 183 articles. The dataset was exported in the BibTeX format and then imported into the BiblioShiny app for bibliometric analysis. The content analysis was done following the theory-context-methodology framework.

The several findings of this study include (1) Co-word analysis of most used keywords; (2) Longitudinal thematic evolution; (3) The focus of the research papers as per the theory-context-methodology review protocol are persuasion knowledge model, fashion and beauty industries, Instagram and content analysis, respectively; and (4) The network analysis of the research studies is known as the co-citation analysis and depicts the intellectual structure in the domain. This analysis resulted in four clusters of the research streams from the literature and two emergent themes (Chen et al., 2010)

In general, the previous reviews in the area are either domain, method or theory-based. Thus, this study aims to complement and extend the existing literature by presenting the overall picture of the SMI research with the help of a unique combined approach and further highlighting the trends and future research directions based on the findings of this study.

This study aims to reveal and compare the cultural logics of university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong in their mothering practices to improvise their femininities in constituting their work–family interactions.

This qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, has included 32 Chinese mothers to share about their mothering experiences through semi-structured interviews. This methodological design with feminist lens embraces women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and learns their voices to reinvent their role and bodily engagement in shaping their family dynamics.

This discussion basically reaffirms the argument where the mother’s involvement in their children’s schoolwork becomes one of the core elements in their actual everyday mothering practices. It has further reflected the dynamics of family quality time in the light of mothers’ cultural logics as much as their attentive agency capacity to present their respectable femininity in the form of mothering.

This research process has revealed the actual experiences of the participants from their own narratives. For future research development, data collection can be extended to include the husbands’ profiles and their narratives in understanding their wives’ mothering experiences.

This discussion enriches the work-family literature by extending it to the Asian Chinese context. While the concepts of cultural capital and habitus have been addressed in previous studies, this discussion highlights the agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in their cultural logics to deliver their respective mothering practices. This filtering process to transmit cultural capital to their children is as much as they involve in reproducing status boundaries for the family.

Digitalization, financial technologies and the internet have rapidly advanced the business ecosystem posing a disruptive threat to how operations are fundamentally performed. Global hospitality and tourism companies face this challenge and have been early adopters in this field. This study aims to examine the role of blockchain technology in strengthening the marketing mix (product, price, place and promotion) and the its related impacts on the tourism industry.

This research adopts a systematic literature review approach to synthesize and assess the literature published on blockchain in tourism and tends to build a conceptual framework that depicts the relationships between different constructs.

The results show a lot of interest in using blockchain technology due to numerous advantages to tourism industry. This innovative technology can change this sector radically; assist small economies in strengthening and transitioning to the level of developed economies; and assist tourism companies in eliminating corruption, establishing a secure network and promoting equality between small and large entities.

Through industry examples demonstrating real-life use cases such as startups operating on the application of blockchain in tourism, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is a first attempt to draw the impact of blockchain technology on product, price, place, promotion (4Ps) in tourism sector. The proposed nine relationships can facilitate the future researchers in advancing the state-of-art on how blockchain-based technologies can shape the customers experience through promoting confidentiality, co-creation and effective destination planning.