Search results

The purpose of this paper is to add to the growing literature addressing whether, and to what extent, brand meaning is determined by corporate and consumer-generated processes. To do this, the authors compared the expression of brand meaning across three key sources i.e. first, brand strategy (i.e. traditional marketing mix); second, corporate-generated media (i.e. web site); and third, consumer-generated media (Facebook).

To address the research question of this study, the authors conducted an in-depth investigation into consumer co-creation experiences in the context of Facebook brand communities. The authors then interpreted the findings in relation to the brand strategy (i.e. marketing mix) and brand meaning expressed via corporate-generated online media (i.e. corporate web site). The authors achieved this by applying a narrative discourse analysis to textual data. To effectively handle the high quantity of textual data spawned via consumer-generated media (i.e. Facebook), the authors used a computer-assisted content analysis application (i.e. Leximancer).

In the analyses the authors found that brand expressions varied considerably across the chosen retail brands, but in all cases strong integration and alignment were present between the corporate and consumer-generated media. Specifically, the authors found that Facebook interactions echoed the brand meanings espoused on the corporate web sites. The findings indicate that online marketers can define the nature of brand co-creation, especially in the context of Facebook interactions.

For marketers who are eager to take advantage of Web 2.0 to build their brand, the findings of this research are highly significant. The authors showed that the brands developed their own interaction profiles, which allowed them to align the Facebook content with their core brand values. The results indicate that sound brand governance is articulated through the effective management of social media touchpoints by providing interactive, content rich, and relevant Facebook sites that echo core brand values.

Even though businesses have now started to penetrate the online social networks and offer direct links from corporate web sites to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, little is known regarding the relationship between social media and traditional media in brand building. This research addresses this gap by undertaking an exploratory study of Facebook brand communities with implications for brand co-creation and brand governance.

This paper aims to explore the relationships between website quality – through consumer-generated media stimuli-, emotions and consumer-brand engagement in online environments.

Two independent studies are conducted to examine these relationships. Study 1, based on a sample of 366 respondents, uses a structural equation modelling approach to test the research hypotheses. Study 2, based on 1,454 online consumer reviews, uses text-mining technique to examine further the relationship between emotions and consumer-brand engagement.

The findings show that all the consumer-generated media stimuli are positively related to the dimensions of emotions. However, only pleasure and arousal are positively related to the three variables of consumer-brand engagement. The findings also show cognitive processing as the strongest dimension of consumer-brand engagement providing positive sentiments towards brands.

The findings provide marketers with an understanding of how valid, useful and relevant content (i.e. information/content) creates a greater emotional connection and drive consumer-brand engagement. Marketers should be aware that consumer-generated media stimuli influence consumers’ emotions and their reaction.

This study is one of the firsts to adapt and apply the S-O-R framework in explaining online consumer-brand engagement. This study also adds to the brand engagement literature as the first study that combines PLS-SEM approach with text-mining analysis to provide a better understanding of these relationships.

Given the importance of performance consistency of chain hotels in customers’ decision-making and service evaluation, this study aims to explore how consistently chain hotel brands offer quality service and carry out their performance from the eyes of customers through online reviews on TripAdvisor of the top five US hotel chains (i.e. Choice, Hilton, InterContinental, Marriott and Wyndham) and their brands.

The research objectives were achieved through methodological triangulation: business intelligence, data visualization analytics and statistical analyses. First, the data collection and pre-processing of consumer-generated media (CGM) (i.e. TripAdvisor online reviews) were performed using business intelligence for further analyses. Using data visualization analytics (i.e. box-and-whisker plot by region and brand), the geographic patterns of performance attributes (i.e. online review ratings, including location, sleep, cleanliness, room and service) were depicted. Using a series of analyses of variance and regression analyses, the results were further assessed for the impacts of brand performance inconsistency on consumers’ perceived value, sentiment and satisfaction.

The empirical results demonstrate that there are significant performance inconsistencies in performance attributes (location, sleep, cleanliness, room and service) by brands throughout the six regions in the US hotel market. More importantly, the findings confirm that brand performance consistency significantly influences consumers’ perceived service quality (i.e. perceived value, satisfaction and sentiment).

This study is one of the first attempts to empirically explore hotel brand performance consistency in the US hotel market from customer reviews on CGM. To measure hotel brand performance in the US hotel market, this study collected and analyzed user-generated big data for the top 5 US hotel chains through business intelligence, visualization analytics and statistical analysis. These integrated and novel research methods would help tourism and hospitality researchers analyze big data in an innovative data analytics approach. The findings of the study contribute to the tourism and hospitality field by confirming hotel brand performance inconsistency and such inconsistent performance affected customers’ service evaluations.

This study demonstrates the significant impact of hotel brand performance consistency on consumers’ perceived value, emotion and satisfaction. Considering that online reviews are perceived as a credible source of information, the findings suggest that the hotel industry pays special attention to brand performance consistency to improve consumers’ perceived value, emotion and satisfaction.

This study aims to analyzes the effects of the consumer-generated media (CGM) boom on hotel managers’ investment behavior concerning quality signals.

Survival analysis has been conducted, considering the permanence/dropout of the Spanish hotels in a quality certification system during the 1998–2020 period.

The number of hotels certified since 2010 has been progressively falling, pointing to a decreasing interest of the managers in these certifications. Nevertheless, this is not a generalized phenomenon: the hotel characteristics and the number and nature of reviews about them in CGM significantly affect their permanence decisions in certification systems.

The findings provide several keys to optimizing investment management in quality signals considering hotel characteristics and their positioning in CGM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that analyses the relationship between the presence of hotels in CGM and their investments in alternative quality signals. The results will allow future investment decisions based on previous real business experiences.

Focusing on hotel managers’ service recovery efforts to service failures, this study aims to explore effects of different types of service recovery strategies on customers’ trust, satisfaction and behavioral intentions in the context of consumer-generated media.

This study conducted a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design to examine effects of hotels’ sincere apology, compensation and existing relationship with customers on customers’ subsequent psychological behavior. An online self-administered survey was used to recruit participants who posted their experiences with a hotel on consumer-generated review sites.

Results of this study identified that when managers incorporated authenticity and compensation components, customers were more likely to show a higher level of trust, satisfaction and behavioral intentions.

Derived from the justice theory and the relationship investment theory, this study identified the main effects of three treatments and their interaction effects on customers’ subsequent behaviors.

Results of this study suggested that service recovery communication processes, in particular, authenticity and compensation, be an integral part of the service recovery strategies in the social media context.

This paper investigated the importance of hotel managers’ service recovery communication strategies in the social media context.

The examination of revisit intentions in hospitality is integral to relationship marketing and customer loyalty. Its measurement and determination have largely been done through closed-ended measures in surveys of customers. However, vast troves of consumer-generated media in the form of open-ended text reviews can also serve as sources for the determination of revisit intentions. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a rule-based classification model from big data to extract revisit intentions.

Data for this came from 116,241 reviews scraped from Tripadvisor.com using a stratified sampling technique comprising hotels in major cities in the USA. A sample comprising 1,800 reviews was randomly drawn from this larger pool of reviews and manually annotated. A manual-set rule-based model, supervised machine learning (ML) models and hybrid models were developed to extract revisit intention.

The hybrid model of the MSRB method complemented by the gradient boosting ML method performed the best to classify revisit intentions in reviews.

This study’s rule-based classification model can be used by hotels to evaluate revisit intentions from the ever-growing pool of consumer-generated reviews. This can enable hotels to identify drivers of re-patronage and enhance relationship marketing initiatives.

This study is the first to propose an analytical model that taps big data to extracting revisit intentions. In the past, revisit intentions have been assessed using closed-ended questions using traditional survey-based methods.

This study aims to examine the relationships between stimuli of website experience (information/content, interactive features and design–visual appeal) and online engagement (cognitive processing, affection and activation) with consumer-generated media and brand advocacy. Furthermore, this study examines if online engagement mediates the relationships between website stimuli of experience dimensions and brand advocacy.

A total of 183 valid online questionnaires were collected, from members of an online forum related to travel and leisure, to empirically test the measurement and structural model using partial least square path modeling. The study sample includes consumers who search for, select and book hotel rooms via Booking.com.

The findings confirm that information/content and design–visual appeal have a significant impact on all three dimensions of online engagement whereas interactive features of a website have significant impact on affection and activation. Furthermore, results suggest that affection and activation predict brand advocacy and engagement mediates the effect of stimuli of experience on brand advocacy.

This is the first attempt to explain the relationships between website stimuli of experience (information/content, interactive features and design–visual appeal), online engagement (cognitive processing, affection and activation) and brand advocacy. Altogether, these variables are not well studied and understood in current literature despite having important implications for managers, academicians and consumers alike.

本论文旨在检验网站体验卖点（信息/内容、互动功能、设计-视觉吸引力）、对消费者自发媒介（CGM）的在线参与（理性思维方面、情感感性方面、和行动力方面）、以及品牌拥护的关系。此外, 本论文还检验在线顾客参与是否从中调节了网站体验卖点和品牌拥护的关系, 从而变成了中间变量。

本论文采用在线问卷采样形式, 一家在线旅游网站的成员为问卷样本, 有效样本数量为183份。本论文采用偏最小二乘回归的样本数据分析方法来分析数据。其中样本是从Booking.com搜索、选择、预定酒店的消费者。

信息/内容和网站设计-视觉吸引力对三种在线顾客参与的维度都有显著作用。而网站的互动性只对在线顾客参与的情感感性维度和行动力维度上有显著作用。此外, 研究结果还证明感性参与和参与行动促进品牌拥护, 因此, 在线参与成为网上体验卖点和品牌拥护的中间变量。

本论文是仅有几篇解释网站体验卖点（信息/内容、互动功能、和设计-视觉吸引力）与在线参与（理性思维方面、情感感性方面、和行动力方面）和品牌拥护之间关系的文章之一。总而言之, 这些变量还处在研究前沿阶段, 现有文献尚未全面研究这些变量, 尽管它们对于管理者、学者、以及消费者有着很重要的意义。

信息/内容、互动功能、设计-视觉吸引力、在线参与、品牌拥护

研究论文

This study aims to conceptualise and empirically examine how blog users engage with the sponsored posts on consumer-generated content, specifically blogs.

This paper empirically tested the proposed hypotheses using the structural equation modelling using a sample of 399 blog users.

The need for cognition, perceived interactivity and perceived credibility of blogs has been found to directly influence consumers’ attitude towards blogs. Innovativeness has been found to have a weak negative link with the attitude towards blogs. Blog users were more favourable towards the sponsored posts if the blogs were more interactive. Attitude towards blogs has been found to mediate the relationship between users’ perceived interactivity and their avoidance of the sponsored posts and also between perceived credibility and avoidance of the sponsored posts on blogs. The most significant finding of this study is that the positive attitude towards a blog results in a higher avoidance of the sponsored posts.

This study focuses on the sponsored posts on blogs. It does not look at other forms of advertising on blogs such as banner ads, or other forms of consumer-generated content.

Marketers and bloggers should carefully consider the suitability of the sponsored posts on blogs as they risk alienating the regular users of the blogs. Sponsored posts which are perceived as honest reviews (as opposed to paid advertorials) might be more acceptable to blog users.

This study highlights the importance of credibility of bloggers to blog users. There are some serious ethical issues related to the sponsored posts which have not been discussed here but need to be examined further.

This study represents one of the first attempts to conceptualise and empirically examine how blog users engage with customer-generated advertising – sponsored posts. It contributes to marketing literature by enhancing the understanding of how consumers perceive consumer-generated content and more specifically, with regard to consumer attitudes towards online consumer-generated advertising. This study enhances the theoretical and empirical knowledge on how consumers react to advertisements on social media, with important suggestions for future research and implications for practitioners.

This paper aims to examine the influence of social media communications, particularly firm-generated content (FGC) and consumer-generated content (CGC) on predicting consumer purchase decisions (CPD) through the lens of perceived brand authenticity (PBA). This paper also investigates the moderating influence of brand prestige (BP) and brand familiarity in the luxury hotel sector.

This study collected data from 390 consumers who were regularly using social media platforms, traveled frequently and stayed in luxury hotels. Following stringent data filtering, 371 responses were analyzed via structural equation modeling.

The findings indicate that FGC and CGC significantly strengthened PBA. However, CGC was the effective driver that directly influenced CPD. Likewise, PBA directly and indirectly substantially impacted CPD. Finally, BP’s direct and moderating effects significantly influenced CPD in the luxury hotel sector.

This novel study contributes to signaling theory, social media communications and branding literature in the luxury hotel sector.

User‐generated media (UGM) like YouTube, MySpace, and Wikipedia have become tremendously popular over the last few years. The purpose of this paper is to present an analytical framework for explaining the appeal of UGM.

This paper is mainly theoretical due to a relative lack of empirical evidence. After an introduction on the emergence of UGM, this paper investigates in detail how and why people use UGM, and what factors make UGM particularly appealing, through a uses and gratifications perspective. Finally, the key elements of this study are summarized and the future research directions about UGM are discussed.

This paper argues that individuals take with UGM in different ways for different purposes: they consume contents for fulfilling their information, entertainment, and mood management needs; they participate through interacting with the content as well as with other users for enhancing social connections and virtual communities; and they produce their own contents for self‐expression and self‐actualization. These three usages are separate analytically but interdependent in reality. This paper proposes a model to describe such interdependence. Furthermore, it argues that two usability attributes of UGM, “easy to use” and “let users control,” enable people to perform the aforementioned activities efficiently so that people can derive greater gratification from their UGM use.

UGM are an extremely important topic in new media scholarship, and this study represents the first step toward understanding the appeal of UGM in an integrated way.