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The purpose of this paper is to reveal the conditions that facilitate or hinder a favorable reaction of fans to the resurrection of sport club brands.

The proposed model was empirically tested by applying partial least squares-SEM to a sample of 462 fans of five Romanian football and handball clubs that were resurrected in the last five years.

The study showed that a positive relationship between the new and the old club owners, the keeping of the brand name, and the involvement of the club’s historic figures are favorable conditions for a successful resurrection. The faded brands that enjoy salient heritage and numerous loyal fans are more likely to be successfully resurrected. Moreover, when the resurrection is undertaken immediately after the old club’s bankruptcy, fans tend to alienate from the brand, as they consider the new club to be trying to counterfeit the meaning of the faded brand.

The cross-sectional nature of the study and the narrow scope of the empirical data are the major limitations of the study.

Based on the empirical findings, the authors made recommendations to sport entrepreneurs who consider reviving faded clubs, and highlighted the difficulties of the resurrection process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of brand resurrection in the sports industry.

Drawing on signaling theory, this paper aims to argue in favor of a “placebo outsourcing effect” (POE) consisting of a positive relationship between provider’s bluffing and customer satisfaction.

The authors applied prediction-oriented segmentation SEM on a dyadic sample of 171 outsourcing relationships.

The authors highlighted two segments that display a form of POE, representing about three-quarters of the customer-provider dyads. The first segment exhibits a positive relationship between the provider’s bluffing and customer satisfaction that is further strengthened by the provider’s reputation and customer’s operational capabilities, while for the other segment, the provider’s bluffing has positive interactions with both operational capabilities and outsourcing experience. These findings show that service providers have reached the bluffing proficiency that enables them to bluff customer firms with varying levels of operational capabilities and outsourcing experience by using the most appealing signals for every type of customer.

Based on the findings, the authors provided to customer firms extensive guidelines to avoid the POE by frustrating service provider’s bluffing proficiency.

This study’s originality resides in the amendment of the disconfirmation paradigm of satisfaction in the outsourcing context by introducing and testing the POE.

Introduction: Tourism is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and an important source of income, taxes and jobs while being closely linked to social, economic and environmental well-being of many countries, especially of the developing countries. Sustainable tourism can be considered as an extension of the sustainability concept in the tourism sector, to meet the current needs of tourists, without compromising the possibilities of future generations to satisfy their own needs. The sustainable development of the tourism sector cannot be achieved if certain social groups will not be able to continue accessing tourism services and, at the same time, if the negative aspects of the environmental impact are neglected. The components of sustainable development actually form the core of social innovation activities. New business models, digital devices, user-generated content, big data and online commerce have positive effects on sustainable tourism. But the quality of the tourist product is influenced by the quality of the human factor. Activities that can be performed remotely will be based on new technologies, which require new skills and competencies for employees. It is necessary to reconfigure the implementation of the tourist services process, in which the human interaction is reduced and, at the same time, the client experience is stimulated. The COVID-19 crisis can be considered a catalytic moment to reconsider the growth trajectory of the tourism industry, in the sense that all activities can be reorganised so that the development of tourism is sustainable, with a less destructive impact on the social and environmental component.

Aim: The purpose of this chapter is to review the valences of sustainable tourism in the context of societal changes at the European level.

Method: An extensive literature review was carried out and then the authors discussed the critical issues affecting sustainable tourism. To achieve this, the authors incorporated findings from various researches into four categories. The result is a new perspective and a new potential framework for analysis.

Findings: The authors identified four critical factors that have the potential to influence the sustainable tourism development: social innovation, digitalisation, management of crisis situations and human capital development.

Originality of the Study: This chapter offers a new perspective on the factors that influence the sustainable tourism. These new factors offer potential for further in-depth analysis and refinement.