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Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

Boxing Not so Clever In this first issue of what will be a regular review of the world's marketing literature, it is a challenge to an editor to extricate a theme from such an abundance of riches.

The purpose of this paper is to explore open innovation (OI) collaborations between high-tech small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large customers. The research aims to add new insights into how smaller firms attract and build trusting relationships with larger customers for the purpose of innovation, and to highlight customers’ contribution in SMEs’ innovation process.

This exploratory research is based on three case studies and adopts a process perspective to gather qualitative data on OI collaborations, focusing on the inherent dynamics, and evolution in long-term relationships.

The study provides insights into how SMEs develop OI relationships with both industry and research customers by building trust through various mechanisms. Motivated by the potential benefits of OI in strengthening the firms’ technological edge, the SME managers proactively and strategically developed and managed their OI relationships. The results proved that large customers contributed greatly to the SMEs’ innovation processes both directly and indirectly.

The research provides advice for smaller firms which are considering adopting an OI strategy with customers through mechanisms such as trust building and enhancing legitimacy.

The research adds to the OI literature on SMEs by exploring how smaller firms manage OI challenges, exploit benefits, and develop trusting relationships with larger customers and research institutions.

This special “Anbar Abstracts” issue of the Marketing Intelligence & Planning is split into nine sections covering abstracts under the following headings: Marketing Strategy; Customer Service; Sales Management/Sundry; Promotion; Marketing Research/Customer Behaviour; Product Management; Logistics and Distribution.

This research investigates the role of customer forgiveness as the result of online service recovery transparency in predicting customer engagement. It also examines the moderating roles of timeliness and personalization in this proposed model.

An online survey study using retrospective experience sampling and a scenario-based experimental study were conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

Customer forgiveness positively influences customer engagement and plays a mediating role in the relationship between service recovery transparency and customer engagement. Additionally, timeliness and personalization moderate the positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness. The positive influence of service recovery transparency on customer forgiveness is more apparent when levels of timeliness and personalization decrease.

To retain focal customers' engagement after a service failure, firms must obtain their forgiveness. One of the firm's online complaint handling strategies to increase the forgiveness level of focal customers is to provide a high level of service recovery transparency (i.e. responding to their complaints in a public channel), especially when the firm is unable to respond to online complaints quickly or provide highly personalized responses.

This research provides new insights into the underlying mechanism of customer engagement by applying the concept of customer forgiveness. It also contributes to the social influence theory by applying the essence of the theory to explain how other customers' virtual presence during the online complaint handling influences the forgiveness of focal customers in order to gain their engagement. Additionally, it provides insight into the conditions under which the role of service recovery transparency can be very effective in dealing with online complaints.

Customers are important stakeholders for any company; yet, they seem not to be widely discussed in merger and acquisition research. This chapter synthesizes the current body of research on customers in mergers and acquisitions through presenting a systematic literature review. The chapter is based on a systematic literature review resulting from a search in EBSCO Host for any research item that refers to “customer” and “consolidation or merger of corporation.” All articles were coded to specify how customers are described, with a focus on whether customers are expected to affect and/or be affected by the merger or acquisition. Articles were compared with regard to their year of issue and research disciplines of publishing journals. The review indicates how customers continue to be discussed only to limited extent. The customer roles array from them as an acquirable customer base to customers as actors, whose activities become the very reason to merge or acquire. Literature also refers to them as victims and affected by the merger or acquisition, and reacting parties. In addition to the description of welfare transfer from consumers to acquirers in law and economics studies, the different ways of referring to customers extend beyond specific research disciplines. The literature review indicates more multifaceted ways of describing customers in recent research. No systematic literature review on customers in merger and acquisition literature has previously been conducted. The comparison of research disciplines, years of issue, and customer roles provides new insights into developments in the merger and acquisition field of research.

This research examines the underlying psychological process of customers' impulsive buying on social media through the lens of customer inspiration. Drawing on the customer inspiration theory, it identifies the factors influencing customer inspiration on social media from three perspectives: source characteristics, platform characteristics and personal characteristics, which subsequently lead to impulsive buying. Since the conceptualization of source credibility includes three mostly reported components: attractiveness, expertise and trustworthiness, it further contrasts the effects of three dimensions of source credibility on customer inspiration.

A structural equation model of customers' impulsive buying on social media was developed through the lens of customer inspiration. An online survey with 625 participants was conducted to test the hypotheses, and the partial least squares (PLS3) method was used.

This research found that source credibility, social presence and customer innovativeness are antecedents of customer inspiration on social media, which positively influence the inspired-by state of the customers, which impacts the inspired-to state and further leads to impulsive buying. By comparing the three dimensions of source credibility, the authors found that attractiveness and expertise positively affect the inspired-by state, while trustworthiness has no significant effect.

This research establishes the link between impulsive buying and customer inspiration, which provides a new psychological perspective to understand impulsive buying. In addition, it investigates the source characteristics of customer inspiration by comparing the effect of three dimensions of source credibility on customer inspiration, which provides the first evidence for connecting customer inspiration and source credibility.

The aim of the research is to identify the impact of the Tesco Clubcard on customer loyalty. The secondary aim is to contrast customer perceptions of the Clubcard, staff and “feeling valued” to identify which factor has the greater impact on customer loyalty to store.

Quantitative analysis was used based on 60 questionnaires conducted with randomly selected customers in Tesco Metro Dundee in 2005. Tesco were not involved in the research other than to provide approval at a store level for the research to take place outside their premises.

A positive moderate relationship was found r=0.388, p=0.01 between the owning of a Clubcard and loyalty to store. It was also found that there was a positive moderate relationship between the Clubcard returns and customer loyalty, with r=0.334, p=0.01. The research, however, found no relationship between loyalty and customers feeling more valued by Tesco, nor did the research reveal a significant relationship between Tesco staff and customer loyalty.

The research is restricted in so far as it only considers Tesco Clubcard in the grocery retail sector and as it is an exploratory study the research is limited in so far as the number of participants is only 60. A further limitation surrounds the issue of generalisability as only one Tesco retail outlet in Dundee was used. Further research needs to include other Tesco formats and contrast with grocery retailers who do not use loyalty cards.

It is suggested that Tesco consumers are influenced by having a loyalty card in so far as it contributes to making them loyal. However, other factors need to compliment such a card, with consumers seeing the Tesco “provision” as inter‐related.

The paper is useful to both practitioners and academics in the fields of relationship marketing and loyalty. The research provides some initial insight into consumer perspectives in the value of loyalty cards.

Despite data being a hot topic, little is known about how data can be successfully used in interactions in business-to-business relationships, specifically in the boundary spanning contexts of firms working together to use data and create value. Hence, this study aims to investigate the boundary spanning context of data-driven customer value projects to understand the outcomes of such activities, including the types of value created, how resulting value is shared between the interacting firms, the types of capabilities required for firms to deliver value from data and in what contexts different outcomes are created and different capabilities required.

Three abductive case studies were undertaken with firms from different business-to-business domains. Data were coded in NVivo and interpreted using template analysis and cross-case comparison. Findings were sense checked with the case study companies and other practitioners for accuracy, relevance and resonance.

The findings expand our understanding of firm interactions when extracting value from data, and this study presents 15 outcomes of value created by the firms in the study. This study illustrates the complexity and intertwined nature of the process of value creation, which emphasises the need to understand distinct types of outcomes of value creation and how they benefit the firms involved. This study goes beyond this by categorising these outcomes as unilateral (one actor benefits), developmental (one actor benefits from the other) or bilateral (both actors benefit).

This research is exploratory in nature. This study provides a basis for further exploration of how firm interactions surrounding the implementation of data-driven customer value projects can benefit the firms involved and offers some transferable knowledge which is of particular relevance to practitioners.

This research contributes to the understanding of data-driven customer-focused projects and offers some practical management tools. The identification of outcomes helps define project goals and helps connect these goals to strategy. The organisation of outcomes into themes and contexts helps managers allocate appropriate human resources to oversee projects, mitigating the impacts of a current lack of talent in this area. Additionally, using the findings of this research, firms can develop specific capabilities to exploit the project outcomes and the opportunities such projects provide. The findings can also be used to enhance relationships between firms and their customers, providing customer value.

This work builds on research that explores the creation of value from data and how value is created in boundary spanning contexts. This study expands existing work by providing greater insight into the mechanics and outcomes of value creation and by providing specific examples of value created. This study also offers some recommendations of capability requirements for firms undertaking such work.