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Research is needed regarding how to influence young adults’ patterns of cell phone use while driving, amid social pressures to stay connected to their peers. Such insight could form the basis of a social marketing campaign. This study aims to explore the potential of inoculation and narrative messages as strategies to protect (i.e. generate resistance against) negative attitudes toward texting and driving.

Using a three-phase experiment, the investigation explored the impact of different communication message strategies (i.e. inoculation, narrative, control) aimed at reducing texting while driving.

Results indicated that, for college students exposed to messages in support of texting and driving, inoculation messages were superior to both narrative and control messages. These findings can guide the development of strategic social marketing interventions.

Social marketing scholars and practitioners should consider weaving inoculation messages throughout social marketing campaigns focused on this important issue.

To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate and compare inoculation and narrative strategies in the context of texting and driving.

Service failure is detrimental for both enterprises and customers; therefore, it is particularly important and cost effective for service enterprises to take precautionary measures rather than provide recovery after service failure. Based on the inoculation theory, this research examines the impact and the boundary conditions of inoculation messages on the effectiveness of service recovery.

The proposed research model is examined through two scenario-based experimental studies. A total of 627 datasets was collected and analyzed with the SPSS program with the PROCESS tool to examine the moderation (Model = 1) and three-way interaction (Model = 4) effects.

The research findings show that inoculation messages moderate the relationship between recovery measures and customer satisfaction. Specifically, there is a positive relationship between service recovery and recovery satisfaction, which can be further boosted with inoculation messages. Importantly, inoculation messages eliminate the significant difference between the effects of expected recovery and high recovery. However, inoculation messages are only effective for enterprises with high brand equity.

These findings have important theoretical and practical implications for the service recovery practice of service enterprises.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether organizational identity, commitment, and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) can be bolstered through the use of inoculation treatments.

A four‐phase experiment with 317 subjects was conducted in a laboratory setting to determine if inoculation messages could bolster organizational attitudes manifested in organizational identity and commitment, as well as citizenship behaviors.

Results show that organizational identity, organizational commitment, and certain OCBs can be strengthened through internal communication.

Small effect sizes are a limitation, but they are very common in persuasion research.

This article adds to the literature on organizational identity, commitment, and OCBs. It demonstrates that inoculation can be used to bolster these employee attitudes, which had not been examined before.

Purpose – Attitudinal inoculation has a long history of success in communication studies. A wealth of literature has shown it to be an effective strategy for preventing the assimilation of beliefs and attitudes in several domains, including healthcare, politics, and advertising. Despite its demonstrated efficacy, its utility as a means of preventing the adoption of beliefs and attitudes consistent with strategic messaging distributed by malicious actors has yet to be sufficiently evaluated. This chapter introduces attitudinal inoculation as a viable strategy for challenging online disinformation produced by violent extremist groups.

Methods – Through a systematic review of the literature on attitudinal inoculation and disinformation, this chapter represents an attempt to link broad themes of narrative persuasion with the field of counter-terrorism.

Findings – This chapter will offer specific guidance on the development of inoculation messages intended to mitigate the persuasive efficacy of online disinformation produced and distributed by violent extremist organizations.

Originality/Value – As one of the first attempts to demonstrate the utility of attitudinal inoculation in the field of terrorism and radicalization studies, this chapter presents a novel approach to understanding contemporary issues of political extremism.

This study aims to apply and test the effectiveness of message sidedness and conclusiveness in Google Ads advertising.

Four field experiments on Google Ad campaigns were conducted on the topics of energy and environment, the water–energy–food nexus, and a Higher-Ed program (at the national and local levels).

Two-sided search engine advertisements are more effective than one-sided advertisements in national campaigns but less effective in local campaigns. In national campaigns, conclusive search engine advertisements are more effective in increasing impressions and clicks, but inconclusive advertisements are more effective in increasing the click-through rate (CTR); in local campaigns, inconclusive advertisements are more effective when being one-sided, while conclusive advertisements are more effective when being two-sided. Overall, the two-sided and inconclusive advertisement generates the best results in a national campaign, but the one-sided and inconclusive advertisement generates the best results in a local campaign.

As the first to test sidedness and conclusiveness with Google Ads advertising, the paper provides theoretical and practical suggestions to search engine marketers by identifying the effective copywriting strategies, moderating factors and more measurements of effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to (n=472) examine how negative, user-generated content on Facebook impacts stakeholders’ perceptions of the organization.

At Phase 1, stakeholders’ perceptions about the organization – public relationship, corporate social responsibility, attitude toward the organization, and reputation of the organization were assessed. A week later, at Phase 2, participants were exposed to negative Facebook comments. This study employed the theory of inoculation as a way to bolster stakeholders’ attitudes to protect against attitude shift following exposure to negative, user-generated comments.

Paired sample t-tests indicate stakeholders’ perceptions of the organization – public relationship and corporate social responsibility significantly decrease after stakeholders read negative, user-generated content. The pattern of means supports the idea inoculation can prevent against attitude shift.

Strategic communication professionals should be aware of the impact negative posts can have and develop a strategy to respond to negative comments on Facebook.

There is limited experimental research examining the impact of negative Facebook posts on stakeholders. It extends current literature and provides practitioners with some guidance on the impact of negative, user-generated content.

The use of aggressive media campaigns to parody a competitor is a relatively recent development. The aim of this study is to gauge the consequences of parody on attitudes towards the brand that is the victim of the parody.

The data collection was carried out in an experiment design in two steps (before and after brand parody exposure) in order to measure the effects of a parody exposition on brand‐parodied attitude.

The results show that average level of attitude toward the brand parodied is significantly different after exposure to the advertisement that parodies it. Thus, the average level of attitude toward the brand parodied is significantly different in accordance with the degree to which those exposed to parodies are subject to feelings of anti‐commercial rebellion.

This study shows that a brand parody communication by playing negative humour with an anti‐commercial style represents a real threat for the brand parodied.

This research measured the effect of parody on attitude toward the brand parodied by its competitor. For this, the original materials were used (iPod advertising and iPod parody advertising made by its competitor).

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature regarding negative information’s impact on consumer behavior in the context of tourism services. In addition, this paper empirically examines the likely difference between first-time and repeat tourists in terms of their: resistance to negative information.

Using a sample of 539 visitors to Mount Yuelu, a popular tourist destination in China, this study explores the differences between first-time and repeat tourists regarding how destination social responsibility (DSR) and service quality (SQ) influence tourist resistance to negative information.

The effect of SQ on resistance to negative information is stronger for repeat tourists than for first-time tourists. In addition, the study identifies that DSR and SQ have a positive impact on tourists’ resistance to negative information. Finally, findings indicate that destination identification partially mediates the relationship between DSR, SQ and tourists’ response to negative information, respectively.

The findings provide valuable theoretical and empirical insights into the driving factors that influence consumer resistance to negative information.

The paper brings together DSR, SQ and tourist-destination identification to better understand the impact that visitation frequency (first-time versus repeat tourists) has on how tourists resist negative information about a tourist destination.

Negative information that is generated about a destination may cause the number of future tourism visits to decline. Findings of this paper provide insight as to the framework that can make tourists more resistant to said negative information.

This study contributes to the services marketing and tourism literature by investigating the degree to which DSR and SQ affect tourist resistance to negative information as mediated by tourist-destination identification and moderated by visiting frequency.

Customer service conversations are becoming increasingly digital and automated, leaving service encounters impersonal. The purpose of this paper is to identify how customer service agents and conversational artificial intelligence (AI) applications can provide a personal touch and improve the customer experience in customer service. The authors offer a conceptual framework delineating how text-based customer service communication should be designed to increase relational personalization.

This paper presents a systematic literature review on conversation styles of conversational AI and integrates the extant research to inform the development of the proposed conceptual framework. Using social information processing theory as a theoretical lens, the authors extend the concept of relational personalization for text-based customer service communication.

The conceptual framework identifies conversation styles, whose degree of expression needs to be personalized to provide a personal touch and improve the customer experience in service. The personalization of these conversation styles depends on available psychological and individual customer knowledge, contextual factors such as the interaction and service type, as well as the freedom of communication the conversational AI or customer service agent has.

The article is the first to conduct a systematic literature review on conversation styles of conversational AI in customer service and to conceptualize critical elements of text-based customer service communication required to provide a personal touch with conversational AI. Furthermore, the authors provide managerial implications to advance customer service conversations with three types of conversational AI applications used in collaboration with customer service agents, namely conversational analytics, conversational coaching and chatbots.

Research in tourism and hospitality industry marketing has identified many highly effective applications of social media. However, studies in the existing literature do not enable a comprehensive understanding of this phenomenon because they lack a theoretical foundation. Therefore, this study systematically reviewed the literature from the perspective of the task-technology fit (TTF) theory. The purpose of this paper is to map out what is known about social media use in tourism and hospitality marketing and what areas need further exploration.

A descriptive cumulative review of the literature obtained 99 articles published in tourism and hospitality journals from 2010 to 2019.

The analysis suggests that to understand social media use in tourism marketing, researchers and practitioners in the industry must clarify the following four issues: the control variables, longitudinal analyzes and TTF concepts that should be used in future studies; the fitness of social media platforms for tourism marketing; how various social media platforms differ in terms of performance outcome; and the digital divide in the use of social media for tourism.

An integrated framework was developed to identify constructs and to understand their relationships. Recent studies in this domain are discussed; theoretical and practical suggestions and implications for future research are given.