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The purpose of this study is to explore the factors that influence sustainable homestay development and suggest a model for adopting and implementing the homestay concept and its contribution towards sustainable rural development in Uttarakhand, India.

Researchers have collected a total of 360 responses from tourists, homestay owners/villagers and managers associated with homestay businesses in Uttarakhand to examine, assess and analyse the data with the help of different statistical tools such as SPSS and AMOS to validate the concept of homestay and its impact on sustainable rural development.

The analysis uncovered that collaborative consumption, sharing economy and family feeling and community development are positively associated with and, in return, community development affects sustainable development.

This study enables us to explain the “collaborative consumption” in the context of homestays functional in the state of Uttarakhand only.

The study results in evidence of crucial implications for policymakers. Policymakers should focus on opportunities in tourism and its integration with economic, environmental and social goals. Homestays will be new avenues for economic and sustainable development.

Homestay offers reasonable and cheap lodging for tourists within the existing ancient homes, typically restored for the guests to form a comfortable stay. Homestay is adopted to facilitate community-based tourism in the state. It also helps in developing a source of livelihood for the community. It is helpful for individuals’ economic, social and aesthetic desires to be consummated by maintaining cultural integrity, ecological processes, biodiversity and natural support systems through homestay, as social entrepreneurship. Homestay has been envisaged as a driver to realise the sustainable development goals by steering the pathways to a property future for all involved within the elected hill states.

This study validates a new homestay model that will be useful for developing community and achieving sustainable development.

This paper aims to integrate the consumption perspective within the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing (IMP) debate. The study delves into how consumer communities can be conceived like other network business actors. The perspective of sustainable new ventures (SNVs) in the fashion industry is adopted, considering their specific connection with consumer communities.

Adopting a multiple case study methodology, this paper uses a qualitative approach. Data collection mainly relies on interviews conducted with 10 SNVs in the fashion industry; this sector is a fertile ground for studying sustainability and consumer communities. For data analysis, the abductive approach of systematic combining is applied.

The paper identifies four distinct types of consumer communities and four roles that they can assume as business actors in the business network. Owing to their engagement in these specific roles, consumer communities become part of the SNVs’ network, akin to other business-to-business players.

This study represents one of the initial endeavors to introduce consumption into the IMP theoretical framework. In this paper’s conceptualization, consumer communities are groups of consumers and collective actors in the business network. Additionally, this study advances the research on sustainability as a network concept by including consumer communities’ roles in business networks.

Social factors, such as fellow spectators in a stadium or other fans sharing their experiences on online platforms, play a dominant role in spectator sport consumption. This conceptual article sets out to achieve three objectives: classify customer-to-customer (C2C) interactions in the sport fan context, develop a framework that links the classification of interactions to relevant outcomes and identify areas for related future research.

The authors integrate conceptual and empirical contributions on C2C interactions in the service, marketing and sport management literature.

The article proposes classifying C2C interactions into synchronous multi- and uni-directional interactions as well as asynchronous multi- and uni-directional interactions. The C2C interaction framework (C2CIF) proposes that such C2C interactions have hedonic, social, symbolic and utilitarian value outcomes. It further suggests that physiological, psychological and social processes underlie the co-creation or co-destruction of value and identifies contingencies at both the fan and the brand level.

Based on the C2CIF, we identify relevant topics for future research, in particular relating to technology-supported and virtual interactions among fans, fan-to-fan interactions across different countries and cultural backgrounds and fan-to-fan interactions as a way to reduce societal concerns.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, one dark social-media phenomenon in particular has experienced a significant rise: consumer-to-consumer (C2C) conflicts, i.e. consumers who verbally attack each other in response to COVID-19 service failures. The aim of this paper is to uncover the sources of such conflicts and to gain an insight into the corresponding conflict moderation strategies that international brands adopt.

The methodology consists of non-participatory netnographic observations of 13 national, international, and global online brand communities (OBCs) on Facebook. The authors use purposeful sampling to collect relevant data on conflict sources and brand moderation strategies during COVID-19 service failures and a hybrid approach to thematic analysis to derive distinct themes from these data.

The paper identifies five C2C conflict sources: brand attack, brand dissatisfaction, brand skepticism, brand contention and brand defense; these are then classified as having either an individualistic (self-oriented) or collectivistic (other-oriented) orientation. The authors also uncover several moderation strategies: non-engaging, automated, bolstering, asserting (direct, indirect) and informing (factual, empathetic, apologetic), which are broadly categorized into two levels based on their passive vs active approach and authoritative vs cooperative orientation. The paper further highlights that brands adapt their moderation strategies to specific sources of C2C conflicts, thereby producing a range of OBC outcomes.

The study's empirically informed framework comprising sources of undesirable conflicts and brand moderation strategies offers a practical tool that can aid marketing managers in nurturing civil C2C engagement and interactive behaviors in their OBCs. By adopting our framework, brand and marketing practitioners can tailor their communication strategies toward different sources of C2C conflict and minimize their adverse consequences, thus, fostering an overall constructive OBC engagement.

The authors offer a novel framework to international marketing research, consisting of C2C conflict sources and corresponding moderation strategies that take place in response to service failures during the COVID-19 pandemic. These insights, in turn, inform international marketers about new ways of transforming the dark side of OBCs into a source of competitive advantage based on real-world brand practice.

Nonprofit organisations (NPOs) are an increasingly fundamental part of our society. Meeting rising demand requires NPOs to attract enough resources, especially volunteers, to enable service delivery. This paper aims to adopt a novel theoretical lens to reframe this marketing challenge to inform practice and extend theory.

Practice-based exploration of a volunteer-enabled NPO, parkrun, through in-depth interviews and secondary source analysis.

The research identified that the brand community connects volunteers through three inter-connected levels. The big idea of parkrun, the focal brand, resonated with people through being “on their wavelength”, something they believed in. The local, physical event meant engagement was “on their patch”, anchored in place. Finally, the brand community enables people to volunteer “on their terms”, with fluid roles and flexible levels of commitment.

Not all NPOs have service beneficiaries who are able to volunteer, services with different volunteering roles, or operate through a local physical presence. However, taking a focal brand approach to consider the brand community through which people volunteer for an NPO, the practices that reinforce that community, and how to offer volunteers significantly greater flexibility in both role and commitment presents an opportunity for NPOs to rethink how volunteering works for them in the future.

Clear recommendations for practice include the opportunity to integrate service beneficiary with service delivery enabler (volunteer) to strengthen the implicit social contract, increasing participation to deepen the social identity felt towards the brand, and key practices that reduce barriers to volunteering.

The paper extends volunteering theory from the traditional individual needs approach to a focal brand community perspective. The marketing challenge of attracting volunteer resources to NPOs is understood through rethinking the boundaries between service beneficiaries and service enablers, anchored in social identity theory. It provides clear recommendations for practice through reframing the recruitment challenge.

As of December 2021, WeChat had more than 1.2 billion active users worldwide, making it the most active online social media in mainland China. The term social commerce is used to describe new online sales through a mix of social networks and/or peer-to-peer communication or marketing strategies in terms of allowing consumers to satisfy their shopping behaviour through online social media. Thus, given the numerous active users, the development of online social media and social commerce on WeChat is a critical issue of internet research.

This empirical study takes WeChat as the online social media research object. Questionnaires for WeChat users in China were designed and distributed. All items are designed as nominal and ordinal scales (not Likert scale). The obtained data was put into a relational database (N = 2,342), and different meaningful patterns and rules were examined through data mining analytics, including clustering analysis and association rules, to explore the role of WeChat in the development of online social media and social commerce.

Practical implications are presented according to the research findings of meaningful patterns and rules. In addition, alternatives to WeChat in terms of further development are also proposed according to the investigation findings of WeChat users’ behaviour and preferences in China.

This study concludes that online social media, such as WeChat, will be able to transcend the current development pattern of most online social media and make good use of investigating users’ behaviour and preferences, not only to stimulate the interaction of users in the social network, but also to create social commerce value in social sciences.

This paper seeks to define a theoretical model for the urban regeneration of mass housing areas based on citizen initiative, self-management and self-financing in the form of the neighbourhood cooperative. This paper aims to identify mechanisms for economic resource generation that enable the improvement of the urban surroundings and its buildings without assuming disproportionate economic burdens by the local residents based on two principles, the economies of scale and service provision.

The research is structured in three phases: a literature review of the different trends in self-financing for urban regeneration and the conceptual framework for the definition of a cooperative model; the definition of theoretical model by analysing community ecosystem, neighbourhood-based services and the requirements for its economic equilibrium; and the discussion of the results and the conclusions.

The results show the potential of the cooperative model to generate a social economy capable of reducing costs and producing additional resources to finance the rehabilitation process. The findings show not only the extent of economic advantages but also multiple social, physical and environmental benefits. Its implementation involves the participation of multiple actors, which is one of its significant advantages.

The main contribution is to approach comprehensive urban rehabilitation from a collaborative understanding, overcoming the main financing difficulties of the current practices based on public subsidy policies. The model also allows an ethical relationship to be built with supplier companies by means of corporate social responsibility.

This study aims to examine the phenomenon of self-perceived age (SPA) identity for Generation X (GenX) women in the UK. Squeezed between the more ubiquitous “boomer” and “millennial” cohorts, and now with both gender and age stigma-related challenges, this study looks to provide insights for understanding this group for marketing.

This study adopts an existential phenomenological approach using a hybrid structured/hermeneutic research design. Data is collected using solicited diary research (SDR) that elicits autoethnographic insights into the lived experiences of GenX women, these in the context of SPA.

For this group, the authors find age a gendered phenomenon represented via seven “age frames”, collectively an “organisation of experience”. Age identity appears not to have unified meaning but is contingent upon individuals and their experiences. These frames then provide further insights into how diarists react to the stigma of gendered ageism.

SDR appeals to participants who like completing diaries and are motivated by the research topic. This limits both diversity of response and sample size, but coincidentally enhances elicitation potential – outweighing, the authors believe, these constraints. The sample comprises UK women only.

This study acknowledges GenX women as socially real, but from an SPA perspective they are heterogeneous, and consequently distributed across many segments. Here, age is a psychographic, not demographic, variable – a subjective rather than chronological condition requiring a nuanced response from marketers.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first formal study into how SPA identity is manifested for GenX women. Methodologically, this study uses e-journals/diaries, an approach not yet fully exploited in marketing research.

This paper aims to examine the origins of value co-creation (VCC) knowledge streams, vis-a-vis their progression over the past 18 years. The study explores how knowledge of this discipline emerged across the tripartite strategic paradigms of business transformation.

Co-citation analysis (CCA) and co-word analysis (CWA) are used as bibliometric techniques, for which, a group of articles is retrieved using Scopus’s usual keyword-based search. The initial collection consists of 3,431 research articles published in business and management publications. By explaining the article clusters generated through CCA and keyword connections generated through CWA, the findings outline the origins and development of VCC research. A CWA-based chronological study adds further insights to the development of VCC research themes.

The results depict that VCC research has grown multifold in the past 18 years, whereby it has shifted its attention from a dyadic interaction approach to a multistakeholder ecosystem-based approach detailing the phenomenological instances of resource integration and institutional processes. Notably, extant research in this field has grown at a much faster rate since 2008. In fact, a stronger concentration of research emerged in the experience domain, particularly in terms of hedonic services. Development of engagement platforms has been driven by research into technologies such as IoT and artificial intelligence.

The theoretical framework of the VCC paradigm is used to describe the aggregation of co-creation research around the three strategic pillars. This framework is useful for business strategy and to track VCC research over time.

This work identifies the practices and strategies of VCC at three different levels: capacity, platform and experience. The study offers insights into a variety of co-creation practices at their respective levels, incorporating micro-level dyadic interactions and macro-level processes in a service ecosystem.

This study uses different bibliometric methodologies to investigate the development of this scientific field over time. “Document co-citation” analysis, a more preferred bibliometric technique under CCA, is used to construct the cluster of theoretical cores of this area. The results are classified under the strategic framework of the co-creation paradigm (Ramaswamy and Ozcan, 2014).

This study proposes a model that influences customer citizenship behavior during COVID-19, and empirically tests the effects of fast-food restaurant customers' perceptions of justice (price and procedural justice) on trust; trust on satisfaction and loyalty; and trust, satisfaction and loyalty on customer citizenship behavior. Furthermore, it was questioned whether there was a disparity between customer expectations based on the restaurant's image and consumption experience.

The data were gathered from customers of fast-food restaurants in the shopping centers in Turkey. The data set, which included 437 valid questionnaires, was subjected to CFA for validity and reliability, SEM analysis for hypothesis and paired sample t-Tests for the research questions.

The findings of the study indicate that perceived justice affects customer trust, which, consequently, affects customer loyalty and satisfaction during the COVID-19 period. Findings also demonstrate that, while customer loyalty and trust increase customer citizenship behavior, customer satisfaction alone is insufficient to increase customer citizenship behavior. The study also shows that during the COVID-19 period, fast-food restaurants should have raised awareness of employees’ fair behaviors toward the customers and provided additional services to differentiate themselves in the market. Also, it indicates that customer expectations related to price, cleanliness and professional appearance of staff are not met after taking service.

No research has been found in the literature focusing on the expectations, justice, trust, satisfaction, loyalty and citizenship behaviors of fast-food restaurant customers in the COVID-19 pandemic process. Therefore, the results can fill the gap in relevant literature by testing the relationships between justice, trust, satisfaction, loyalty and citizenship during the pandemic and provide inferences for fast-food business owners.