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This study aims to use empowerment theory to examine the relationship between a user's engagement type (active or passive) and psychological empowerment (intrapersonal and interactional) in the context of a social media brand community (SMBC). This study also looks at the impact of psychological empowerment on brand community commitment (CC) and brand loyalty.

Convenience and snowball sampling were used to select respondents from mobile phone brand communities in India. The conceptual model was tested using structure equation modelling.

According to the study findings, active user involvement in SMBC is strongly associated to both intrapersonal and interactional empowerment (IE), but passive user engagement is weakly related to IE. Furthermore, customer empowerment and CC have a strong impact on brand CC and brand loyalty.

SMBC is now a significant point of contact for building strong consumer–brand relationships. SMBC members who are actively involved in the community have greater emotional bonding, trust and commitment to the brand. Therefore, social media marketers should encourage their customers to get involved in a brand community and empower them by involving them in brand related decision, etc. This will help the community grow and thrive.

This study addresses a research gap by examining how active and passive members of an SMBC facilitate both focal points of psychological empowerment (intrapersonal and interactional), which increase the brand community's commitment and brand loyalty.

This study aims to explore the effect of human resource (HR) strategy (e.g. empowerment and teamwork) on green supply chain integration (e.g. green supplier and customer integration), which further leads to economic performance. Moreover, the authors examined the moderating effects of information systems and mutual trust on the relationship between HR strategy and green supply chain integration.

Using the empirical data from 213 Chinese manufacturing firms, this study uses structural equation modeling and hierarchical regressions to examine the conceptual model.

The study’s findings reveal that empowerment and teamwork positively enhance green supplier and customer integration. Green supplier and customer integration are positively related to economic performance. Moreover, information systems positively moderate the relationship between empowerment and green supplier integration but negatively moderate the relationship between teamwork and green supplier/customer integration. Mutual trust positively moderates the relationship between empowerment and green supplier integration and the relationship between teamwork and green customer integration.

This study extends the existing understanding regarding how to enhance green supply chain integration by adopting an appropriate HR strategy in the context of different levels of information systems and mutual trust.

The rapid shift in the emerging pedagogies of customer behavior has changed the business preferences in the hotel sector. This study prioritizes the hotel's main task to develop customer re-patronage intention. Keeping in line with these factors, this study investigates the impact of customer empowerment on re-patronage intentions through customer value co-creation in the hotel sector of Pakistan. Furthermore, the study examines the moderating impact of sensation-seeking on customers.

A total of 350 potential customers participated in the online survey using purposive and snowball sampling techniques. Partial least square structural equation modeling was employed using Smart PLS-3 to test the projected hypotheses.

This study reveals that empowered customers improve their behavior and involvement in value co-creation, which, in turn, increases the prospects of re-patronage intention. Moreover, sensation-seeking moderates between consumer empowerment and customer value co-creation.

Customer-dominant logic and sense-making theory present interesting insights where customer empowerment and value co-creation have a positively significant impact on customer re-patronage intention. Findings also elaborate on a significant mediating role of customer value co-creation activities, which is an interesting call for hotel managers to add thought-sharing ecosystems. The suggested factors add long-lasting results in terms of revenues, performance and global GDP.

It provides guidance for the hotel managers through novel factors that activate the customer to augment an intention to re-patron. Moreover, it provides a direction to add sensation-seeking strategies that strengthen the effects on customer empowerment and value co-creation.

This study has its uniqueness in introducing an environment in hotels where customers are empowered to further actively participate in value co-creation initiatives, along with sensation-seeking acting as a stimulus among them. These factors have greatly impacted the hotel's objectives (i.e. re-patronage intention).

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to investigate the impact of online customer engagement on brand love via dual mediating mechanisms, empowerment (bright side) and stress (dark side). The roles of perceived brand quality and extroversion as weakener and facilitator respectively on the dark side effect are also examined.

An online survey is conducted, targeting people who have experience in participating in online engagement activities. The dual mediation and moderation analysis are examined.

The results confirm the proposed dual mediating mechanisms. Perceived brand quality and extroversion also significantly moderate the engagement–stress link.

This study explains the mediating mechanisms between online customer engagement and brand love, with a focus on the fast-moving consumer goods industry. This calls for further research on other industries.

This study provides marketers with insights that online customer engagement strategies are not always good and that they should be more careful in formulating such strategies.

This study advances the understanding of the relationship between customer engagement and brand love in the virtual community especially in the social media context.

This paper aims to examine the open innovation engagement process in terms of how online community members create and share knowledge for open innovation and the consequences of engagement.

A mixed methods approach based on netnography (Study 1), qualitative interviews (Study 2) and surveys (Study 3) was adopted in three studies.

The results of Study 1 show that hotel brand community members actively create and share their knowledge by evaluating hotel policies, providing service suggestions and creating new service ideas. The results of Study 2 identified enjoyment and empowerment as major antecedents of the engagement and brand loyalty and a sense of brand community as major consequences. In Study 3, the relationships among them were quantitatively examined.

This research provides empirical knowledge on online engagement and identifies the innovation value of online platforms. The research also provides knowledge on the engagement process for open innovation by online community members in terms of its antecedents and consequences. As a main limitation of the study, this research only focuses on a single online brand community.

While most existing tourism research analyzes the role of user-generated content in customer decision-making, this research provides a fresh insight into the innovation value of customer knowledge.

Customers' co-design behavior is an important source of knowledge for product innovation. Firms can regulate the focus of information interaction with customers to set goals and motivate their co-design behavior. Drawing on regulatory fit theory and construal level theory, the authors build a research model to study whether the fit between the regulatory focus of firms' task invitations (promotion focus vs prevention focus) and their feedback focus (self-focused vs other-focused) can enhance co-design behavior by improving customers' experiences (perceived meaning, active discovery and perceived empowerment).

The authors conducted two online between-subjects experiments to validate the proposed research model.

The two online experiments reveal that customers' experiences are enhanced when the feedback focus is congruent with the regulatory focus of the firm's task invitations. Specifically, self-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the prevention focus context. Other-focused feedback has a stronger positive effect on customers' experiences in the promotion focus context. Moreover, customers' experience significantly and positively affects co-design behavior (i.e. co-design effort and knowledge contribution).

This work provides theoretical and practical implications for firms to improve the effectiveness of information interaction with their customers and eventually ensure the sustainability of co-design.

The purpose of this study is to examine the transformation expectations and well-being of lenders as a consequence of participation in peer-to-peer (p2p) lending in India. The study tested the influence of transformation expectations on well-being, social connectedness on transformation expectations and the influence of customer participation on financial empowerment of borrowers.

A cross-sectional survey research design was adopted to collect data from 434 customers in India. Structural equation modelling procedure was performed to test the hypothesized relationships.

The findings show that relational transformation expectations leads to well-being, while social connectedness influences self and relational transformation expectations. Further, customer participation has a positive influence on financial empowerment of borrowers.

Managers may use these findings to create suitable marketing strategies for increasing customer participation in p2p lending.

Previous studies on transformative services have shown that well-being can be achieved through participation in services that are transformative by design, while this study has established that lender participation in peer-to-peer lending can result in relational transformation expectations and lead to well-being. Also, the current study has shown that social connectedness is an antecedent of transformation expectations.

The paper intends to show the role of fear of COVID-19 and the relevance of customer empowerment (CU_EMP) and customers’ perceived value of digital service transactions (CU_PV_DST) in promoting green bank service purchase intention (GBS_PI), despite the antagonistic impacts brought in other sectors and the relevance of customer empowerment (CU_EMP) and customers’ perceived value of digital service transactions (CU_PV_DST) as important mediating variables of the relation.

The structured questionnaire helped collect survey data from 323 small business people. The model relationship was assessed through EFA, CFA by SPSS-AMOS and SEM using bootstrapping procedures in Smart-PLS.

The findings of this study show that there is a significant effect of fear of COVID-19 pandemic (F_COVID-19P) on CU_EMP and GBS_PI. CU_EMP influences GBS_PI, whereas F_COVID-19P influences GBS_PI indirectly via CU_EMP. Furthermore, there is a substantial effect of F_COVID-19P on CU_PV_DST and GBS_PI. Thus, F_COVID-19P significantly influences GBS_PI indirectly via CU_PV_DST.

Capitalizing on the COVID-19 wave by empowering customers technologically, improving the legal framework and increasing the perceived value of green service by using an innovative mechanism. In addition, fostering cultural change and emphasizing altruistic values through green advertisements have been explored in this study.

Green services are healthier for smart/green economy and are health-protective for coping with health risks.

This study helps in understanding the theories used in this context by linking them to F_COVID-19P with CU_EMP, CU_PV_DST and GBS_PI and contributes to the literature of both. Furthermore, this is the only study that has used SEM to study this kind of interrelation.

Although research analyzing the consequences of salesperson social media use in driving sales behaviors and performance outcomes has proliferated in the recent past, there are significant research gaps in the domain. Grounded in task-technology fit theory, this paper aims to propose a conceptual framework that integrates between previously disjointed areas of research and analyzes the relationships between salesperson social media use, brand awareness, creativity, manager empowerment and company performance.

Survey responses were collected from a multi-industry sample of 158 business-to-business salespeople. Structural relationships were tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The analysis shows that salesperson social media use positively affects brand awareness. The relationship between social media and brand awareness is magnified with the increase in salesperson creativity. Findings also show that manager empowerment increases salesperson creativity. Finally, brand awareness positively affects company performance.

Sales organizations should focus on developing digital strategies, especially focusing on salesperson social media use to enhance company’s brand awareness, which in turn increases company performance. Moreover, sales managers should also follow empowering leader behaviors to enhance creativity.

The authors amalgamate salesperson social media use literature and branding literature by proposing salesperson social media use’s positive effects on brand awareness. This study also expands the knowledge by exploring the moderating effect of individual-level variables such as salesperson creativity on driving the effects of salesperson social media use.

What if companies try to combine the IKEA and Trophy winner effects? The purpose of this study is to understand the similarities and differences between both effects. This is not only theoretically but also practically important for the way that companies interact with their customers.

Successful work – invested either to create or to obtain a product – increases the customers’ valuation of the product. This phenomenon known as the IKEA or Trophy winner effect. This study directly compares both effects using experiments with two different products (paper planes and 3D puzzles). Moreover, this study tests whether they reinforce each other.

The Trophy winner effect looms larger than the IKEA effect for inexpensive items. For slightly more expensive products, this study finds a Trophy loser effect. Positive emotions of trophy winners drive the results for inexpensive products, whereas negative emotions of trophy losers drive the results for slightly more expensive products.

The relevance of the IKEA and Trophy effects is influenced by the type of product. Customers’ labor invested in the product itself is of greater importance the more expensive the product is. As soon as customers interpret the interaction with other customers as competition, the effect on valuation can be substantial even for inexpensive products. Future studies could try to replicate our results with different product categories.

Although the IKEA and Trophy effects are no new phenomena in consumer psychology and behavioral economics, they have not been compared to each other or combined yet. The results are useful for researchers and practitioners alike. They yield implications for product customization and customer empowerment.