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This paper aims to extend the understanding of how global brands can positively influence brand trust by introducing two new mediating variables – brand affect and brand innovativeness, and testing the moderating role of consumer ethnocentrism in these relationships.

In total, 250 participants completed self-administered online questionnaires in a cross-sectional study in France. Moderated mediation and floodlight analysis were performed.

Brand globalness is positively related to brand affect and this, in turn, is positively related to brand trust. The relationship between brand globalness and brand affect is weaker for ethnocentrist consumers. Brand globalness is positively related to brand innovativeness and this, in turn, is positively related to brand trust. The relationship between brand globalness and brand innovativeness is weaker for ethnocentrist consumers.

A limited number of fast-food brands was analyzed. Future studies should replicate the research model using different product categories to generalize the findings.

This study offers new opportunities for managers concerned by the optimization of their global brands management. First, the results demonstrate the interest of managers to increase the emotional and affective aspects of their global brands to make them more trustable. Second, brand managers should also emphasize the innovative aspects of their global brand. Indeed, it is essential for practitioners not only to propose frequently new and innovative products to consumers but also to follow the latest trends in their market. The more managers provide new, useful solutions to fulfill consumers’ needs, the more consumers will trust those global brands.

The mediating role of brand affect and brand innovativeness in the relationship between brand globalness and brand trust gives new insights on an established relationship.

This paper aims to investigate the underlying process by which a brand’s unit pricing for multiple package sizes influences consumer evaluations by incorporating several mediators and moderators. Two-unit pricing tactics were examined: quantity discounts and surcharges.

Two online experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses. Study 1 examined the mediating role of consumers’ inferred motive for sellers in setting quantity discounts or surcharges in the relationship between the pricing tactics and consumer evaluations. Study 2 incorporated affect as a mediator, and price consciousness and unit price usage as moderators in this relationship.

The mediating role of inferred motive is supported. Motive is related to the sales volume. Furthermore, this mediation effect is more potent when consumers have stronger quantity discount belief. Further, the mediating role of affect is supported. It is more salient when consumers are frequent users of unit prices.

This study compared two pricing tactics and did not include a control condition. The first digit of the unit price for the small package size was different between the pricing tactics.

When applying quantity surcharges to products, it is essential to provide additional information to consumers to preclude the possibility of negative evaluations.

This study makes a significant contribution by offering a deeper understanding of consumer responses to the pricing tactics. In particular, it reveals that pricing tactics trigger both cognitive and affective responses, which then influence evaluations of the pricing tactics. This elicited cognition is associated with deduction about sellers’ brand-size pricing behavior.

Social recommendation has been recognized as a kind of e-commerce with large potential, but how social recommendations influence consumer decisions is still unclear. This paper aims to investigate how recommendations from different social ties influence consumers’ purchase intentions through both behavior and brain activity.

Utilizing behavioral (N = 70) and electroencephalogram (EEG) (N = 49) experiments, this study explored participants’ behavior and brain responses after being recommended by different social ties. The data were analyzed using statistical inference and event-related potential (ERP) analysis.

Behavioral results show that social tie strength positively impacts purchase intention, which can be fitted by a logarithmic model. Moreover, recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect mediate the effect of tie strength on purchase intention serially. EEG findings show that recommendations from weak tie strength elicit larger N100, N200 and P300 amplitudes than those from strong tie strength. These results imply that weak tie strength may motivate individuals to recruit more mental resources in social recommendation, including unconscious processing of consumer attention and conscious processing of cognitive conflict and negative emotion.

This study considers the effects of continuous social ties on purchase intention and models them mathematically, exploring the intrinsic mechanisms by which strong and weak ties influence purchase intentions through recommender-to-customer similarity and product affect, contributing to the applications of the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model in the field of social recommendation. Furthermore, our study adopting EEG techniques bridges the gap of relying solely on self-report by providing an avenue to obtain relatively objective findings about the consumers’ early-occurred (unconscious) attentional responses and late-occurred (conscious) cognitive and emotional responses in purchase decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers of consumer engagement and its consequences via the experiences of mobile money services’ users in Ghana and to discuss its implications for the society, financial service innovation, delivery and operations.

A pre-tested survey instrument was used with a sample of 595 mobile money services users in Ghana. SmartPLS application was used to analyze the data and report findings.

The study shows that perceived risk, consumer empowerment, subjective norm, performance expectancy and effort expectancy influence the affect component of consumer engagement and explain around half of its variance. The effect of perceived risk on consumer engagement was counterintuitive. Perceived risk was significant and positive for cognitive processing, whereas the effect was significant but negative for affect. The authors found support for the positive effect of cognitive processing on advocacy intention but no support for its effect on continuous usage. By contrast, affect strongly influenced both advocacy intention and continuous usage of mobile money services.

The authors highlight the implications of mobile money services to business and marketing/service managers, policy makers, non-banking entities (such as telecoms and financial technology firms) and to the society in general. The authors provide important insights into how service providers can manage consumer engagement process and formulate marketing strategies to target and promote this simple, but innovative service to consumers. Moreover, the authors discuss the societal implications of the study in Ghana, a developing country. The authors recommend several options for future studies in order to stimulate the research agenda on mobile financial services in general.

The present study shows that although mobile money was initially introduced to help consumers who hitherto have no access to formal banking services, this form of banking has become increasingly popular among various consumer segments as its usage and adoption has increased multifold largely in emerging and developing countries. The main contribution of this study is the development and testing of the “mobile money customer engagement model.” Moreover, this study shows the key factors that influence the engagement process and the effects of these factors as analyzed within the context of a developing country.

The purpose of this study is to examine consumer attitude toward a new type of co-branded products, which encompass attributes of high-technology and luxury. The authors named these kinds of co-branded products as “high-tech luxury co-branded products” (HLCPs). Current theoretical approaches used to study co-branding strategies cannot completely explain consumer attitude toward HLCPs. In this study, the authors apply the ABC (affect-behavior-cognition) model of attitudes (as opposed to attitude as a whole) to explore how affect and cognition drive consumer behavior toward HLCPs.

Questionnaires were used and the respondents totaled 483 in period 1 and 331 in period 2. Respondents were collected using convenience sampling technique in one university in Spain and analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The authors finding revealed that consumers use both affect and cognition simultaneously when forming an attitude toward HLCPs. Also, consumers’ perception of product fit represents a more relevant driver of consumer behavior with respect to brand fit. Appropriate theoretical and managerial implications are derived from these results.

This study contributes to the understanding of consumers’ preferences toward high-tech luxury co-branded products.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the diffusion of food safety information through social media affects customers’ purchase intentions in China. This leads to the identification of the critical factors that impact the purchase intention of individual consumer through the diffusion of food safety information using social media in China.

A research model is proposed based on a comprehensive review of the related studies. Such a model is then tested and validated using structural equation modeling based on the survey of 199 individuals who have experience in purchasing food products online while having social media accounts.

The study reveals that friend recommendation and perceived risk directly affect consumers’ purchase intentions and opinion leader recommendation, quality of information, credibility of information and demand for information indirectly affect consumers’ purchase intentions through the diffusion of food safety information using social media in China.

This study is the first of this kind in China for exploring the critical factors that affect consumers’ purchase intentions through the diffusion of food safety information using social media. The findings of the study are significant for the government and food enterprises to make a full use of the advantages of social media to improve the communication of food safety information in ensuring the safety of the food supply in China.

This paper investigates how language homophily between service providers and migrant consumers affects migrant consumers’ intentions to engage with financial and medical service providers.

Three empirical studies were conducted with migrant consumers living in Chile, England and the USA. Participants were presented information on service providers, and language homophily was manipulated between subjects. In the high (low) language homophily condition, service providers were described as having (not having) the ability to speak the native language of the migrant consumer.

Language homophily was found to increase migrant consumers’ expectation of control over a service encounter and, in turn, increase their intention to use a provider’s services. Collectivism was identified as a boundary condition. Among high collectivist consumers, language homophily did not affect service usage intentions; however, language homophily did positively affect service usage intentions among low collectivist consumers.

This work extends prior research on service provider language by finding a positive effect of language homophily on service usage intentions and by identifying mediating (i.e. expected control over the outcome of the service encounter) and moderating (i.e. collectivism) mechanisms for this effect.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of consumers’ moral preferences between moral and economic benefits and consumers’ moral and rational behaviour intentions based on moral decision-making models of previous studies.

Respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire measuring moral and economic benefits, consumers’ moral preferences and moral and rational behaviour intention after reading a stimulus describing imaginary fashion brand A’s unethical activities.

Moral and economic benefits directly and significantly affect moral and rational behaviour intention. Homo economicus evoked by an economic benefit had a negative effect on moral behaviour intention.

This study focused only on a moral benefit and an economic benefit as factors evoking consumers’ moral preferences. This study was also conducted only in a Korean context and considered a specific industry. In future research, the results of this study should be extended to design the “possibility of punishment” to encourage moral behaviour by discouraging the effect of homo economicus. The results have implications for companies such as social enterprises and charities that want to promote consumers’ moral behaviour.

This study provides evidence on why ethical consumers do not always make ethical decisions by confirming that homo economicus has a significant influence on not only rational behaviour intention but also moral behaviour intention.

This study aims to identify the role of consumer characteristics in cultural consumption tendencies. Additionally, the study examines whether country differences and prior experience in the country affect consumers' cultural consumption tendencies.

The effects of cosmopolitanism, consumer ethnocentrism, individual innovativeness, and lifestyle on cultural consumption tendencies were tested. Moreover, we assess whether country type and prior experience are differentiating factors for cultural consumption tendencies. To this end, two countries – the USA and South Korea, representing Western and Eastern cultures, respectively – were selected to achieve comparable results in two different cultures. The research data were collected from 775 people using an online survey method and analyzed using path analysis and an independent samples t-test.

Consumer characteristics affect cultural consumption tendencies. These effects are culture-specific and cultural product-specific. Cosmopolitanism has a positive impact on cultural consumption tendencies, while consumer ethnocentrism has a negative impact. Individual innovativeness and lifestyle partially affected cultural consumption tendencies. Notably, these effects differ by country type. However, cultural consumption tendencies do not differ according to consumers' prior experience.

This study provides insightful information for e-retailers to be mindful of global consumer characteristics. Accordingly, cultural consumption patterns can be used as the basis for market segmentation. In addition, understanding global consumer characteristics and their cultural product- and culture-specific effects on consumption will help cultural industry players in their segmentation and targeting decisions.

Notwithstanding the rich body of literature on cultural consumption, this study provides consumer-level comparative empirical research from a marketing perspective. Essentially, the study is novel as it reveals the consumer characteristics that affect cultural consumption tendencies.

With increasing managerial attention on the strategic promotion of brand-related sustainability initiatives (BSI), this study explores the psychological role of image congruence of the triad comprising brand, BSI and self-concept (brand–sustainability–self-congruence; BSSC). The study assesses the predictive effect of BSSC on consumers' brand evaluations and its variation according to the brand types and consumers' attributes. The purpose is to provide managerial suggestions as well as theoretical implications to build an effective BSI strategy from the perspective of consumer psychology.

The data from 409 respondents in Japan are assessed to discuss the relationships among BSSC based on actual/ideal self-concept (actual/ideal BSSC), brand trust, brand affect and purchase intention according to hypothetical BSI settings.

The results suggest a significant role of BSSC in consumers' brand evaluation mechanisms associated with BSI: mostly, actual BSSC affects non-luxury brand evaluation, while ideal BSSC affects luxury brand evaluation. Likewise, the effects of actual/ideal BSSC seem to vary according to consumers' income levels.

The results suggest that managers strategically consider consumer psychology of brand evaluation with actual/ideal BSSC, income levels and brand attributes such as luxury level in BSI planning. Thus, they may predict its contribution to brand equity, leading to companies' performance being compatible with environmental contribution.

This study uniquely extends the self-congruity theory and discusses the psychological brand evaluation mechanism comprising BSSC, presenting the switching role of actual/ideal self-concept according to brand types and consumers' attributes.