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The potential outcomes of social media-facilitated customer–brand relationships have prompted many firms to develop strategies that would enable them to connect with as many customers as possible through social media. Nevertheless, the marketing value of these artificial connections is questionable. Therefore, this paper aims to identify determinants of customers’ intention to connect with a brand on social media (i.e. Facebook) in the absence of “pull-strategies”.

In this paper, the concept of customer–brand engagement (CBE) is applied to the intentions to “Like” a brand’s Facebook fan page using structural equation modelling.

The results show that the three dimensions of CBE collectively explain about 50 per cent of the intentions to “Like” a brand’s Facebook fan page. Additionally, the results show that the influences of two of the CBE dimensions on the two “Like”-intentions are conditional effects of brand trust.

Because of the novelty of the CBE construct, further investigation of its application in a social media setting is lacking. To address this gap in the literature, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how CBE influences customers’ intention to “Like” a brand’s Facebook page.

The benefits and problems associated with firm-generated content (FGC) as a key driver of sponsorship effectiveness demand more research attention. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of content marketing on sponsorship-response favorability in the South African energy drink market.

It is theorized that in an FGC environment, sponsor factors, sponsorship factors and event factors drive sponsorship favorability. This notion is tested using a structural equations model among 18- to 35-year-olds.

The results show acceptable model fit and confirm the usefulness of understanding the effects of content marketing on sponsorship favorability. The authors also offer directions for future research.

The results suggest that FGC which is well-designed, packaged and presented can enhance the views of individuals regarding a sponsor – even if the brand operates in a background position as opposed to the conventional foreground position common in promotional material.

The current study considers content marketing in contexts that have largely been avoided so far, or have only featured on a very limited scale in the literature. This study was conducted in an emerging market, business-to-consumer and sponsorship context for the application of a content marketing strategy.

Digital-only banks are emerging as challenger banks to the traditional-bank business model in South Africa. However, traditional-bank customers could resist the use of digital-only banks, theoretically due to their satisfaction with the status quo. Consequently, inertia arising from bias to traditional banks based on status quo satisfaction could engender their resistance to become customers of digital-only banks. The objective of the study, therefore, is to investigate how traditional-bank customers' inertia influences digital-only bank resistance.

Based on a literature review, digital-only bank adoption barriers and cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs were identified as mediators of the influence of inertia on digital-only bank resistance. To test the mediation model empirically, data was collected from 610 traditional-bank-only customers.

The five adoption barriers fully mediate the influence of inertia on cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs. The five barriers in serial with cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs partially mediate the influence of traditional-bank customers' inertia on digital-only bank resistance. Cognitive-based initial distrusting belief is an essential factor in the mechanism underlying the influence of traditional-bank customers' inertia on digital-only bank resistance.

Digital-only banks are relatively new. Research is therefore lacking in consumer behavior explaining the use of digital-only banks by traditional-bank customers in the South African context. A further novelty of the study is the empirical assessment of mechanisms that explain the influence of inertia on cognitive-based initial distrusting beliefs, and the influence of inertia on resistance behavior.

Shopping statistics indicate that online shoppers prefer purchasing products using the desktop website of the retailer, rather than using the mobile website on a mobile phone to purchase products (mobile website purchasing). Therefore, using status quo bias theory, this study aims to investigate mobile website purchasing resistance of those customers using only desktop website purchasing.

To test the conceptual model an online questionnaire was used to collect data from customers purchasing products using only the desktop website on a computer (n = 484) and not the retailer’s mobile website.

Due to cognitive dissonance, customers using only desktop purchasing trivialize mobile website purchasing perceived attractiveness while perceiving more cognitive effort in mobile website purchasing to maintain consonance with their inertia. Further, relative advantage perceptions of mobile website purchasing lead to more trivialization of mobile website purchasing attractiveness perceptions. Desktop purchasing inertia enhances resistance through alternative attractiveness and cognitive effort perceptions, respectively, and cognitive effort and alternative attractiveness perceptions in serial. Desktop purchasing habit has the strongest positive influence on desktop purchasing inertia.

This study was conducted in a high-involvement product context. Replication in a low-involvement product context is necessary to confirm the robustness of the results.

Retailers can use the findings to develop strategies to lower mobile website purchasing resistance in an online-mobile concurrent channel environment.

The study provides novel insights into mobile website purchasing resistance in an online-mobile concurrent channel environment. Further, the study addresses the gap in research on inertia and switching costs in the adoption of concurrent channels.

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.

Nel riprendere come Libero Docente le mie lezioni presso la Facoltà di Giurisprudenza dopo un lungo intervallo di anni in cui il Corso è stato impartito per Incarico, cioè a titolo ufficiale, prima nella facoltà di Scienze Politiche e poi in quella di Economia e Commercie, ritengo opportuno accennare alle vicende di questo insegnamento che ha segnato in certo modo il punto di partenza ed insieme il banco di prova del primo tentativo di sistematica scientifica della trattazione del turismo dal punto di vista economico e statistico. E mancherei ad un preciso dovere e ad un impulso spontaneo del mio animo se in questa occasione non rivolgessi un memore e devoto pensiero al mio grande ed indimenticabile maestro, Augusto Graziani, che seppe inculcarmi la passione per gli studi di economia politica: debbo anzi a lui anche lo specifico orientamento verso l'indagine turistica, perchè il primo tema che egli mi propose nelle esercitazioni di seminario degli Istituti Giuridici dell'Università di Napoli (oh magnifica palestra per noi giovanissimi studenti appena usciti dal Liceo!) fu quello della bilancia dei pagamenti internazionali con particolare riguardo alle cosidette partite «invisibili».

La politica del turismo, intesa come sistema di direttive e di norme per gli operatori turistici e come atteggiamento degli organi statali, parastatali e privati nei riguardi dei problemi sorgenti dal movimento dei forestieri, significa organizzazione e disciplina delle attività del turismo e dell'ospitalità, sia per spontanea consapevolezza degli interessati, sia per riconosciuta esigenza di tutela delle manifestazioni individuali e collettive derivanti dai rapporti turistici.

In Italia si è fatto quanto non è stato fatto in nessun altro Paese, sempre nel settore dell'istruzione media turistico‐alberghiera. Per cui mi permetto di suggerire, come ebbi a fare altre volte, di esaminare gli ordinamenti scolastici esistenti negli altri Paesi. Ciò per stabilire, in quanto è possibile, un programma comune sull'istruzione media turistica.

This paper aims to determine one explanation for how the self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty through the brand experience. Brand experience should verify the self-brand connection by acting as a mechanism through which a self-brand connection is associated with brand loyalty.

Data were obtained from 317 adults through paid Facebook Boosting of an online survey and analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Analyses confirm that brand experience fully mediates the association between self-brand connection and brand loyalty.

Ensuring a positive brand experience is critical for brand managers opting to maintain consumers’ self-brand connections and brand loyalty. Causality suffered owing to the cross-sectional design of the study.

Self-brand connection is viewed as consumer-driven. However, by identifying the brand experience to verify the self-brand connection and as a factor that mediates the self-brand connection–loyalty relationship of consumers, brand experience is recognized as a new factor which brand managers can control to manage self-brand connections and brand loyalty.

This paper is the first to apply the self-verification theory to the self-brand connection–loyalty relationship by explicating brand experience as a mediator of this relationship. This paper argues self-verification is not context-specific and lived experiences with the brand, irrespective of context, establish consumer–brand relationships. This paper confirms the second-order factor structure of the brand experience scale (Brakus et al., 2009) as a mediator in this self-brand connection–loyalty model.