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This research aims to investigate the showrooming phenomenon in the context of the evolving omnichannel shopping landscape, which seamlessly integrates both physical and online retail channels. Showrooming, wherein customers browse products in physical stores but ultimately purchase from online competitors, poses a potential threat to the job security and job satisfaction of sales staff in brick-and-mortar (B&M) stores. To address this issue, this study explores the relationship between showrooming, self-efficacy, sales performance, job insecurity and job satisfaction of sales staff, using the job demands-resources (JDR-R) model as a theoretical framework.

This research employs quantitative research methods and gathers data from 219 sales staff working in Indian retail stores. Structural equation modeling is used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results indicate that showrooming is associated with a decrease in the self-efficacy, sales performance and job satisfaction of sales staff. Furthermore, the result indicates that showrooming is positively associated with increased job insecurity among the sales staff.

This study offers valuable contributions to existing literature and offers insights for both retailers and salespeople regarding the potential repercussions of showrooming. It also suggests coping strategies to address the challenges posed by showrooming and the behavior of showroomers.

The concept of “participation” has become a buzzword in contemporary public governance models. However, despite the broad and significant interest, defining participation remains a debated topic. The aim of the current study was to explore how participants perceived and interpreted the meaning and scope of participation.

This study is part of a four-year (2019–2022) longitudinal research project investigating stakeholder participation in the context of developing and establishing a strategic regional plan in Region Skåne in southern Sweden. The research project has a qualitative approach and uses interviews with different stakeholder groups such as municipal politicians and public officials and a survey as empirical material.

The authors developed a participation spectrum including eight types of participation: to be open, to be informed, to be listened to, to discuss, to be consulted, to give and take, to collaborate and to co-create. The authors also identified four different purposes of participation: creating a joint network, creating a joint understanding, creating a joint effort and creating a joint vision. The spectrum and the purposes were related through four characteristics of participation, i.e. involvement, interaction, influence and empowerment.

The study rests on a single case, and so the results have limited transferatibility.

Researching participation in terms of the participants' perceptions contributes a new perspective to the existing literature, which has commonly focussed on the organizers' perceptions of participation. Moreover, in order to clarify what participation meant to the participants, the study puts emphasis on untangling this from the why question of participation.

This paper looks at how stakeholders co-create value at mega-events from a service ecosystem perspective. Despite the growing interest, little is known about how value is co-created through such initiatives for individual stakeholders and the community.

Drawing on institutional and stakeholder theory, the study focuses on Cortina 2021, the World Ski Championships held in Italy in February 2021. It investigates how multiple actors co-create value within a service ecosystem through qualitative interviews with key stakeholders combined with the analysis of official documents and reports.

The research established that key stakeholders were willing to get involved with Cortina 2021 if they recognised the value which could be co-created. Such an ecosystem requires a focal organisation with a clear regulative and normative framework and a common cultural basis. The latter helped resilience in the extraordinary circumstances of Cortina 2021 and safeguarded long-term impacts, even though the expected short-term ones were compromised.

From a managerial point of view, the evidence from Cortina 2021 shows how a clear strategy with well-defined stakeholder engagement mechanisms can facilitate value co-creation in service ecosystems. Moreover, when regulative and normative elements are blurred because of an extraordinary circumstance, resource integration and value creation processes need to be entrusted to those cultural elements that characterise an ecosystem.

The study takes an ecosystemic approach to mega-events to explore value creation for the whole community at the macro level, not only at the individual or organisational level, even during a crisis, which greatly impaired the preparation and running of the event.

This study aims to examine the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels in service ecosystems, analyzing the case of a tourist destination.

A questionnaire was designed based on previously validated scales. The questionnaire was distributed through the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram. The survey yielded 1,476 valid responses for three types of destinations. Structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis were performed to test the hypotheses.

Aggregate service experience and memorable customer experience (MCE) in service ecosystems are determined by customer experiences at a dyadic level. Service experience at the ecosystem level is formed from ordinary experiences at the actor level, while MCE is formed from extraordinary experiences at the dyadic level. The type of ecosystem moderates the relationships between the variables but does not alter the importance of each of them.

The relationship between the co-creation of customer experiences at different levels of service ecosystems (dyadic vs aggregate) is addressed. A relationship is established between the ordinary and extraordinary character of experiences and their memorability at the ecosystem level.

This paper aims to provide a conceptual understanding of the drivers and outcomes of actor opportunism in the context of the three key actors of the sharing economy – the service provider, the platform and the consumer.

The research uses a conceptual approach by drawing on literature from within and outside of marketing.

The current research introduces a conceptual framework of opportunism in the sharing economy with seven underlying propositions. The framework posits a U-shaped moderating effect of social capital for the relationship between opportunism and its drivers, actor vulnerability and asset specificity. Furthermore, a 2 × 2 matrix consisting of two types of opportunistic behaviors (active and passive) and two coping strategies by other actors (defensive and nondefensive) suggests that passive opportunism tends to lead to value codestruction independently of the coping strategies employed by other actors. Counterintuitively, the combination of active opportunism and defensive coping strategy presents an opportunity for value cocreation due to its potential to break up older structures and generate new ones.

While our research provides a higher-level understanding of opportunism pertaining to platform, consumers and service providers in the sharing economy, future research could situate our framework within specific regulatory environments, incorporate the role of competitors and examine individual interaction effects between type of opportunism and coping strategies.

The framework enables service providers, platforms and consumers to identify drivers of opportunistic behaviors of their partners and discern instances in which opportunistic behaviors lead to value codestruction for all actors.

This research transcends prior work on the bright and dark sides of the sharing economy by identifying its dynamic nature and examining the contributing role of opportunism.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the marketing and communication activities carried out by small management consulting firms and how they relate to customers.

After the framing of the literature on the subject, the study is based on the results of a survey carried out through an online questionnaire. The sample under investigation is represented by 914 small consulting firms located in central Italy.

Results show that half of the sample carried out marketing and communication activities, mainly through the website and social media, while others participating in events as speakers at conferences. It also emerges that management consulting firms carry out activities aimed at maintaining relationship with customers even if they do not invest time in market research in order to find potential and new clients.

The study suggests that management consulting firms should adopt a systematic and strategic approach to communication and should develop a complete and integrated digital communication strategy, as well as to rethink the consulting business model.

There are no previous studies that provide insight into the everyday practice of marketing and communication of small management consulting services in today's dynamic and changing economic environment.

This paper aims to examine the transformative role of experience identification in connecting online communities to offline experiences. This study also aims to understand if consumers in the pre-experience stage can identify with an experience and how this influences their subsequent evaluations, focusing on the impact of online community participation.

A theoretical model, based on social identity theory, is tested using a two-study approach. Study 1 involves first-time cruisers in an online cruise community. Study 2 extends the findings to a broader range of travel experiences, including both first-time and repeat travelers.

Results suggest that experiential consumers can identify with an experience in the pre-experience stage through two key community participation variables – experience imagination and emotional significance. Experience identification directly influences loyalty, which subsequently impacts word-of-mouth and satisfaction post-experience.

Service providers should leverage forums, brand communities and social media platforms to enhance interactivity between experienced and first-time customers. Strategies are presented to foster user interaction and interconnectedness, boosting consumer satisfaction and loyalty and providing a competitive advantage from the outset of the customer journey.

Despite the recognized importance of experiential consumption, the marketing literature has largely focused on the actual consumption experience, overlooking the pre-experience stage. This research highlights the critical role of the pre-experience stage, showing that the value of an experience begins before the service encounter and continues after it ends.

The wine market has witnessed intensified competition across all aspects. However, there is a limited systematic assessment of wine marketing literature. This study employs bibliometric and thematic content evaluation methodologies to present a comprehensive summary and trend of the existing research in wine marketing.

This integrates bibliometric and thematic content analytical techniques to trace the evolutionary arc of wine marketing research, underpinned by a framework-based evaluation - the 4 Ws (what, where, why, and how) to give a thorough overview of wine marketing literature. We draw on the thematic structure of wine marketing research by conducting keyword co-occurrence, thematic, social network, and cluster-based content analyses. A total of 291 publications from peer-reviewed journals, spanning the years 2001–2023, were examined in the present study.

The bibliometric analysis is used to determine the most notable journals, authors, nations, articles, and themes, thereby offering a comprehensive understanding of the publication trends within the sphere of wine marketing. Based on the findings, this study advocates a research agenda to extend further contributions to the field of wine marketing.

The study performs a comprehensive analysis of the publication patterns, influential authors, and emerging trends within the wine marketing research field. It provides a unique insight into the evolution and development of wine marketing as a scholarly discipline, facilitating future research directions and knowledge advancement.

In modern societies, consumer well-being is dependent on choices regarding complex services, such as investments, health care, insurance and lending. However, evaluating costs of such services is often difficult for consumers due to a combination of limited cognitive resources and complexity of the service. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine to what extent three specific consequences of complexity influence consumer tendencies to make mistakes when evaluating the costs (or price) of complex services.

Three studies were conducted (survey: n = 153, experiment: n = 332 and conjoint analysis: n = 225), all focusing on how consumers evaluate costs in the complex mutual fund setting.

The authors find that consumers struggle with estimating and using cost information in decision-making in the complex services setting. Consumers of complex services frequently underestimate the costs over the long-term, may see costs as a signal of service quality and are susceptible to influence from presentation formats when evaluating costs.

The study investigates mutual funds, which is one example of a complex service. In order to get a full picture of how consumers deal with costs in complex setting, future research needs to expand this focus to other types of complex services.

The results have implications for both marketers of complex services and policymakers. For marketers, this paper highlights that competing with a low-cost strategy may be difficult in the complex services setting as consumers may lack the ability to actually evaluate what they pay over the long term. For policymakers, increased simplification of prices may be an attractive option. However, it is important that this simplification is done in a way that increases the possibility to compare prices.

As complexity influences several aspects of decision-making, an understanding of how consumers evaluate costs in complex settings is dependent on taking a multidimensional research approach. This paper makes a novel contribution to the literature on pricing by showing that consumers struggle with multiple aspects when evaluating costs in complex contexts. Understanding these effects is important to policy, as well as to research on the cognitive value of simplicity that is currently gaining traction in marketing research.

The study investigated the impact of perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) on employees' turnover intention in professional team sports organizations, focusing on employee identification and co-production’s role in this context.

Data were collected from 225 employees in professional team sports organizations, with analysis conducted via partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM).

The results indicated that perceived CSR negatively impacted turnover intention. Employee identification mediated the relationship between perceived CSR and turnover intention. Moreover, co-production moderated the relationship between perceived CSR and employee identification, affecting the mediating role of employee identification between perceived CSR and turnover intention.

Prioritizing CSR offers benefits beyond improving an organization’s public image. It also plays a crucial role in enhancing internal organizational dynamics. Specifically, it helps to increase employee identification with the company, reduce turnover intentions, and promote co-production. These outcomes, when combined, lead to the development of a stronger, more cohesive, and resilient organization.

This study provides empirical evidence of the influence of perceived CSR on employee identification and behavior within professional team sports organizations. It underscores the importance of enhancing employee identification to reduce turnover intention.