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This paper aims to determine the impact of online community participation on attitudes and product-related behaviour in the health and fitness sector.

Survey data are collected from 221 users of the social medium Instagram, members of the self-proclaimed health and fitness community (#fitfam). Data are analysed with structural equation modelling.

The study shows that online community identification and engagement significantly increase health environment sensitivity, resulting in heightened engagement in physical fitness and healthy product choices.

Given the difficulty to remain engaged in pro-health behaviour and the growing impact of social media on young adults’ lives, these findings are encouraging. They show that online health and fitness communities provide a supportive environment in which consumers can identify and freely engage and a fertile ground to the development of health sensitivity and product-related behaviour.

The study advances knowledge on the role of social media and online communities in promoting health and fitness product behaviours and attitudes.

This research created a theoretical framework based on theory of consumption values (TCV) and theory of perceived risk (TPR) to investigate the determinant factors behind consumers' intention to use health and fitness apps during the COVID-19-related lockdown. In addition, based on selectivity hypothesis theory (SHT), this study also explored how gender differences moderate the relationships between the determinants and consumers' behavioral intention.

A total of 613 respondents completed a self-reported online questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the role of potential determinants in influencing consumers' behavioral intention. Hierarchical multiple regression was performed to examine the moderating effect of gender.

The findings of this research revealed that physical appearance, general health, enjoyment, affiliation and condition have positive influences on consumers' behavioral intention, while privacy risk and security risk exert negative impact on consumers' behavioral intention. More importantly, the moderating results indicated that only affiliation, privacy risk and security risk have stronger influences on female, while other predictors showed the same effects on both genders.

Fitness providers should embrace health and fitness apps as a new contactless tool to offer services during and after the COVID-19-related lockdown. Fitness providers and app developers need to focus more on the utility and quality of their health and fitness apps. In addition, they should add more gamification elements to health and fitness apps because these elements could increase consumers' hedonic experience especially during the lockdown. Third, the security systems in health and fitness apps should be continuously updated to decline privacy risk during and after the COVID-19-related lockdown. Lastly, when female consumers are targeted during the lockdown, fitness providers should make more efforts to imbue health and fitness apps with more social features and improve the level of security.

Although the importance of contactless technologies has been highlighted ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been very little research on the usage of health and fitness apps during the lockdown based on TCV and TPR. Meanwhile, the moderating role of gender differences in this context remains underexplored. This research is one of the early attempts to fill in these gaps. The findings of this study will enhance the theoretical framework regarding the acceptance and use of health and fitness apps; it also challenges the generalizability of SHT in the context of the COVID-19-related lockdown. Moreover, several important implications for the health and fitness industry during and after the COVID-19 pandemic were suggested.

The purpose of this paper was to better understand the underrepresentation of Muslim women living in Australia in physical activity and in group-fitness classes in particular. The authors contend that the Australian fitness industry has ignored the needs of this group through stereotypical islamophobic views focusing on religious dictates as the prime barrier for participation of this group. This study debunks this myth showing that motivations for exercise are complex and multi-faceted.

The authors conducted interviews and a focus group with 27 Muslim women living in Australia. Through this method, the authors explored the role of religiosity and national culture in attitudes towards participation in exercise, gym attendance and group fitness classes.

The authors confirmed that while religion impacted the form and place of exercise options, it did not impact the overall motivation to engage in exercise. This study found that group-fitness classes offered by gyms did not particularly appeal to this group of women, partially due to their religion (this form of exercise being too aggressive and immodest) and partially due to their ethnic background. Exercise options that were more social were favoured. The authors found that notions of femininity and culturally embedded expectations for the role of women were more powerful predictors of exercise engagement and choice of exercise type.

This research is exploratory in nature and as such its findings are restricted to the small sample. To extend this study’s implications, a larger empirical study should be conducted and needs to also consider the intersection between national culture and religiosity on decision-making.

This study has practical implications for the fitness industry attempting to attractive new markets in a multi-cultural population. To attract Muslim women, gyms and fitness centres need to consider providing appropriate areas for women to exercise that allow them to maintain their modesty. To attract this segment, fitness products that are focused on a holistic approach to wellness and highlight opportunities for social interaction should be developed. Focusing on this group as a market segment needs to include a broader contextualisation of their lifestyles and individual situations and should not just focus on their religion.

The requirements of the Muslim religion for women to adopt conservative dress and to avoid contact with men do hinder their ability and also their desire to exercise to maintain a healthy mind and body. Many of these women would like to exercise but find it difficult to find the right settings and form of exercise that suits their needs. Engaging in exercise with others is also an important way for these women to integrate into their communities and to assimilate with the national culture.

This research is original in that it is one of the first to explore attitudes of Muslim women towards exercise and group-fitness classes in Australia. In particular, it includes an examination of the impact of religiosity on motivations and attitudes towards fitness and is the first to consider the relationship between religion, ethnic background and notions of femininity in the context of fitness. The influence of religiosity is an area heavily impacted by cultural bias and stereotyping, and it is therefore important for a deeper understanding of this issue in the services domain.

This article describes an apprenticeship scheme, including National Vocational Qualifications, introduced by UK health and fitness company Cannons Health and Fitness, which covers the training needs of team members working in the exercise and fitness area as well as a range of training that supports the business side of running health and fitness facilities.

Situates the initiative in the context of the company's “Grow Your Own” employee‐development scheme, and examines the training from the perspectives of the company itself and the training provider.

Shows that 20 Cannon team members a month are currently joining the program, and forecasts that around 300 team members will be accredited by the end of 2007.

Shows that successful work‐based training is about delivering courses that not only fit in with trainees' work commitments but also complement employers' needs. Cannons already had a good infrastructure in place. The introduction of NVQ‐level training has helped to make its employees more employable.

Demonstrates that it is possible significantly to improve a company's training provision by adding accreditation.

This article aims to lend insight into the consumption situation wherein consumers are unmotivated to try new products or behaviors that they perceive as too difficult to adopt as a result of low self-efficacy.

Two experiments were introduced to test hypotheses. In Studies 1 and 2, we demonstrated that enhancing specific self-efficacy (SSE) by repositioning the self, through marketing messages, increased participants’ behavioral intentions toward difficult to adopt (DTA) products.

In this research, an important issue is elucidated in consumer behavior: a phenomenon wherein consumers lack the motivation, as a result of low self-efficacy (i.e. assessing the disparity between their current situation and some desired goals as too wide to bridge over), to try a product that would benefit them. Thus, the marketer’s role in this case is to convince the consumers that they are able to achieve these goals.

This study focuses on health and fitness products and on the effectiveness of messages targeted at raising SSE among undergraduate students through verbal persuasion. For better generalizability, it is recommended that future research focus on other product categories (e.g. do-it-yourself products, technological products) aimed at other segments (e.g. elderly consumers) and use other means of boosting consumers’ self-efficacy.

The practical importance of the findings is especially relevant in DTA situations in which marketers aim to motivate consumers to engage in effortful consumption tasks.

The uniqueness of our approach is, in addition to introducing the theoretical concepts, to demonstrate that marketers can boost individuals’ self-efficacy by means of marketing messages that emphasize their ability to face challenges and, consequently, increase their preferences, behavioral intentions and financial commitments toward a DTA product.

The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the healthy lifestyle consumer by examining demographic, personal value and psychographic antecedents.

A cluster analysis was used to divide consumers into healthy and unhealthy lifestyle segments based on their diet and exercise behavior. A logistic regression analysis was then run on these segments to test the impact of 17 hypothesized antecedents.

Results indicate that people who maintain a healthy lifestyle tend to be female, older, more educated, place less importance on the value of “excitement”, have a greater tendency to plan ahead and tend to experience less role overload.

One limitation is that the response rate of the mail survey used to collect data was only 28.8 percent. Another limitation was that the specific types of diet and exercise behavior used to classify respondents into clusters did not encompass the full range of diet and exercise options available to all consumers.

The financial impact of the healthy lifestyle consumer on a number of industries is documented. A demographic profile of the healthy lifestyle consumer was obtained which should assist companies seeking to target this segment. The significance of two time‐related psychographic predictors suggests that companies looking to expand the market for healthy products may want to focus on ways of making their products/services more convenient to time‐pressured consumers.

This paper represents one of the first attempts in the marketing literature to study the healthy lifestyle segment.

This paper aims to outline the role of brands as relationship builders and to offer a better understanding of the recent developments and key literature in the area of consumer–brand relationships.

This paper is an editorial based mainly on a literature review on consumer–brand relationships. It uses the sentiment range and passion intensity to position various brand relationship constructs. This work follows the same bibliometric-analysis approach used by Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) and looked for publications in the Web of Science on brand relationships, with reference to Fournier’s (1998) seminal work and data collected for the period between January 2010 and November 2018.

First, this work presents the key consumer–brand relationship terms and positions the work on brand love, brand like, brand hate, brand dislike and brand indifference. In addition, the bibliometric analysis offers a number of insights into the current state of the academic research in the area of consumer–brand relationships, including a clear indication that the research on consumer–brand relationships is increasing.

This work and the whole special issue together help in the understanding of brands as relationship builders, clearly explaining the continuum from strong positive or negative relationships with brands to no relationship with brands and the current state of research in the area.

The idea that risk could be a motivating factor in consumers′ choice of breakfast cereal seemed less than plausible on first consideration. However, reports an investigation of secondary sources, some focus groups and a survey of 180 shoppers which revealed that this initial reaction was unfounded and that risk appeared significant in affecting consumers′ purchasing behaviour. The most important risks were those of taste and nutritional value. The most important risk relievers were choosing a well‐known brand and obtaining free samples. The findings seem to support the high advertising spends characteristic of the market, but question the widespread use of celebrity endorsements.

The classification of psychological suffering stumbles on the challenge of quantifying the ‘un-quantifiable’ upon the systematic categorising and description of affective and mental states and their transformation into illnesses and disorders. In this chapter, the author will explore the affect of anxiety through a critical recent history of its diagnosis and treatment in the context of psychological care. By unpacking the strategies employed by mainstream psychiatry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association since the mid-twentieth century, it is possible to unveil the dynamics of a reduction of the subject to a productive-biological body in the last decades. This chapter thinks through what happens to the equation ‘body-world’ through the critical genealogy of affect and its relation to diagnoses and treatments of anxiety and depression. It grapples with the ethics of techno-scientific global financial capitalism – heralded by pharmacological corporations and governmentality – which replicates a modern scientific view of the body, affect and suffering in a world of renewed paradigmatic demands. The author argues that by consistently pathologizing and working towards the elimination of anxiety, the hegemonic clinic erases the possibility of such ‘subjective truth’, reducing the subject to the status of ‘dividual’.