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The purpose of this study is to examine how consumer-brand engagement on social networking sites (SNS) is an outcome of the message orientation/vividness.

Message design is proposed to include two components, namely, orientation and vividness. The message orientation is classified as either task/instrumental or socioemotional. The message vividness is measured through content type. The consumer-brand engagement is conceptualized at three levels, namely, cognitive (comment), affective (shares) and conative (likes). A total of 1,000 posts were collected from the official Facebook pages of the 10 most popular travel brands, five each from India and the USA. These two countries were chosen as they are culturally different, with the former representing a largely collectivist culture and greater social connectivity and the latter representing primarily an individualistic culture.

The study reveals that greater message vividness, with more interactive/audio-visual content, leads to higher engagement. The task/instrumental message orientation leads to low-/medium-level engagement. Overall, a combination of high-vividness and socioemotional orientation generates maximum engagement. India and the USA depict unique effects of message orientations/vividness on the consumer-brand engagement levels, indicating cultural implications for the brand SNS messages – effectiveness.

The study’s conceptualization of consumer-brand engagement reflected through the consumers – responses to brands – SNS messages, represents new knowledge. The unique effects of message vividness and orientation on consumer-brand engagement and the variations across cultures is also a novel contribution to the extant branding literature.

The brand marketers should not only design their SNS messages with appropriate vividness/orientation but also tweak them across cultures, for maximum consumer engagement.

The study is a novel attempt to deploy the interaction process analysis framework in an SNS setting.

This chapter renews the thought on conceptualizing customer experience (CX) through the perspective of customer knowledge management (CKM). It bridges two pathways: Tacit Knowledge and Lived experience of the customer. Hence, refreshing the CX conceptualization aims to grasp the depths of the in situ service lived experience by examining the tacit knowledge forms issued from the lived experience of the client-curist in the well-being tourism. Dealing primarily with the consumption of service experience into the thalassotherapy centers is already an uphill task. This is due to its subtle and embedded experiential nature. Notwithstanding these challenges, it offers substantial knowledge about the conceptualized customer experiential knowledge (CEK). Hence, a generation of a pool of items measuring the customer experiential knowledge-process competence construct (CEK-PC) comes to begin the empirical development of the customer experiential knowledge management (CEKM) approach (as developed by Jaziri, 2013, 2019a). It also offers empirical evidence that corroborates CEK conceptualization (Jaziri-Bouagina, 2017). Through the CEK-PC, this chapter explores the competence of management levels in adopting a phenomenological vision and a global approach of ethnography to acquire CEK for treating, sharing, and using it to implement an experience-based innovation. The thrust of the construct was preserved via the Q-sort technique that has assessed the content validity through two sorting rounds. Forty-two items are retained representing a first step of the measure development.

Ranging from the romanticism era to the postmodern paradigm and the experiential approach, this chapter reexamines the fundamental roots of the consumption experience concept while addressing the conceptualizations and nature of customer experience. In this context, the concept of customer experience in the tourism field is outlined. We set out to readdress the essence of the customer experience in the light of the consumer value (CV) as a relevant empirical ground to study it. Hence, this chapter revisits the intricate epistemological and methodological connection of the customer experience to CV. This leads to a rediscussion of the key role of customer introspection approach while outlining the narration side in studying this intimate connection of both concepts in the tourism field.

Though customer experience (CX) is identified as a key research priority, empirically led insight with tourism consumers' resulting emotional attachment (EA) and customer loyalty (CL) remains scarce, particularly during the COVID-19 crisis. Adopting service-dominant logic, this study develops a model that investigates the impact of customer engagement (CE) and customer co-creation (CC) on CX, which consequently effects EA and CL during the COVID-19 crisis in the tourism industry. First, our results suggest that CE and CC positively affect tourism CX. Second, results revealed the CX's significant positive effect on EA and CL. Third, findings confirmed the CE's and CC's indirect impact on EA and CL, as mediated via CX in pandemic situations. Our study offers key implications for destinations to develop tactics in surviving during a pandemic to rebuild tourism.

To be successful in today's experience economy, hospitality and tourism firms need to be attentive to detail and have the right information to manage a variety of aspects related to their businesses and their performance, not least when it comes to experiences. The old-fashioned way of producing offerings based on the management's and organization's knowledge and traditional way of operating may not suffice in the future. The attention must instead be centered on the actual source of data – the customer – as they are the ones assessing the value of the offering, and they are the ones, hopefully, willing to pay for the experiences.

At the same time hospitality and tourism managers get inadequate information and support from the data available in their management systems to help them in their efforts to create memorable experiences for their customers. The objective here is, by using theoretical frameworks and concepts like the resourced-based view (RBV) and customer experiential knowledge management (CEKM), among others, to analyze and develop the EA-approach from a strategical perspective to enhance the possibilities to create and maintain competitive advantages for the hospitality and tourism firms, foremost the SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises).

The identified solution will therefore be the implementation and use of customer-centred management systems where the focus should be aiding the process of creating experiences, increase customer value and by this strengthen the businesses' competitive advantage. This could be of particular interest postCOVID when the industry will do everything it can to bounce back at full strength.

Customer experience is a relevant concept in marketing and tourism research since its correct understanding allows companies to achieve competitive advantage and service providers can reach several outcomes such as customer engagement, loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This chapter aims to analyze one of the main outcomes of the customer experience, the customer satisfaction through online reviews, and using spatial analysis as a tool to incorporate the contextual nature of the customer experience. Thus, our study considers online rating as a measure of customer satisfaction and tries to analyze the impact of actions under the control of the service provider (price and objective quality) and actions under the control of the customer (subjective quality) on customer satisfaction.

With the Spanish hotel industry as a study framework, an empirical study is developed to analyze, through geographically weighted regression techniques, the relationship between price, objective quality and subjective quality, and online ratings given by consumers with a sample of 1870 of geolocated hotels in Spain. The findings show how a premium price, depending on the geolocation, is an indicator for better customer experiences, and they also show that objective quality is the antecedent of customer experience whose positive effect on customer satisfaction is geographically more widespread. Results show contradictory effects of subjective quality, while in some areas subjective quality does not match the product fit of customers, in others it allows hotels to provide more satisfactory experiences.

Along with the changing needs and expectations of tourists, their demands for special interest tourism types have also increased. In this context, tea tourism is accepted as one of the notable tourism types in recent years. For this reason, it is important to examine the behavior of tourists participating in tea tourism and to provide services accordingly. However, studies on the experiences of tourists participating in tea tourism are still insufficient. The purpose of this study is to determine the memorable experience components of tourists participating in tea tourism. In this context, data were collected using semistructured interviews, participant observation, and online tourist comments. According to the findings, the memorable experience components of tourists participating in tea tourism activities are divided into four themes. These themes are: information about tea, tea-related environments, the taste of tea, and interaction. At the conclusion part of the study, some suggestions were made to the marketers, managers, and operators related to tea tourism according to the determined themes.

Films are arguably one of the most influential phenomenon of modern society. They are remarkable and effective means of conveying stories and influencing humans. Films are one of the most important factors that motivate people to travel to a destination. This chapter will explore the phenomenon which is widely known as film tourism and its role in tourist experience. To gain a better understanding of film tourism experiences, this chapter presents key concepts and analyzes existing studies. The analysis investigates important aspects of film tourism experience, including experience satisfaction and storytelling. It tries to highlight how films can influence tourist experiences beyond the travel itself, with a strong emphasis on the role of storytelling and film tourism experience satisfaction. To help readers achieve a clearer and more detailed understanding of the unique and dynamic nature of film tourism experiences, this chapter provides an overview of the tourist experience by conducting a comprehensive literature review on the subject. By doing this, this chapter proposes a new framework of film tourist experience satisfaction while describing the relationship between influential factors such as previous film experiences, motivation to visit a destination, destination expectations, on-site destination experience, and tourist involvement. Finally, conclusions are drawn presenting storytelling as a contemporary approach in the domain of film tourism experiences.