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Cool has been studied mostly in consumer samples drawn from Western countries. This study was inspired by paucity of literature on “cool” in an Indian context. There is certainty that “cool” adds value and bestows desirability but there is uncertainty about what “cool” means. Since “cool” is a cultural phenomenon, the purpose of this paper is to explore its meaning in the Indian context.

The data were obtained on an open-ended questionnaire followed by depth probes on a sample of young consumers. The obtained scripts were coded and classified into semantic categories based on the grounded theory.

The study found that cool is indicated by seven facets, including being oneself, living life to the fullest, sense of humor and socially networked, and calm disposition. Unlike Western notions, in India, cool is not being deviant and hedonistic. The cultural and religious imprints are palpable in what is construed as cool in India.

Transplanting the Western notions of cool for brand building is likely to be a risky proposition. It may not resonate with the inner cords of the Indian youth. The implication of this study is that it reveals possible ways in which cool can be incorporated in brand identity.

Cool is valued because it bestows distinction in subtle ways. Brands can gain traction among consumers by incorporating cool symbolism in their identity.

This study expands the understanding of cool in the context of an emerging market. This is one of the first studies to have probed the concept of “cool” in India.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of mindfulness meditation sessions on students of higher education in terms of their mindfulness, mindful consumption behavior and life satisfaction.

Participants of research were higher education students. The research included two studies. The first (screener) study endorsed that mindfulness was higher in students with higher mindfulness meditation frequency. The second study used difference-in-differences experimental design using a treatment and a control group. These groups participated in pre and post-treatment surveys. The treatment was given as guided short mindfulness meditation sessions as suggested by mindfulness guru – Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn. The treatment group received these sessions at the end of regular subject classes for two months.

The experiment revealed that mindfulness, mindful consumption and life satisfaction change significantly in the treatment group after treatment as compared to the control group.

Limitations of the study included sample size and attrition. In total, 149 students participated in the screener study. In total, 94 students were given pre-treatment survey as per research design and 80 participated in post-treatment survey.

This experiment demonstrated that important traits and behavior like life satisfaction and mindful consumption behavior of higher education students can be improved significantly. The effectiveness of guided short mindfulness sessions, conducted in the classroom environment, was also confirmed.

The inclusion of mindfulness in the regular curriculum by policy makers would benefit students, faculty members and overall quality of learning environment.

Though previous researches have separately investigated relationships of mindfulness with life satisfaction, there is a lack of research to show association of mindfulness, mindful consumption and life satisfaction.

Mindful consumption is a popular concept that is often associated with mindfulness and religious faith, but nonetheless, its empirical associations to these remain relatively underexplored. Clarifying the impact of mindfulness and religious faith on mindful consumption is important to delineate their effectiveness in influencing consumers to reconsider consumption decisions (e.g. the need for additional products) given the detrimental effects of mindless consumption (e.g. financial debt, environmental degradation and materialistic culture). The concern about mindfulness potentially being a religious matter can also be resolved through empirical validation. Hence, the purpose of this research is to advance the empirical understanding of how mindfulness and religious faith impact on mindful consumption and whether mindfulness and religious faith are interrelated.

The authors adopt a multistudy approach to scaffold the exploration of mindfulness and religious faith as precursors of mindful consumption.

Study 1 carries out an experiment with undergraduates and demonstrates that mindfulness encourages mindful consumption. Study 2 conducts an offline survey with undergraduates and provides evidence that mindfulness and religious faith independently (i.e. without interacting with each other) encourage mindful consumption. Study 3 uses an online survey of consumers for conceptual replication and reaffirms the findings of Studies 1 and 2 across gender, occupations and household incomes (except middle-income households).

The implications of these findings are discussed, wherein mindfulness and religious faith are earmarked as viable avenues for promoting mindful consumption.

This seminal attempt uses multiple studies to empirically validate the nature and generalizability of relationships between mindfulness, religious faith and mindful consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to find out the antecedents of customer brand advocacy (CBA) on the basis of synthesis of the CBA literature. A summarisation of the results of the empirical CBA studies containing CBA as a measured variable is carried out. The antecedents’ strengths of association with CBA are compared.

The literature is synthesised using the technique of meta-analysis (Hedges and Olkin, 1985). A total of 63 empirical research papers containing 66 data sets, published between 1988 and 2019, are analysed. For each antecedent – CBA relationship, the statistics calculated include point estimate of the reliability adjusted correlation coefficient (ρ), 95% confidence interval of the computed effect size, Cochran’s Q statistic and fail safe-N. The effect of study context as a possible moderator is assessed.

The major antecedents of CBA, identified in the study, are categorised into personal factor (opinion leadership), relational factors (brand trust, customer satisfaction, brand identification, customer-based brand equity, affective commitment and normative commitment) and social factor (normative influence). Significant heterogeneity was found across studies for the paired relationships, pointing towards the presence of theoretical and/or methodological moderators.

The nascent CBA literature reports mixed findings. This creates confusion. This synthesis study contributes to the present body of knowledge of the concept of CBA. It is the only study that uses the technique of meta-analysis to the CBA literature.

The study aims to synthesize the state of research on pride in consumer behaviour and marketing. Specifically, this study aims to understand the emergent themes of literature, the key theories, analytical techniques and methodologies used, as well as key variables associated with pride in consumer behaviour and marketing.

Using a systematic literature review process, the study analyses 59 research articles and structures its findings by using the theory–context–characteristics–methodology framework.

The review proposes a taxonomical classification of the multiple conceptualizations of pride. It identifies that the phenomenon and regulation of pride is explained using theories from psychological self-related research. Pride has been experienced in sustainable, advertising, luxury and digital consumption contexts. Reviewed articles showed an over-reliance on the quantitative methodology and the experimental method. The review identifies that pride is associated with positive outcomes and has considerable influence on consumer behaviour. Building on this analysis, 12 research questions are developed to encourage future research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first structured review on the emotion of pride in the domains of consumer behaviour and marketing.

Service failure and recovery encounters are often witnessed by other customers, but little is known about how these encounters impacts other customers. With an aim to bridge this gap, the purpose of the paper is to explore why and how service recovery directed at a focal customer impacts other customers who are present in the same service environment.

The paper follows a qualitative research methodology. Purposive sampling was used to collect data from 30 customers through semi-structured face-to-face interviews. The data was analysed using thematic analysis.

Findings of the study show that service recovery directed at a focal customer has an impact on other customers' fairness judgments, emotions, service quality perceptions and behaviour. Other customers' behavioural reactions in response to observed service recovery are driven by two different motives: self-interest and moral obligation. Observing customers' cautious behaviour and (re)purchase behaviour are found to be primarily driven by self-interest, whereas their helping behaviour, punishment behaviour and word-of-mouth behaviour are found to be driven by moral obligation.

This study findings contribute to theory development on “other-oriented” effects of service recovery and provides valuable insights for effective management of service failures in the shared service environment.

This is the first study, which qualitatively explores the “other customers” perspective of service recovery in the context of shared servicescape.

The purpose of this paper is to build on the Consumer Perceived Value (CPV) phenomenon by theoretically defining and empirically developing a Services Perceived Value Scale (SPERVAL) in the context of services industry.

The multidimensional SPERVAL scale relies upon exploratory research to identify “Value Indicators”. Given the constructs included in the proposed research model, it is quite clear that testing the model involves a study of consumers. Accordingly, this study is focused on consumers’ views and a blend of both quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. The study has used qualitative research as a starting point, using exploratory research methods of focus group discussions and interviews. The results generated from the research were quantitatively analyzed with descriptive research by using questionnaires as the instrument.

KMO and Bartlett's Test justified the use of factor analysis on the data. The reliability of the SPERVAL Scale was 92.629 per cent (Cronbach alpha), part 1=0.9046, part 2=0.8405 (split half) and the correlation between forms was 0.7511.

Marketers can understand the psychology behind evaluation of consumption values in the context of services industry by way of CPV dimensions and drivers. Service providers can also use the research findings to build on their competitive advantage by developing core competencies in these areas. Limitations of scope with respect to sampling area and sample size existed.

The paper presents a new Consumer Perceived Value Scale in the context of service consumption.

Service quality is a perceptual construct that is likely to differ across industries, customer segments and markets. The purpose of this paper is to explore the construct of retail service quality in the Indian context, and identifies quality components as a precursor to developing a quality measure.

Initially, the construct comprehension was done using exploratory research involving customer depth probes and juxtaposing it with the available literature. After defining the broad contours of retail service quality and surface considerations, the study attempted to discover retail service quality dimensions by factor analyzing the collected data.

It was found that retail service quality construct is composed of seven critical dimensions – ambience and layout, salespeople, merchandise, convenience, services, prices and customer care.

The specific quality component structure found in this study highlights the need for managers to prioritise their retail operation and marketing efforts in sync with the uncovered quality dimensions.

This paper explored the quality phenomenon in the Indian retail context using a bottom-up approach. This paper provides the much-needed insights to firms that are entering the Indian market on what the quality means and the components it is made up of.

Ubiquitous health-care monitoring systems can provide continuous surveillance to a person using various sensors, including wearables and implantable and fabric-woven sensors. By assessing the state of many physiological characteristics of the patient’s body, continuous monitoring can assist in preparing for the impending emergency. To address this issue, this study aims to propose a health-care system that integrates the treatment of the impending heart, stress and alcohol emergencies. For this purpose, this study uses readings from sensors used for electrocardiography, heart rate, respiration rate, blood alcohol content percentage and blood pressure of a patient’s body.

For heart status, stress level and alcohol detection, the parametric values obtained from these sensors are preprocessed and further divided into four, five and six phases, respectively. A final integrated emergency stage is derived from the stages that were interpreted to examine at a person’s state of emergency. A thorough analysis of the proposed model is carried out using four classification techniques, including decision trees, support vector machines, k nearest neighbors and ensemble classifiers. For all of the aforementioned detections, four metrics are used to evaluate performance: classification accuracy, precision, recall and fmeasure.

Eventually, results are validated against the existing health-care systems. The empirical results received reveal that the proposed model outperforms the existing health-care models in the context of metrics above for different detections taken into consideration.

This study proposes a health-care system capable of performing data processing using wearable sensors. It is of great importance for real-time systems. This study assures the originality of the proposed system.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and rank the contextual relationship among the quality management (QM) constructs for manufacturing and its related service organizations providing integrated value bundles, which has got limited research attention.

The QM constructs of manufacturing and services are selected by performing the citation analysis. Studies related to manufacturing and service are selected by reviewing their citations index in the three major research databases namely ProQuest, Scopus and Google Scholar. The subjective responses from both industry and academia are taken in order to gain better understanding of the contextual relationship among the QM constructs. Finally, an integrated model is proposed using Micmac analysis and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM).

The citation analysis lead to identification of 12 QM constructs: top management commitment, supplier relationship management, human resource management, strategic focus, customer focus, quality of information sharing, process management, servicescape, employee involvement, service quality, supply chain flexibility and customer satisfaction. The expert opinions of executives in the automotive industry and academia resulted in the development of contextual relationships among the identified QM constructs for the development of an ISM model, which is a major contribution of this study.

The unique focus of this study is on analyzing the contextual relationship among QM aspects in manufacturing and services as clubbed offering. The researchers in the existing literature have so far differentiated between manufacturing and services but this study integrates the QM constructs for manufacturing and its associated services through expert feedback and proposes an ISM model.