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This present study aims to investigate the effect of electronic word of mouth (e-WoM) behavior in Muslim social media on building a halal brand image (HBI) and its influence on purchase intention (PI). Also, Muslims’ altruism (ALT) and moral obligation (MO) were hypothesized as motivators to engage in e-WoM behavior.

A survey involving 320 members of a Muslim halal forum was conducted. Further, structural equation modeling was used to assess the proposed hypotheses.

It is found that ALT and MO positively influence e-WoM behavior. Furthermore, E-WoM also significantly affects HBI and PI. Meanwhile, HBI has a positive effect on PI.

Indonesian halal marketers face difficulties developing a halal image as a critical differentiator, mainly due to the upsurging number of halal certifications and the consumer’s perception that all products available in the market are halal. This present study offers an alternative strategy for Indonesian marketers to strengthen the HBI through Muslim social media amidst the cluttering halal brands in the market.

The development of HBI combined with social media interactions will accelerate the halal brand awareness and usage among society, especially in Indonesia, a Major Muslim country.

This present study provides empirical evidence that social media e-WoM, despite its lack of physical interaction and opportunity to scrutinize the halal features, effectively creates HBI and influences PI among Muslims.

This study aims to explain the factors associated with receiving a specific brand of COVID-19 vaccine within the framework of the theory of reasoned action (TRA). This study extends the TRA with the country-of-origin image (COI), brand image and electronic word of mouth variables.

This study is based on a cross-sectional survey conducted among 460 people who received the Sinofarm vaccine. Participants were selected using an online convenience sampling method. The structural equation modeling technique tests the proposed hypotheses.

The results showed that the essential factor associated with the intent to get the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine is the attitude toward the Signopharm vaccine. Also, word of mouth, subjective norms and brand image are the most critical factors that play a role in forming a favorable attitude toward the Sinopharm vaccine. Finally, the country-of-origin image does not affect attitudes toward the Sinopharm vaccine.

The area of vaccine marketing has been given limited attention in academic literature. This study addresses this area with little research and is greatly attractive to many brands targeting the consumer market. The study results can form a foundation for creating the branding strategy for this product category and assessing its demand in various markets.

The purpose of this study is to suggest a reward-based crowdfunding approach and test customers’ financial contribution behaviour (FCB) as a fundraising strategy for hospitality enterprises.

To investigate this initiative, a conceptual model motivated by the theory of planned behaviour, integrating economic, emotional, social and altruistic values, perceived risk and electronic word of mouth has been considered. Partial least square structural equation modelling is applied to test the model. Data was collected from 263 respondents across three regions – Europe, Asia and Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Findings revealed that attitude, self-efficacy and subjective norm of the customers positively influence their financial contribution intention. Further, Asian customers demonstrate significantly higher FCB in comparison to MENA.

This study will be helpful for the hospitality players to raise the funds during the crisis and survive to pay the reward back to the customers. This study will be helpful to the crowdfunding platforms to understand the factors which influence the contribution behaviour.

The results of this study can encourage hoteliers and other hospitality players looking to approach their funding needs through crowdfunding by providing them a guide to maximise their possibility and level of success.

Hospitality businesses demand new approaches and strategies to keep operating during COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 time. This research is original to provide insights into customer contribution intentions during COVID-19.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the antecedent factors influencing e-loyalty toward e-wallet payment apps in developing countries (e.g. Jordan). This study also investigates the mediating role of perceived usefulness (PU) and the moderating role of electronic word of mouth (e-WOM) toward these apps.

An online questionnaire was used for data collection from 251 actual users of e-wallet payment apps. To estimate and test the research-proposed model, the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed.

The results mainly confirm that perceived trust (PT), perceived financial cost (PFC) and perceived ease of use were found to be determinants of PU; perceived security (PS), PT, PFC, perceived ease of use and perceived enjoyment (PE) were found to be determinants of e-satisfaction, whereas e-satisfaction and e-WOM were found to be determinants of e-loyalty toward e-wallet payment apps. Likewise, the results support the significant effect of the moderating effect of e-WOM. Conversely, the direct and indirect impact of PU and perceived health benefits (PHB) on e-satisfaction is not supported; therefore, hypotheses H4, H5 and H9 were rejected.

This study contributes to the understanding of the critical success factors underlying e-wallet apps during and post-COVID-19 era, which can help policymakers in banks and other financial institutions (service providers) to increase the diffusion rate of financial inclusion by the usage of e-wallet apps.

This paper aims to research as to how Twitter is influential as an electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) communication tool and thereby affecting movie market. In present days, social media is playing an important role in connecting people around the globe. The technology has provided a platform in the social media space for people to share their experiences through text, photos and videos. Twitter is one such online social networking media that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter has nearly 200 million users and billions of such tweets are generated by users every other day. Social media micro-blogging broadcasting networks such as Twitter are transforming the way e-WOM is disseminated and consumed in the digital world. Twitter social behaviour for the Hollywood movies has been assessed across seven countries to validate the two basic blocks of the honeycomb model – sharing and conversation. Twitter behaviour was studied for 27 movies in 22 different cities of seven countries and for six genres with a total tweets of 9.28 million. The difference of Twitter social media behaviour was compared across countries, and “sharing” and “conversation” as two building blocks of the honeycomb model were studied. t-Test results revealed that the behaviour is different across countries and across genres.

The objective of the paper is to analyse Twitter messages on an entertainment product (movies) across different regions of the world. Hollywood movies are released across different parts of the world, and Twitter users are also in different parts of the world. The objective is to hence validate “conversation” and “sharing” building blocks of the honeycomb model. The research is confined to analysing Twitter data related to a few Hollywood movies. The tweets were collected across nine different cities spanning four different countries where English language is prominent. To understand the Twitter social media behaviour, a crawler application using Python and Java was developed to collect tweets of Hollywood movies from the Twitter database. The application has incorporated Twitter application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the Twitter database to extract tweets according to movies search queries across different parts of the world. The searching, collecting and analysing of the tweets is a rather challenging task because of various reasons. The tweets are stored in a Twitter corpus and can be accessed by the public using APIs. To understand whether tweets vary from one country to another, the analysis of variance test was conducted. To assess whether Twitter behaviour is different, and to compare the behaviour across countries, t-tests were conducted taking two countries at a time. The comparisons were made across all the six genres. In this way, an attempt was made to obtain a microscopic view of the Twitter behaviour for each of the seven countries and the six genres.

The findings show that the people use social media across the world. Nearly 9.28 million tweets were from seven countries, namely, USA, UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, India and New Zealand for 27 Hollywood movies. This is indicative of the fact that today, people are exchanging information across different countries, that people are conversing about a product on social media and people are sharing information about a product on social media and, thus, proving the hypothesis. Further, the results indicate that the users in USA, Canada and UK, tweet more than the other countries, USA and UK being the highest in tweets followed by the Canada. On the other hand, the number of tweets in Australia, India and South Africa are low with New Zealand being the lowest of all the countries. This indicates that different countries’ users have different social media behaviour. Some countries use social media to communicate about their experience more than in some other country. However, consumers from all over the world are using Twitter to express their views openly and freely.

This research is useful to scholars and enterprises to understand opinions on Twitter social media and predict their impact. The study can be extended to any products which can lead to better customer relationship management. Companies can use the Internet and social media to promote and get feedback on their products and services across different parts of the world. Governments can inform the public about their new policies, benefits of governmental programmes to people and ways to improve the Internet reach to more people and also for creating awareness about health, hygiene, natural calamities and safety.

Global adoption of the internet and mobile usage results in a huge variation in the cultural backgrounds of consumers who generate and consume electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). Unsurprisingly, a research trend on cross-cultural eWOM has emerged. However, there has not been an attempt to synthesize this research topic. This paper aims to bridge this gap.

This research paper conducts a systematic literature review of the current research findings on cross-cultural eWOM. Journal articles published from 2006 to 2021 are included. This study then presents the key issues in the extant literature and suggests potential future research.

The findings show that there has been an upward trend in the number of publications on cross-cultural eWOM since the early 2010s, with a relatively steeper increase toward 2020. The findings also synthesize cross-cultural eWOM research into four elements and suggest potential future research avenues.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is currently no exhaustive/integrated review of cross-cultural eWOM research. This research fills the need to summarize the current state of cross-cultural eWOM literature and identifies research questions to be addressed in the future.

El boca a boca electrónico cross-cultural: una revisión sistemática de la literatura

La adopción global de Internet y los móviles da lugar a una enorme diferencia en el origen cultural de los consumidores que generan y consumen el boca a boca electrónico (eWOM). No es de extrañar que haya surgido una tendencia de investigación sobre el eWOM transcultural. Sin embargo, no se ha intentado sintetizar este tema de investigación. El objetivo de este artículo es subsanar esta carencia.

Este trabajo de investigación realiza una revisión bibliográfica sistemática de las investigaciones realizadas sobre eWOM transcultural. Se incluyen artículos de revistas publicados desde 2006 hasta 2021. A continuación, el estudio presenta las cuestiones clave de la literatura existente y sugiere posibles investigaciones futuras.

Los resultados muestran que ha habido una tendencia al alza en el número de publicaciones sobre eWOM intercultural desde principios de la década de 2010, con un aumento relativamente creciente hacia 2020. Los resultados también sintetizan la investigación sobre eWOM intercultural en cuatro elementos y sugieren posibles vías de investigación futuras.

Actualmente no existe una revisión exhaustiva/integrada de la investigación sobre el eWOM cross-cultural. Esta investigación satisface la necesidad de resumir el estado actual de la literatura sobre eWOM cross-cultural e identifica las cuestiones de investigación que deben abordarse en el futuro.

跨文化电子口碑研究：系统性文献回顾

摘要

在互联网全球化以及移动手机的广泛使用的背景下, 不同文化背景的消费者都在贡献电子口碑（eWOM）。这使得电子口碑存在文化差异。然而, 还没有人试图对这个研究课题进行综合分析。本文的目的就是要弥补这一空白。

本研究论文对目前关于跨文化eWOM的研究成果进行了系统的文献回顾。包括2006年至2021年发表的期刊文章。然后, 本研究提出了现有文献中的关键问题, 并提出了潜在的未来研究。

研究结果显示, 自2010年初以来, 关于跨文化eWOM的出版物数量呈上升趋势, 到2020年时增幅相对较大。研究结果还总结了跨文化eWOM研究的四个要素, 并提出了潜在的未来研究途径。

目前还没有关于跨文化eWOM研究的详尽/综合的回顾。这项研究填补了总结跨文化电子WOM文献现状的需要, 并确定了未来要解决的研究问题。

The main purpose of this chapter is to examine the attitudes and behaviors of digital consumers in omnichannel world. For this purpose, in order to understand the behavior of digital consumers, literature review has been made. The transformation of traditional consumers into digital consumers has been examined within the framework of marketing periods. What are the new types of consumers and demographic and psychographic characteristics of these, and how they are segmented in the market are important issues. Another important issue is how digital environmental factors affect digital consumers when shopping online. Purchasing processes of digital consumers and their behaviors, which channels they use and how they make purchasing decisions play an important role in understanding digital consumer behaviors. After the purchasing decision, it is examined whether digital consumers will transfer their experiences to other consumers, satisfaction and loyalty experiences, and whether they will buy again in digital environmental.

The consumer is currently feeling the consequences of the global economic crisis, leading to decreased spending by tourists. An important economizing strategy appears to be that vacationers do not give up their holiday but are likely to travel closer to home, a phenomenon called “staycation”, but this is just one of a variety of options vacationers can use. If they make economies within a holiday, where do they get their ideas about economizing from? The purpose of this paper is to study information searching from the perspective of economizing on vacations.

The work reported on is a survey of Dutch vacationers who stated that they economized on their 2009 holiday.

The research shows that different sources have strong and weak points in relation to the different subdecisions that constitute a vacation. Information sources are used in concert for subdecisions; the strongest joint use involves marketer‐generated sites and e‐WOM, and brochures and travel guides. In the family context, a tendency is found to use more information sources the more economizing decisions are discussed.

For tour operators, it seems to make sense to make it easier to compare vacation alternatives that differ on subdecisions such as booking moment and period, and to offer a range of options from expensive to inexpensive. Also, making options more flexible in terms of downgrading on vacation features could assist vacationers who want to economize. Consumer‐generated sources could focus more on providing information and comparison opportunities for subdecisions.

Information searching is a widely studied area in vacation decision making. Two extensive literature reviews give an overview of factors influencing this search process. In this literature, a contribution on information searching to obtain economizing ideas in difficult times is absent. In this article, with the aid of five research questions, the role of information searching in relation to economizing on vacations is investigated.

While the topical areas of service failure and complaints have been systematically investigated for the general traveling public, service failure issues for disabled tourists have been widely ignored. This exploratory study attempts to provide some insights into this phenomenon by analyzing disabled travelers' complaints reported through online customer complaint websites.

A total of 316 customer complaints were collected and analyzed utilizing a modified procedure of the Critical Incident Technique (CIT). Differences in service failure dimensions in industry sector and recovery type were investigated through the correspondence analysis.

Critical incidents of disabled travelers were classified into three dimensions of service failures including service delivery failure, unfulfilled special requests, and unsolicited employee conduct. Significant relationships in service failure dimensions were identified in the industry sectors and types of recovery.

The limitations of this study are unidentifiable demographic information and lack of necessary details, since this study is based on textual data collected from online complaint/review websites. For further research, more inclusive quantitative data could provide a more complete picture.

The findings of this study could represent a valuable step toward assessing the current status of service failure provided by hospitality and tourism industry, and thus provide useful insights for practitioners to more effectively serve this market segment.

This study serves as exploratory research and contributes to a better understanding of the tourism experience of individuals with disabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of e-marketing orientation (EMO) on strategic business performance (SBP) in presence of e-trust.

Data were collected from CEOs, finance managers, IT managers, Policy makers, owners and Managing Directors of SMEs located in two big cities of Pakistan (Islamabad and Peshawar). Correlation, regression and bootstrap analysis was conducted to check the relationship among independent, mediating and dependent variables.

Based on empirical findings of the responses from managerial staff, it is suggested that strategic performance largely depends on EMO and e-trust.

The authors recommend that further studies are required to test the propositions in longitudinal research design for achieving in-depth insights.

It has been observed that SMEs in developing countries pay less attention toward its strategic goals. This research discusses an implementation approach based on solid theoretical foundations to achieve the SBP.

This study tests e-trust as a mediator between EMO and SBP, therefore, makes a significant contribution to the literature of SMEs by focusing on the link between EMO, e-trust and SBP.