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The emergence of virtual reality (VR) has the potential to revolutionize various industries, including tourism, as it delivers a simulated environment that closely emulates real-life experiences. Therefore, this study aims to explore how the factors, i.e. enjoyment, emotional involvement, flow state, perceived privacy risk, physical risk and cost, influence the customers’ intention to use VR for tourism.

This study integrates the technology acceptance model, hedonic consumption theory with other factors, including cognitive response, authenticity, perceived privacy risk, perceived physical risk, perceived cost and perceived presence. Partial least squares structural equation modelling approach was used to test the proposed research model.

The finding based on the sample of 252 respondents revealed that authenticity is the most influential factor impacting behavior intention followed by perceived cost, attitude, cognitive response and enjoyment. Also, the study supported the moderating impact of personal innovativeness between attitude and behavioral intention to use VR for tourism.

The findings of the study offers practical implications for service providers, site managers, destination marketers, tourist organizations and policymaker to develop more effective strategies for offering VR services for tourism.

This study enriches the current understanding of VR adoption in context of tourism with empirical evidences.

Aiming to address the problem in which practitioners mindlessly prioritise the reputation of social media influencers (SMIs) over ensuring proper congruence between the influencers themselves and content marketing strategies, this study develops a conceptual framework that adopts an elaboration likelihood model and attachment theory to ascertain the effects of SMIs, live content marketing and their congruency on impulsive buying (IB).

Through collecting cross-sectional data from 608 valid replies, this study adopts an integrated method that combines partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), artificial neural network (ANN) and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to analyse.

The results reveal that the credibility and relevance of live content, the empathy and professionalism of SMIs, and their congruence are critical antecedents of consumers' attachments to live content and SMIs, thus triggering their attachment to endorsement and IB.

In knowledge, this study benefits the scope of the elaboration likelihood model and attachment theory and enriches live streaming commerce literature. In method, an integrated analytical method is used to cope with complex structural relationships in non-linear patterns and predictions, as well as examine the complex causal configurations. In practice, this study facilitates practitioners to further ascertain what attributes in live content and SMIs can foster customer's emotional attachments in choosing endorsers and developing endorsement strategies, thus driving their IB.

Consumers can spend their disposable income on hedonic consumption or save for the future. Their preferences were altered by the prolonged life and livelihood-threatening experiences of the pandemic. This paper aims to study the spillover effect of the pandemic experience on consumer savings attitudes and hedonic purchase preferences in the new normal.

The authors conducted 35 in-depth interviews with consumers in India. The data were analysed thematically.

The results showed that when fear of life and negative emotions of the pandemic persisted, consumers became short-term focused, moved towards materialism and increased hedonic spending. Alternatively, individuals who faced substantial financial hardships resorted to an increased preference for savings. The relationship between changes in savings orientation and hedonic consumption was found to be moderated by consumer's individual differences in financial vulnerability and life history strategies.

As the trend towards increased hedonic consumption and preference for luxury products continues, the study findings can be used to devise effective marketing strategies to tap the emerging segment of mass luxury consumption.

Despite ample work being conducted in the hedonic consumption domain, it has not been studied in conjunction with savings orientation, a significant determinant. This research links personal savings orientation with hedonic spending and substantiates that purchase decisions are cognitively weighted as a choice of discretionary spending against the opportunity to save.

Fierce competition among over-the-top (OTT) platforms has rendered branding a precondition for consumer appeal. This study proposes a new structural equation model for OTT brands, especially Netflix, where hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment motives function as facilitators of consumer brand engagement.

An online survey was conducted. Structural Equation Modeling was used to build the model and test for various direct, mediation, and moderation effects.

The results suggest a multiple mediation model in which the relationship between the two types of entertainment and intention to use Netflix is sequentially mediated by consumer attention and consumer brand engagement. Moreover, this study confirms that female consumers, compared to male consumers, exhibit higher levels of consumer brand engagement when motivated by hedonic entertainment.

This is the first study to present a novel structural model for the content consumption of OTT brands and test the role of the two types of entertainment in the intention to use Netflix.

Enterprises build online product community to expect users to contribute: opinion sharing (content contribution) and product consumption (product contribution). Previous literature rarely focused on both. The purpose of this paper is to explain user contribution mechanism by identifying content contribution and product contribution.

This research chose Xiaomi-hosted online product community (bbs.xiaomi.cn) and Huawei-hosted online product community (club.huawei.com) where users can freely share ideas and buy products at the same time. Data were crawled from 109,665 community users to construct dependent variable measurement, and 611 questionnaires were used to verify research hypotheses.

The results indicate that both cognitive needs and personal integration needs have a significant positive impact on browse behavior; social integration needs and hedonic needs have a significant positive impact on content contribution behavior. Browse behavior not only directly affects but also indirectly influences product contribution through content contribution behavior.

Findings of this research provide community managers with useful insights into the relationship between content contribution and product contribution.

This study explains the formation mechanism of user product contribution and reveals the relationship between user content contribution and product contribution in online product community. This paper provides a different way of theorizing user contributions by incorporating uses and gratifications theory into the “Motivation-Behavior-Result” framework.

Although digital content marketing (DCM) research and industry-wide expenditure is growing very rapidly owing to the positive outcomes associated with this new pull marketing strategy, research has not completely mapped how DCM activities can be optimized in the social media brand community context. This paper seeks to understand how social media DCM activities can be optimized to achieve greater relational and monetary outcomes for different products.

A structural equation modeling procedure was used to analyze 416 survey responses obtained from members of Facebook brand communities in South Africa.

The results reveal that social media DCM consumption motives exert significant differential effects on both relational and monetary marketing outcomes in search and experience product contexts while also demonstrating the mechanism through which social media DCM consumption motives lead to contributing social media engagement behaviors.

The study findings call for the need for firms to understand the motives that drive the consumption of DCM in social media brand communities. Specifically, marketers of search products should deploy more of hedonic contents such as images while simultaneously keeping highly textual DCM to a minimum in Facebook brand communities as this works better for experience products. Finally, more authentic SM-DCM activities that effectively address the authenticity SM-DCM consumption motive can result from the DCM activities of social media opinion leaders and genuine consumer–brand interactions in the context of Facebook brand communities.

This paper broke new grounds in three unique directions in terms of: (1) the relative salience of SM-DCM consumption motives in enhancing WTP and different aspects of SMBE; (2) the contextual influence of product type on SM-DCM activities optimization and (3) the mechanisms that underlie the effects of SM-DCM consumption motives on contributing SMBE in the Facebook brand community context.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the underlying consumer values that drive hotel booking mobile app users to engage more with the app and use the app continuously for hotel booking purposes.

By conducting confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) on the data collected through the Qualtrics online survey platform from 506 respondents in the United States, the proposed measurements and structural models were tested.

The findings for both Generation Xers and Millennials revealed that hedonic and social values influenced mobile app engagement, which strongly influenced mobile app loyalty. Thus, to enhance customer engagement and indirectly influence mobile app loyalty, the app value delivery should appeal to social and hedonic values. Although the utilitarian values for using apps had a potential direct impact on mobile app loyalty, the mediation analysis showed that mobile app engagement, when connecting consumption values to mobile app loyalty, served as a full mediator for Generation Xers and a partial mediator for Millennials.

This study provides insights into how hotels and online travel agent (OTA) marketing managers may consider augmenting user engagement with hotel booking mobile apps. This study suggests that hoteliers and OTAs should further develop their user experience efforts to enhance the utilitarian features of their mobile app to increase revenue from repeat purchases. Additionally, this study provides implications for enhancing the hedonic and social features of hotel booking mobile apps to appeal to Millennials and Gen Xers.

This study developed and assessed an integrated model to investigate the relationships between consumption values, engagement and loyalty in hotel booking mobile apps. Furthermore, it examined generational cohorts' role in the relationships between these constructs.

People usually try to avoid uncertainty. Recently, however, uncertainty has become an emerging marketing tool in the hedonic product industry. In the case of blind box consumption, for example, the consumers become addicted to the uncertainty created by businesses, leading to repeat purchases and even indulgences. Previous research has, yet, to focus on the impact of uncertainty on indulgence and the role of emotions.

This paper constructs and validates a chain mediation model of uncertainty triggering indulgent consumption based on the information gap theory, positive emotion theory and uncertainty resolution theory and examines the difference between resolved and unresolved uncertainty. This study also explores differences in the impact of whether uncertainty is resolved on emotions. The uncertainty-resolved group elicited a more positive emotional response than the uncertainty-unresolved group, leading to a more indulgent consumption.

The results of three studies show that uncertainty influences indulgent consumption through curiosity and positive emotion, and that curiosity and positive emotion play separate and chain mediating roles between uncertainty and indulgent consumption, respectively. We validate our central hypothesis with questionnaires among blind box consumer groups, examining the moderating role of perceived luck and risk preferences.

The findings shed new light on firms' use of uncertainty to promote consumer purchases.

The current study aims to investigate the various consumption motives (hedonic, gain and normative) responsible for strengthening consumers' intentions toward purchase behavior for electric vehicle (EV).

A total of 411 valid survey responses were collected using a structured questionnaire. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling to investigate the empirical fit of the hypothesized framework.

The results of structural equation modeling revealed that all three motives were positively correlated with purchase intentions for EV. Hedonic motives were found to have the strongest influence on purchase intentions. In addition, gain and normative motives were also found to be significant predictors of EV buying behavior. Further analysis revealed a positive correlation between gain, normative and hedonic motives. Moreover, personal moral standards seem to have a significant and positive impact on the positive emotions associated with buying EV.

The results of current research can be useful for marketers while designing promotional strategies for all the high-involvement green products. Marketing professionals and policymakers can use these results to build effective marketing strategies for EVs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from personal vehicle use.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study in the South Asian region that explores consumers' motives for EV purchase behavior. Further, this is among a few studies, which have attempted to investigate the impact of hedonic, gain and normative motives on green purchase behavior in the context of high involvement green products.

Drawing on person–environment fit theory, this study aims to investigate how the relationships between service task types (i.e. utilitarian and hedonic service tasks) and perceived authenticity (i.e. service and brand authenticity) differ under different conditions of service providers (human employee vs service robot). This study further examines whether customers’ stereotypes toward service robots (competence vs warmth) moderate the relationship between service types and perceived authenticity.

Using a 2 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, Study 1 examines a casual restaurant, whereas Study 2 assesses a theme park restaurant. Analysis of covariance and PROCESS are used to analyze the data.

Both studies reveal that human service providers in hedonic services positively affect service and brand authenticity more than robotic employees. Additionally, the robot competence stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services, service and brand authenticity, whereas the robot warmth stereotype moderates the relationship between hedonic services and brand authenticity in Study 2.

Restaurant managers need to understand which functions and types of service outlets are best suited for service robots in different service contexts. Robot–environment fit should be considered when developers design and managers select robots for their restaurants.

This study blazes a new theoretical trail of service robot research to systematically propose customer experiences with different service types by drawing upon person–environment fit theory and examining the moderating role of customers’ stereotypes toward service robots.