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This study examined brand hate within the context of the (German) Bundesliga and (Australian) National Rugby League (NRL). The study pursued two research questions: (1) What types of brand hate were expressed towards the Bundesliga and the NRL? (2) To what extent did hateful comments attract more likes than non-hateful comments?

Brand hate was studied in the context of competition restrictions in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We analysed reader comments posted below online articles published in three German (119 articles and 8,975 comments) and three Australian online newspaper articles (116 articles and 4,858 reader comments). The data were analysed deductively.

Non-parametric tests found that all types of brand hate were expressed. Approximately 85% of the hateful comments were mild, or more specifically, cold (n = 445 or approximately 53%), or cool (n = 250 or approximately 30%), or hot (n = 20 or approximately 2%). Hateful comments attracted more likes than non-hateful comments.

This study advances our understanding of how negative brand perceptions underpin an extreme negative emotional reaction in the form of brand hate. The empirical evidence enables brand managers to better address disgusted, angry, or contemptuous consumers (or stakeholders) and consider whether the feeling is enduring, strong or weak, and linked to either aggressive or passive behaviours.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of sports sponsorship on brand equity using two managerially related outcomes: price premium and market share.

This study uses a best–worst discrete choice experiment (BWDCE) and compares the outcome with that of the purchase intention scale, an established probabilistic measure of purchase intention. The total sample consists of 409 fans of three soccer teams sponsored by three different competing brands: Nike, Adidas and Puma.

With sports sponsorship, fans were willing to pay more for the sponsor’s product, with the sponsoring brand obtaining the highest market share. Prominent brands generally performed better than less prominent brands. The best–worst scaling method was also 35% more accurate in predicting brand choice than a purchase intention scale.

Future research could use the same method to study other types of sponsors, such as title sponsors or other product categories.

Sponsorship managers can use this methodology to assess the return on investment in sponsorship engagement.

Prior sponsorship studies on brand equity tend to ignore market share or fans’ willingness to pay a price premium for a sponsor’s goods and services. However, these two measures are crucial in assessing the effectiveness of sponsorship. This study demonstrates how to conduct such an assessment using the BWDCE method. It provides a clearer picture of sponsorship in terms of its economic value, which is more managerially useful.

This study aims to understand how unimanual and bimanual motor actions in the form of writing a message (handwriting and typing) influences consumer behavior intention and attitude.

Three studies have been conducted to understand how the method of writing (typing or handwriting) and moderator type of message (moderator: emotional vs. rational) can influence persuasion variables.

This paper shows evidence that bimanual and unimanual motor actions activate contralateral brain hemispheres and influence consumer behavior. Specifically, how the use of these motor actions leads to a change in behavior intention and attitude. Furthermore, how bidirectional behavior and role-reversal occurs when a unimanual vs bimanual motor actions are used to create an emotional or rational message.

This research focuses on explaining cognitive implications of unimanual vs bimanual motor actions (typing vs handwriting) on self and specifically on consumers when they are exposed to situations of producing/creating a message. Adding further evidence to persuasion, behavior intention and attitude research in embodied cognition (e.g. Petty and Cacioppo, 1986b; Briñol and Petty, 2008), the role of haptic interfaces in online marketing and consumer behavior (e.g. Brasel and Gips, 2015). The authors did not collect any FMRI data but it can be the future scope of this work.

The novel findings of bimanual and unimanual motor actions have a direct application to the current scenario of the online reviews/surveys, which have become a crucial point for e-commerce businesses and retailers that require customers to give feedback. Since, consumer emotions can influence behavioral outcomes and decision making through sensory cues (Abdolmohamad Sagha et. al, 2022; Haase Wiedmann and Labenz, 2022). From this perspective, depending on the mapping/recording of the felt emotionality or rationality by the customer, the feedback method can be oriented in a way to reduce the effect of negative reviews. Further applications are suggested for retailers, increasing prosocial or sustainable behavior and attitudes.

Marketing and advertising research conducted in different social settings is considered important in neuropsychology and neurophysiology research (Pozharliev et al., 2017). Therefore, this research can be extended to test in different social settings and marketing contexts, for example, in the virtual reality, metaverse and gamification. Thus, this research can serve as an avenue to examine the bimanual and unimanual motor actions in a scenario where the participants can combine several motor actions, for example, talking on the phone or walking while filling consumer reviews online/offline and wearing the VR devices like Apple Vision Pro and performing unimanual or bimanual motor actions.

Mapping of human behavior has always been done dependent on the cognition aspect and limited in its scope for embodied cognition. The results can be used for more direct and impactful ways of conducting surveys, feedback and handling communications for major businesses. In addition, it can be a helpful tool for message persuasion for a new brand or increasing awareness about sustainable consumption depending on typed or handwritten inputs by a potential consumer.

The aim of this research was to investigate fans’ responses toward a sponsor that has had a long-standing sponsorship deal with a club and decided also to sponsor the club’s rival.

A long-term sponsorship deal between a retsina wine company and a popular football club and a newly established deal between the company and the main rival club were selected as the research setting. Data were collected from a total sample of 302 participants, fans of the two teams, using an online survey and PLS-SEM was employed to test the relationships of the proposed structural model.

The results provided evidence for the importance of the inclusion of perceptions of fit for both teams to the model as it impacted the responses in the joint sponsorship. Team identification emerged significant for improving fans perceptions of fit between the sponsor and their favorite club but also led fans of the long-term sponsored club to feel betrayed from the sponsor. The sense of betrayal impacted the level of fit, the rejection of sponsorship but did not emerge significant for driving negative responses toward the sponsor’s brand. The same held for the rejection of the joint sponsorship.

This is the very first study that incorporated the effects of the perceptions of fit of two rival clubs to test the effect of sponsorship for a sponsor brand of a deal that includes a longtime sponsored football club and its rival as a newly sponsored one. It is also one of the first attempts that explores relationships between perceptions of fit, sense of betrayal and rejection of a joint sport sponsorship in a rivalry context, highlighting the importance of preventing fans' betrayal.

Public service announcements (PSAs) have been shown to be effective instruments that raise awareness, educate society, and change behaviors and attitudes. Many governments and organizations have utilized PSAs on social media to promote online safety among children and youth. However, we have limited understanding of the range of topics that these PSAs address and how they present their content to audiences. This study provides an inventory of the types of online safety topics that current PSAs address and a catalogue of the types of persuasive features employed by PSAs.

A content analysis of 220 YouTube PSA videos on online safety was conducted. Various topics under the umbrella of online safety were identified. Guided by the prospect theory and exemplification theory, different persuasive features employed in the PSAs were sought.

The findings highlight that the primary focus of these PSAs is on online safety behaviors and general instructions on online hygiene. Interestingly, nearly half of the videos employ a neutral frame, while a significant portion provides no evidential support. Additionally, video length was associated with the number of views and likes it gathered but not with the number of comments.

The inventory of PSAs can help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers better understand the type of content being produced and disseminated online as well as identify topics that are either over or under-represented. Further, the catalogue of the types of persuasive features employed by PSAs would be helpful in guiding research, practice, and policymaking in the context of creating effective online safety videos.

Text classification is a widely accepted and adopted technique in organizations to mine and analyze unstructured and semi-structured data. With advancement of technological computing, deep learning has become more popular among academicians and professionals to perform mining and analytical operations. In this work, the authors study the research carried out in field of text classification using deep learning techniques to identify gaps and opportunities for doing research.

The authors adopted bibliometric-based approach in conjunction with visualization techniques to uncover new insights and findings. The authors collected data of two decades from Scopus global database to perform this study. The authors discuss business applications of deep learning techniques for text classification.

The study provides overview of various publication sources in field of text classification and deep learning together. The study also presents list of prominent authors and their countries working in this field. The authors also presented list of most cited articles based on citations and country of research. Various visualization techniques such as word cloud, network diagram and thematic map were used to identify collaboration network.

The study performed in this paper helped to understand research gaps that is original contribution to body of literature. To best of the authors' knowledge, in-depth study in the field of text classification and deep learning has not been performed in detail. The study provides high value to scholars and professionals by providing them opportunities of research in this area.

Self-presentation is an important aspect of influencer marketing. Drawing upon self-presentation theory and source credibility theory, this study aimed to unravel how the self-presentation strategies of a layperson, opinion leadership and micro-celebrity influence source credibility (i.e. trustworthiness, expertise, physical attractiveness and social attractiveness) and how source credibility, in turn, affects brand responses.

An online experiment among female participants (N = 229) was conducted. Participants were shown a sponsored blog in which the influencer presented herself as either a layperson, an opinion leader or a micro-celebrity.

The study demonstrated that the presentation strategy of a layperson was more persuasive than a micro-celebrity presentation because of higher levels of (1) trust and (2) social attractiveness. In addition, opinion leaders were perceived as having more expertise than laypeople and, therefore, positively enhanced brand responses.

The current findings provide relevant insights into the theoretical mechanisms (i.e. expertise, trustworthiness and social attractiveness) that explain the effects of self-presentation strategies on brand responses.

Our findings imply that credibility perceptions determine the persuasiveness of the SMI. This study showed that layperson and opinion leadership self-presentation strategies are relatively more persuasive.

This study is the first to show that influencers’ self-presentation strategies determine how people respond to the brands that influencers promote. In addition, we show that these effects are explained by the influencers’ trust, social attractiveness and expertise.

While the proliferation of chatbots allows companies to connect with their customers in a cost- and time-efficient manner, it is not deniable that they quite often fail expectations and may even pose negative impacts on user experience. The purpose of the study is to empirically explore the negative user experience with chatbots and understand how users respond to service failure caused by chatbots.

This study adopts a qualitative research method and conducts thematic analysis of 23 interview transcripts.

It identifies common areas where chatbots fail user expectations and cause service failure. These include their inability to comprehend and provide information, over-enquiry of personal or sensitive information, fake humanity, poor integration with human agents, and their inability to solve complicated user queries. Negative emotions such as anger, frustration, betrayal and passive defeat were experienced by participants when they interacted with chatbots. We also reveal four coping strategies users employ following a chatbots-induced failure: expressive support seeking, active coping, acceptance and withdrawal.

Our study extends our current understanding of human-chatbot interactions and provides significant managerial implications. It highlights the importance for organizations to re-consider the role of their chatbots in user interactions and balance the use of human and chatbots in the service context, particularly in customer service interactions that involve resolving complex issues or handling non-routinized tasks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.