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Research on consumer innovativeness has been studied in the field of marketing during the past decade, in that it has become critical to firms and businesses introducing new products. Yet as the literature concerning innovativeness in the hospitality sector is extremely limited, the purpose of this study is to better conceptualize and understand innovativeness in the hospitality sector (e.g., hotel, restaurant & bar, food & beverage, and occupational training). Using a qualitative method, personal interviews have been collected in this study from local hospitality managers and data are analyzed by constant comparative analysis. Eight themes emerge from the interview data: (1) novelty seeking, (2) eagerness, (3) vigilance, (4) openness, (5) venturesome, (6) hedonism, (7) value seeking, and (8) social distinctiveness. These intrinsic characteristics capture the concept of innovativeness in a broader range within different perspectives. The resultant data could therefore be utilized in future research to evaluate the level of awareness and use of perceived innovativeness in consumer behavior research and business marketing.

Mastering aesthetics is a precious source of competitive advantage in creative industries. In fashion, innovation is reflected by how and how much styles change. Elite designers claim to be the only endogenous force shaping fashion innovation season by season. Yet, each season, fashion critics vet the new collections these designers introduce, assessing what is original as opposed to reworked and uninspired, in this way playing a fundamental role as gatekeepers in setting taste within the industry. In this research, we document how stylistic innovation, vis-à-vis the styles premier design houses introduced each season, is impacted, among the others, by the specific exogenous force of critics' assessments of designers' past work. Our data, which include 61 measures detailing the styles introduced by 38 prestigious Italian and French design houses over a nine-year period, suggest designers move further away from styles reviewed less favourably while adhering more closely to styles reviewed more positively. Additionally, the styles a designer introduces are shown to depend on critical assessments of competing designers' styles, revealing how design houses attend to each other's work. This work documents the strong correlation between style dynamics and critics' feedback. It also has important implications for any company trying to find a balance between independence and conformity in setting its own unique positioning into the market.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

The way in which consumers use mobile devices to engage with fashion retailers online.

What external and internal stimuli can be used to engage with consumers and encourage online interaction?

The lens in with the Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) model is applied to understand consumer behaviour.

How marketing can used both to trigger consumption activities and to encourage more sustainable behaviours?

This study aims to explore the influence of environmental education on perceived eco-innovativeness and behavioral intention in the context of farm tourism that embraces the concept of sustainability. It conducts a series of on-site surveys in a farm which supplies a variety of recreational activities along with environmental educational programs. The survey lasted for two-and-a-half months and resulted in 620 useful responses. To achieve the study aim/purpose/objective a theoretical model entailing environmental education, perceived innovativeness and behavioral intention is first constructed. Then structural equation modeling is performed. The study found that environmental education has both direct and indirect impacts on revisit intention and environmental education strongly influences guests’ perception of eco-innovativeness. However, perceived eco-innovativeness does not affect the revisit intentions. Implications and suggestions for future study are provided as concluding remarks.

Entrepreneurial small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face ever increasing competition not only at the domestic level but also at the global level. While large-scale enterprises and multinational corporations often hog the limelight, research and studies reveal that SMEs form the core of the growth engine of most of the national economies and are critical to rebuilding the economy from an economic crisis. In fact, SMEs make a significant contribution to economic growth and continue to play a pivotal role as a catalyst for development to drive innovation, competitiveness, and future growth. However, due to their size and limited resources, most SMEs often struggle to keep on top of new development in capabilities and skills and encounter difficulties keeping their operational activities in balance. Therefore, it is inevitable that most governments have taken a keen interest in SMEs’ development by providing infrastructure and financial grants. As such, it is argued that resource-constraint SMEs need to preserve the focus and drive to survive and grow in today’s interconnected, interdependent world. SMEs need to be properly equipped with deep capabilities in transformational leadership, technicality, and entrepreneurship, and innovativeness required to go international more rapidly and profitably in today’s increasingly borderless world.