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This paper aims to examine how incentive framing format and language congruency interactively influence readers’ post-reading responses to hotel-related email advertisements.

A 2 (incentive framing format: amount-off versus percentage-off) × 2 (language congruency: use of readers’ native language versus use of readers’ foreign language) between-subject experiment was conducted with 233 bilingual speakers from China.

The findings unveil that readers are more likely to be enticed to search for more information about the promoted hotel restaurant, click the call-to-action button and share the promotional message with friends and families if an email advertisement presents the incentive of a price promotion in the form of amount-off (versus percentage-off). The indirect impact of language congruency is also verified. Specifically, the impact of incentive framing format on readers’ post-reading response is more salient when information is communicated using readers’ native (versus non-native) language.

The findings provide actionable clues for hoteliers to optimize their email marketing campaigns. If hotels want to publicize a price promotion for their high-priced service (e.g. hotel restaurant dining) via email advertisements, marketers should present the incentive in the form of amount-off. Hotels should also personalize the language used in the email advertisements according to readers’ native language.

This study enriches the literature on email marketing by explicating how hoteliers can improve the efficacy of email marketing via personalizing the incentive framing format and language used in the email advertisement according to the readers’ preferences.

This study aims to assess consumers’ beliefs in three Middle Eastern Arab countries regarding attitudinal and behavioural responses towards permission-based direct email marketing (hereafter DEM) and the moderating role of gender in the hypothesised path model.

Structural equation modelling was used to test the hypothesised path model by using data collected from 829 respondents.

The findings show that attitude was found to fully mediate the relationship between beliefs and behavioural responses towards permission-based DEM. Gender moderates the relationship between beliefs and attitudes and responses to permission-based DEM. Notably, female respondents were found to react more actively when exposed to permission-based DEM.

Further qualitative research is needed to learn more about how and why individuals develop behavioural intentions in certain ways towards opt-in DEM. In addition, neuropsychology approaches such as eye-tracking are endorsed for future research to gain more insights and conquer biases associated with self-reporting procedures in countries where such technologies are deemed as legal and ethical to be used with human subjects.

Advertisers promoting products and services in the Middle Eastern Arab context should take further steps to enhance the quality of information (including cultural sensitiveness) and the perceived entertainment value that could be delivered to consumers through permission-based DEM, especially for female internet users. Additionally, this study highly recommends the double opt-in approach to permission-based DEM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to address the gender role as a moderator of the path depicting the effectiveness of permission-based DEM approach in the Middle East (Arab counties) from beliefs to behavioural responses via attitudes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way one farmers’ market organization used an e-newsletter to establish and maintain their brand image as a socially responsible local food outlet. This research analyzed managerial communication efforts to promote farmers’ market products through email marketing. This analysis also revealed the positive and negative brand images that the e-newsletter communicates and how those align or fail to align with public opinion about of farmers’ markets.

The author spent 2.5 years participating in the farmers’ market organization that comprises the focus of this study, and this included conducting multiple studies using interview, survey and ethnographic methods. The data set for the present study includes two years’ worth of marketing messages from the e-newsletter campaign, which included 31 e-newsletters. Thematic analysis (Terry et al., 2017) was used to discover the dominant messages and values present. Analysis extended to textual messages, images, timing, design and overall newsletter content.

The results show that the digital communications at the Lawrence Farmers’ Market (LFM) promoted messages of getting to know your local farmer, eating fresh and healthy food and supporting local products. Additionally, the market frequently attempted to make the market accessible by communicating operating days and times. Finally, the newsletter message analysis also revealed that the LFM brand could be characterized as lacking consistency, having poor organization, and using poor design principles.

This research extends the knowledge of how farmers’ market organizations engage in brand image management. While there are scores of studies on consumer preferences, we have very few that analyze the ways farmers' market organizations spread key brand ideas to consumers. Additionally, this research offers other implications for nonprofits, looking to improve their brand image with limited resources.

Brands are investing heavily in content marketing within digital communication channels, yet there is limited understanding of the effectiveness of this content on consumer engagement. This paper aims to examine how consumer engagement with branded content is created through consumer-initiated online brand communities (OBCs) and brand-initiated digital content marketing (DCM) communications. Self-brand connections are examined as an important antecedent to the cognitive, affective, behavioural and social dimensions of consumer engagement and the subsequent impact of engagement on loyalty is explored across these two channels.

A survey approach was used with two consumer samples for one focal retail brand, namely, a consumer-initiated OBC (Facebook) and email subscribers of the retail brand’s DCM communications. A multi-group analysis of structural invariance procedure was used to comparatively examine the formation of engagement for consumers within the OBC and DCM channels.

This study demonstrates the different ways in which engagement forms across different digital communication channels. Self-brand connection (SBC) was found to strongly drive behavioural, cognitive, affective and social engagement. The cognitive, affective and behavioural engagement was found to mediate the self-brand connection and consumer loyalty relationship. Overall, this relationship was most strongly and significantly mediated by affective and cognitive engagement within the OBC channel when compared to the DCM channel.

The findings of this study should be interpreted with several limitations in mind. First, the research was conducted within the confines of one OBC, within one social networking site platform characterised by self-selected membership based on a passion and immersion with the brand. This means that consumers within the OBC were highly connected to one another and the retail brand and highly socialised in-group norms and mores. This type and intensity of connection may not be the case for all forms of OBCs. Second, this study was limited to one retail brand, from one brand category. Future research should examine OBCs across a range of utilitarian and hedonic brands to comprehensively contextualise the dimensions of engagement. Third, the data for this study was cross-sectional. The use of netnographic analysis and qualitative interviews across a range of OBCs would support the triangulation of the findings of this research, especially with regard to the narrative that consumers’ express when discussing how their SBC manifests through the dimensions of engagement. Fourth, this study explored a single antecedent of engagement, namely, self-brand connections. Future research may consider how SBC operates in conjunction with other complementary factors to enhance consumers’ affective, cognitive, social and behavioural engagement such as brand awareness, satisfaction and participation/interactivity. In addition, future research could examine an expanded array of engagement outcomes such as purchase intention, the share of wallet and reputation. Finally, future research should examine the operationalisation and validation of the dimensions of engagement using multiple competing scales to assess the suitability of these engagement scales across multiple brand categories and contexts.

Given the increasing investment in branding within social media and the fragmentation of brand communications across multiple communications platforms, the management of effective brand communications remains a significant challenge. This study found that the relationship between self-brand connections, affective, social, behavioural and cognitive engagement and loyalty was context-specific and moderated by a digital communication channel (OBC vs DCM email marketing), thus providing insights as to the effectiveness of OBCs and DCMs as two tools for enhancing consumer loyalty.

This study makes a novel contribution to the engagement literature by examining the antecedent role of self-brand connections in predicting consumers’ engagement; the moderating role of digital communication platforms (OBC vs DCM) on the formation of cognitive, affective, behavioural and social engagement; and the mediating effect of these dimensions on loyalty.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into personalisation from a practitioner’s perspective to bridge the practitioner-academia gap and steer the research agenda. A wide scope of research has investigated personalisation from a consumer perspective. The current study aims at bridging the consumer and practitioner perspective by entering into a dialogue about the practical application of personalisation. It takes the personalisation process model by Vesanen and Raulas (2006) as the starting point.

Lead by the exploratory character of the study, semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with marketers, market researchers and online privacy specialists.

The results showcase how practitioners view the issues present in consumer research. First, they are overly positive about personalisation. Second, they are aware of constraining factors; findings showcase best practices to mitigate them. Finally, practitioners are aware of controversies surrounding personalisation and thus engage in ethical discussions on personalisation.

This study shows that practitioners have somewhat different believes about the utility and appreciation of personalised marketing practices than consumers. It also shows awareness of some of the key concerns of consumers, and that such awareness translates into organisational and technological solutions that can even go beyond what is currently mandated by law. Six insights into personalised marketing as well as expectations for the future of the phenomenon are discussed to steer the research agenda.

Insights into the practice of personalisation contribute to a shared understanding of this phenomenon between involved actors, such as marketers, advertisers, and consumer representatives. In addition, implications for lawmakers are discussed, suggesting that the implementation of privacy laws needs more clarity and that actions aiming at improving consumer knowledge are needed.

The paper contributes to the literature first, by drafting a descriptive map of personalisation from a practitioners’ perspective and contrasting it with the perspective stemming from consumer research and, second, by offering insights into the current developments and direct implications for practice and future research.

The project outlined in this seeks to answer the question: “Is a collaborative model of benchmarking the marketing of electronic resources feasible?”

The project is designed as a national working group of approximately 100 college and university libraries all moving together through the process of a typical marketing cycle, running a brief marketing campaign, and reporting findings. All participating institutions will perform these steps at the same time, beginning in October 2011 and completing the project at the end of February 2012.

Based on the data gathered as the result of the project, it is hoped to determine if college and universities working together and sharing data could help to define “best practices” in the marketing of electronic resources using a collaborative model.

The literature in the area of marketing of electronic resources in libraries is sparse and, as a result, a path for the successful marketing of the resources cannot be easily determined. This project proposes a model to quickly educate and gather data to begin building best practices in the area of marketing electronic resources.

This study aims to propose a novel mirroring digital content marketing (MDCM) framework that extends the current consumer-based digital content marketing (DCM) framework to encompass the provider’s perspective. Relying on the stimulus–organism–response theory, the authors posit that content stimuli influence behavioural engagement responses that, respectively, mirror the motives and self-reported engagement from the consumer-based DCM.

To empirically verify the provider side of the MDCM framework, the authors used one newsletter and one matching website with corresponding 117 weekly data points. Data were drawn from three sources for six countries: newsletter content stimuli, newsletter performance indicators and Google Analytics metrics on matching website performance. OLS and panel regressions were used to analyse the data and generate results.

The results show that content stimuli do explain the behavioural engagement responses of consumers recorded by the provider. However, the effects of the different stimuli are inconsistent: functional stimuli have both positive and negative effects, while social stimuli positively impact the behavioural engagement response. The authors further show that the newsletter engagement response influences subsequent engagement responses across channels (e.g. via the linked news media website).

Further research definitely needs to empirically verify the connection between two sides of the MDCM framework. As proposed by authors, provider-based stimuli are corresponding to the consumer-based motivations, however, which stimuli are triggering which motivations and how they can consequently be translated to both consumer- and provider-based behavioural engagement is still an open question. Different theoretical lenses could be taken in the usage of MDCM framework.

Our observations are relevant for marketers that want to use certain stimuli in their digital content, in particular a content introduced in the newsletter and the website. The authors show that stimuli are indeed related to the behavioural engagement response of consumers and that various stimuli impact engagement differently. Furthermore, the recommendations for the marketing managers of news media are to use priming across the platforms in their Web communication strategies.

This study proposes and empirically tests the provider side of the MDCM framework across two news media channels, focusing on behavioural engagement responses.

The paper aims to clarify the validity of the digital marketing model for software IT professionals. It proposes a model of buying behavior practices followed in digital era and outlining all six critical factors that were considered for developing this model. So the main objective of the study is to validate the success of digital marketing model through a survey-based results and case study analysis and synthesize the results for the success of digital marketing model for software development industry.

The paper opted for an exploratory study using the structured questionnaire. The data were collected using online platform. The present study covers the analysis of a survey of 406 IT professionals from software development industry to understand their buying behavior through digital marketing. Regression technique has been used to find the important predictors of the digital marketing model with its impact on the demographic variables.

The paper provides empirical insights about digital marketing model whose validity has been checked by synthesizing the results of both overall and case study. The results show that predictors elucidate Durbin–Watson in the acceptable range and are suitable for the model.

Data were collected during Covid period. So it was quite a challenging task and moreover sample size could not be increased due to this problem.

The paper includes implications for the development of digital marketing model for software IT professionals. Finally, this study will contribute to the further research for many prominent researchers who express their doubts about the state and future of digital marketing studies, characterized by contradictory and confusing empirical findings. A larger quantitative study on IT companies' digital marketing from different regions is recommended as a future line of research in order to encourage the unique globalized level model development.

Many organizations use digital marketing successfully since with the great amount of awareness generated about the digitalization among the customers has propelled for its development.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study how IT professional's digital buying marketing practices need to be studied.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the degree of investment and involvement attributed to specific product categories, affect content marketing plans and practices on the Web and social media.

This is a conceptual paper based on the classification proposed by Morton and Devine (1985) on the axes of investment and involvement. The author uses secondary research evidence from both academic and industry sources to document content marketing trends in the US and the EU markets and allocates such trends using the semiotic square.

The findings indicate that products in each quadrant follow similar practices regarding content publishing, campaign planning and community management.

Further research may test this model empirically and assess its merits in different markets.

Managers can use this model for content planning, considering category-related opportunities and limitations. The model may also serve as a teaching tool to familiarize students with older research and its potential contribution in current settings.

By applying an old model in the current US/EU context, this paper helps document and understand content marketing practices, paving the way toward their optimization.

Role of digital channels in car buying has increased manifold and consumers are making significant use of various digital channels throughout the decision-making process. However, there are very less number of studies available if one wishes to understand the specific reason(s) for the use of a particular digital channel of communication. This study deals with the identifications of the reason(s) leading towards the usage of particular digital channel of communication while buying a car.

Quantitative methodology was adopted for the study. A total of 10 digital channels namely the websites, social networking sites, YouTube, Smartphones, Online communities, Digital TV, Digital Outdoors, e-mails and others were considered in the study. Data was collected from 603 car buyers from Delhi using digital channels of communication.

The results of the study revealed that Website and YouTube were used for being compatible. Social networking sites, smartphones, digital outdoors and e-mails were used for being informative. Online communities were used for offering customers and experts' reviews. Digital TV was used for being easy to use.

The study considers the respondents from Delhi only. A more representative sample covering various parts of the country would offer more relevant results for the marketers as digital divide existing between rural and urban India cannot be simply ignored.

The study reveals that car buyers are making ample usage of digital channels wherein website is the most used digital channel and smartphones are the most used digital devices used by the car buyers.

Study also reveals that car buyers might use search engines to reach the marketer's website, so effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies should be adopted. Important keywords used in the search engines should be used in the website as well as in the links.

Majority of the available studies use digital as an umbrella term for myriad digital channels. So understanding about the usage of specific channel of communication remains an under-researched area. Such understanding strengths and broadens the existing knowledge about technology mediated consumer behaviour especially in extended problem-solving product category.