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Online brand communities (OBCs) and their role in determining consumer behavior is gathering interest of theorists and practitioners. This study examines the role of OBCs in influencing the level of involvement leading to perceived sport team brand equity (STBE) of sports fans from a social exchange theory perspective. The role of self-congruity as a moderator is examined to determine the differences in the level of involvement and attachment of fans in OBCs.

Based on quantitative research and convenience sampling, data for the study were collected from 394 football fans who were existing members of OBCs. The research model is tested using partial least square structural equation modeling.

The results show a direct and significant impact of brand involvement on brand attachment. Consumer brand engagement (CBE) mediates the relationship between brand attachment and STBE. While self-congruence does moderate the effects between brand involvement and brand attachment.

The study reveals the role of community related factors on sports fans’ perceived STBE. The study also provided a novel approach to examine sport fan behavior in social media through the lens of social exchange theory. Finally, it is providing a novel approach in examining role of OBCs in influencing behavior of sports team fans towards the team and brand.

Users frequently target rival brands through direct criticism or indirect customer insults, yet the impact of such attacks on brand advocacy remains unexplored. The purpose of this study is to classify online attacks into brand-targeted attacks and consumer-targeted attacks and further investigate their differential impacts on brand advocacy and the underlying mechanism and a boundary condition of those impacts.

Three experimental studies using different types of brands (electronics, universities and sports footwear) are conducted to examine the effects of brand-related attack targets on brand advocacy.

This research shows that consumer-targeted attacks trigger higher brand advocacy through increasing perceived identity threat than brand-targeted attacks. Moreover, the effect of consumer-targeted attacks (versus brand-targeted attacks) on brand advocacy is mediated by perceived identity threat and mitigated when consumers’ identification with the attacked brand is strong.

The study’s findings yield practical applications for marketers and brand managers, assisting them in understanding consumers’ reactions to brand attacks. This study serves as a reference for firms to consider leveraging the association between brand identification and brand-related attack targets and uniting with loyal brand fans to manage online brand conflicts.

The present study extends prior literature on customer-brand relationships in the context of online attacks. Through investigating the impacts of brand-targeted and consumer-targeted attacks on brand advocacy, this research offers theoretical insights into consumers’ responses to online attacks with different targets.

Built upon customer engagement marketing theory and uses and gratification theory, this study examines the link between individual social media marketing (SMM) performance indicators and restaurant sales performance at the firm level. Moreover, the study investigates the moderating effect of advertising expenditure on this proposed relationship.

Random effect regression models were developed in Stata to examine the associations between SMM performance indicators, advertising expenditure, and restaurant firm revenue. Twelve years of SMM data from brands' Facebook pages were collected with a web scraper built in Python. Natural language processing was used to analyze the sentiment of user-generated content (UGC).

The results suggest that restaurant annual sales revenue increases as the volume of brand posts, “like”s, “share”s and positive comments on restaurants' Facebook pages increase. However, the total number of comments and the number of negative comments show non-significant associations with revenue. Firm advertising expenditure negatively moderates the relationships between sales revenue and the number of “like”s, “share”s, total comments and positive comments.

Restaurants benefit from making frequent posts on SNSs. Promotions that motivate online users to “like”, share, and comment on brand posts should be implemented. Firms with limited advertising budgets are encouraged to actively create buzz on SNSs due to evidenced stronger effects of UGC on sales performance than large advertisers.

This research bridges the gap by studying the effects of individual SMM performance indicators on restaurant financial outcomes. The findings support the effectiveness of SMM; and, for the first time, demonstrate that SMM could generate a more profound impact for firms with low advertising budgets.

The manuscript aims to introduce the managerial practice of content recycling – that is, a firm's recycling of its posts on social media platforms. I define and distinguish the phenomenon from related ones and offer propositions for future research to test empirically.

Review of the practitioner literature, in-situ observations with content managers, and a survey of content managers and Facebook users.

Managers recycle their posts to recoup the costs of content. Under some conditions, recycled content may yield more benefits than costs.

I define the phenomenon of content recycling and differentiate it from related terms. I offer propositions for future research.

I inform managers of the benefits and costs of recycling content and conditions under which benefits may override costs.

The research is novel and helps develop a common managerial practice.

Social commerce (s-commerce) offers community-based platforms that facilitate customer-to-customer interactions and the development of customers' social shopping-based experience. While prior research has addressed the role of customer engagement (CE) in boosting s-commerce-based sales and performance, insight into the effect of s-commerce attributes on CE remains tenuous. Addressing this gap, this study examines the role of specific s-commerce attributes (i.e. community, collaboration, interactivity and social dynamics) on CE, which is, in turn, proposed to impact customers' repurchase- and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) intention.

A web-based survey was deployed to target users of a popular s-commerce platform, Etsy.com. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was, then, used to analyze the survey data collected from 390 users.

The results reveal that the four examined attributes positively affect CE. The findings also demonstrate CE's positive effect on customers' repurchase- and eWOM intention.

Though CE has been identified as a key s-commerce performance indicator, little remains known about the role of specific s-commerce attributes in driving CE, as, therefore, explored in this research. Specifically, the authors examine the role of s-commerce-based community, collaboration, interactivity and social dynamics on CE. Their analyses also corroborate that CE, in turn, drives customers' post-purchase (i.e. repurchase/eWOM) intention. Managerially, our findings can be used to develop more engaging s-commerce platforms.

Social media has become an inescapable part of our lives. However, recent research suggests that excessive use of social media may lead to fatigue and users’ disengagement. This study aims to examine which brand-related factors contribute to social media fatigue (SMF) and its subsequent role on driving lurking behaviors, particularly among young consumers.

Based on survey data from 282 young users of social media, a holistic model of brand-related drivers and outcomes of SMF was tested, emphasizing the contribution of brands’ social media presence to users’ disengagement.

Research shows that branded content overload and irrelevance, as well as branded ads intrusiveness significantly impact SMF, which in turn plays a mediating role between brand-related drivers and lurking behaviors. The authors further conclude that the impact of SMF on lurking is stronger for users who follow a larger set of brands.

The study contributes to social media research by addressing its “dark side” and empirically validating the role of brands’ social media presence in developing young users’ fatigue and disengagement. The study further adds to the scant literature on SMF, which was mostly developed outside the branding field. Research also provides valuable insights to brands on how to improve their social media performance.

This paper aims to explore the causal relationship of user-generated content (UGC) on trust in UGC (TUGC), destination image (DI) and tourist visit intention (VI) guided by the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. This work further examined the mediating effect of TUGC and DI between UGC and VI.

Data were collected through online and personal-administered surveys and randomized sampling. This work employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed model empirically.

In line with the SOR Theory, this work found UGCs that induce positive emotions and connection to the users motivate VI rather than UGCs that are predominantly factual. Furthermore, UGCs are considered reliable, authentic and less biased than brand-generated content. The findings of this work contribute to the theoretical understanding of UGC to VI in a destination.

This work proposes that destination marketers prioritize UGC that evokes positive emotions and connections with users, as it is more effective in encouraging VI. Strategies such as incentivizing content creators, improving online presence and engaging influencers can maximize UGC. Enhancing online traffic quality, visibility and interaction and implementing content policies are crucial for UGC's effectiveness. Marketers should align destination products with tourists' interests and collaborate with influencers for affiliate marketing to increase tourist-generated UGC. Furthermore, improved connectivity encourages UGCs about the destination.

In tourism marketing, UGC has become a valuable information source for tourists in making informed travel decisions. UGC is a tourist-generated content that offers factual information and authentic experiences through images, videos or text posted through social media platforms. UGC is considered more reputable than travel firms and the mainstream media as an information source. Due to the limited works on UGC in the literature, the influence of UGC on tourists' VIs has remained unexplored at the time of writing. This work bridges this gap by empirically examining the impact of UGC on Gen Z tourists' VI guided by the SOR theory.

This research addressed online customer-to-customer (C2C) incivility during digital service recovery.

To examine the effectiveness of managerial responses to online C2C incivility post a restaurant service failure, a 2 (Managerial response: general vs specific) x 2 (Failure severity: high vs low) quasi-experimental design was employed. A pretest was conducted with 123 restaurant consumers via Amazon Mechanical Turk, followed by a main study with 174 restaurant consumers. Taking a mixed-method approach, this research first asked open-ended questions to explore how participants perceived the restaurant’s motivation for providing a generic versus a specific response. Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS procedure was then performed for hypotheses testing.

The results revealed significant interaction effects of managerial responses and failure severity on perceived online service climate and revisit intention, mediated by trust with managerial responses.

This research yielded unique insight into C2C incivility management literature and industry practices in the context of digital customer service recovery.

This study aims to examine the younger generations’ experiential consumption of foreign contemporary music online (i.e. digital music streaming services) by generation and gender in the US market.

The author proposes a sequential experiential consumption model by applying Jacoby’s refined stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory to better understand the experiential sequences in foreign music consumption among young generations in the US market. The proposed model, using structural equation modeling (SEM), examines a cognitive permeable role and a hierarchical affective mediating role. Also, moderating roles of generation and gender are simultaneously tested in overall and specific causal relationships.

The refined S-O-R framework is superior to a linear one in better understanding young consumers’ online experiential foreign music consumption behavior. Moreover, hierarchical sequenced affective organismic behavior is crucial to enhance young consumers’ online music consumption experiences to regulate subsequent behavioral responses. Furthermore, gender differences but no generational differences exist in the experiential consumption process among young consumers. Nevertheless, the strength of S-O-R factors affecting experiential consumption seems idiosyncratic simultaneously in gender and generation.

The study suggests foreign music streaming services boost profitability by focusing on young consumers' psychological ownership and tailored experiences, encouraging a shift from freemium to premium subscriptions. Also, the findings recommend adopting phygital experiences using technologies like AR, VR and MR to enhance engagement and create unique, emotionally resonant experiences for young consumers, thus fostering a more profitable business model.

The authors address under-researched topics relevant to young generations by applying Jacoby’s refined S-O-R framework to foreign music consumption through online streaming. This approach delves into a lesser-explored consumer behavior framework, highlighting young generations’ musical trends. The model reveals cognitive and affective roles, offering advantages over traditional linear S-O-R models. It also uniquely incorporates the moderating effects of generation and gender in music consumption studies, addressing a gap in music-related studies.

This paper aims to analyse the determinants of the intention to share a post about an environmental issue posted by a tourism destination on Facebook. The authors use the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model as a theoretical framework and consider cognitive variables (destination social responsibility, tourist social responsibility and three types of congruence) as antecedents of emotions and of the tourists’ response (intention to share). Specific factors related to the social platform (attachment and active use of social media) are also included.

The model was tested for two destinations with different positioning (green tourism versus sun and beach). For the sampling strategy, the authors conducted an online poll targeting Facebook users who had undertaken at least one trip in the previous year. The sample consisted of 1,001 individuals.

The empirical evidence obtained indicates that consumer–cause congruence is the most important variable for explaining the intention to share the post for both destinations, with the destination–cause congruence being non-significant. The authors also observed that active participation on the social network stimulated the intention to share this specific content.

Unlike prior research, this paper examined consumer motivators for engaging with online corporate social responsibility content for tourism destinations, specifically focusing on destination social responsibility in sustainable tourism. The model also incorporates three types of congruence, revealing variations in their impact on explaining the intention to share sustainability-related posts.