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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.

This chapter presents a systematic review of over 30 types of online marketing methods. It describes different methods like email marketing, social network marketing, in-game marketing and augmented reality marketing, among other approaches. The researchers discuss that the rationale for using these online marketing strategies is to increase brand awareness, customer-centric marketing and consumer loyalty. They shed light on various personalization methods including recommendation systems and user-generated content in their taxonomy of online marketing terms. Hence, they explain how these online marketing methods are related to each other. The researchers contend that the boundaries between online marketing methods have not been clarified enough within the academic literature. Therefore, this chapter provides a better understanding of different online marketing methods. A review of the literature suggests that the “oldest” online marketing methods including the email and the websites are still very relevant for today’s corporate communication. In conclusion, the researchers put forward their recommendations for future research about contemporary online marketing methods.

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.

New information and communication technologies have transformed the ways businesses communicate and maintain relationships with their customers. In this chapter, we review the main topics in academic research pertaining to digital marketing and relationship perspectives. The discussion involves email and website marketing, search engine marketing, user-generated content, co-creation marketing, social media marketing, prosumption marketing in the sharing economy, immersive marketing and AI-based marketing. On this basis, the chapter proposes some future research directions including influencer marketing, live streaming, social service enhancement and the dark side of social media marketing, consumer-to-consumer interactions on two-sided platforms, psychological mechanisms related to the use of mixed realities, and the experience of AI-enabled service automation and relevant ethical issues. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as the Internet of things (IoT) and blockchain are expected to be the next breakthrough in marketing, which warrant further research to examine their impact on the customer-firm relationship. It is suggested the researchers could focus on the adoption and application of blockchain technology, participative marketing via IoT, as well as the privacy and data protection issues related to these technologies. This chapter provides a comprehensive picture of the connection between digital marketing and relationship marketing in academic research.

The rapid digital transformation is driving businesses to reexamine their marketing plans and practices. Marketers face new conflicts while they are implementing digital marketing strategies. The main objective of this chapter is to deeply understand these conflicts and to provide appropriate solutions. This chapter addresses six digital conflicts that challenge marketers most: (1) online versus offline channel conflicts, (2) conflicts stemming from digitalization gap, (3) conflicts in influencer marketing context, (4) conflicts in artificial intelligence (AI) context, (5) environmental conflicts and digital marketing, and (6) ethical conflicts and digital marketing. Finally, we discuss conflict management strategies for the most challenging digital marketing conflicts.