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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how customer involvement in product development creates an emotional connection, satisfaction, and subsequent loyalty toward fast-fashion retailers across high vs low fashion-conscious consumers.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to gain understandings of the impacts of customer involvement. To explore customers’ general perceptions of fast-fashion retailers, a focus group interview with 11 US students was conducted. Data for a hypothesis test were obtained from 306 US female consumers and analyzed through structural equational modeling.

The findings underscored the relational benefits of involving customers in product development and the substantial moderating impact of female customers’ fashion consciousness.

The study’s findings support that the customer-brand relationship can be solidified by proactively involving customers in product development. This is beyond benefits derived from leveraging customers’ operant resources in product innovation. Thus, apparel retailers should take such interactive opportunities to build relationships with customers. Also, involving customers in product development can be a critical way for fast-fashion retailers to establish an emotional bond with and loyalty from consumers with a low level of fashion consciousness. Thus, any digital opinion platform designed to foster customer involvement should be managed with the customer-brand relationship in mind.

This study contributes to the emerging body of literature on customer involvement in product development in fast-paced retailing by elucidating the psychological process through which their participation strengthens the customer-brand relationship manifested in emotional, evaluative, and behavioral responses to the brand, and by identifying a consumer attribute that fortifies this process.

This paper aims to offer insights into the impact of digitization technology on consumer goods manufacturers and retail organizations. The authors propose that the “next phase” of digitization will entail the employment of digitization technology to offer consumers personalized product offerings and recommendations based on their internal biomarkers.

The authors draw on past investigations into digitization and their retailing experience to speculate on how the next phase of digitization will affect both consumer goods manufacturers and retailers.

The next phase of digitization will entail the use of nutrigenomics (DNA sequencing), exhaled breath analysis, fitness tracker devices, sensory patches, radio frequency identification tags and quantum ID tags to create customized and recommend products, and support product-to-customer communication regarding authenticity.

Consumers will increasingly rely on technology to inform them of their bodily needs and to receive personalized solutions to help satisfy those needs. Consumer behavior theories must be reconsidered because consumers will become more passive participants in retail consumption as they rely on technology for need-recognition and product-fulfillment.

Digitization technologies that use consumers’ biomarkers for new product creation or product recommendation raise new risks and uncertainty. For example, the legal implications of an incorrect product recommendation based on customer biomarkers are unknown. Furthermore, retailers would need to maintain data privacy of biomarker data and be responsible for data breaches.

The research explores how digitization will affect consumers’ in-store experiences with consumer goods products.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors affecting the adoption of product virtualization technology (PVT) for online shopping small consumer electronics by applying a modified electronic technology acceptance model (e‐TAM) and tested model invariance male/female shoppers in the overall adoption process.

Online surveys are completed by a US national panel of online shoppers. The data are analyzed using single‐ and multiple‐group structural equation modelling.

The results provide empirical support for e‐TAM in the context of PVT acceptance for online small consumer electronics shopping. In addition, two external constructs – technology anxiety (TA) and innovativeness (INN) – show significant influences on the beliefs (perceived usefulness, ease‐of‐use and entertainment value). There is no significant gender difference in the overall adoption process of PVT.

More specific consumer characteristics such as time‐consciousness, opinion leadership or age differences under different categories may be useful to investigate.

PVT may provide a valuable tool that online retailers can use to enhance their consumers' purchase behaviour, either by reducing the perceived risk through better online product evaluation or by enhancing consumers' enjoyment of the shopping process on their web site by increasing the number of unique and repeat traffic visitors to the site and ultimately establish an online competitive advantage.

Inclusion of TA and INN in e‐TAM for PVT acceptance and the equivalence test of the hypothesized model across gender make the research unique, adding to the explanatory and predictive power of the e‐TAM.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether online apparel shoppers' adoption of product virtualization technologies is facilitated more by hedonic motivations than functional motivations due to the hedonic nature of the product virtualization technologies.

In addition to the focus group interview, two separate online surveys with links to a stimulus web site containing one of the two product virtualization technologies was conducted to a national online shopper sample. The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling by comparing the structural coefficients of hedonic and functional motivations on the attitude toward using the product virtualization technologies. The linear combination of functional and hedonic roles of each technology was examined using discriminant function analysis to see if the results were consistent.

The results showed that the hedonic motivation had a stronger positive relationship than functional motivations with the attitude toward using product virtualization technologies. The empirical findings of this study confirm our proposition that perceived entertainment value is a stronger determinant of attitude toward using product virtualization technologies than perceived usefulness.

The findings of the paper support the idea that the direction of technology acceptance model related research should be drawn by the (functional or hedonic) purpose of the technology/system. Based on the current findings, it seems likely that the predictive importance of the hedonic or functional benefits on attitude toward using a particular technology/system will depend, to a large extent, on the primary purpose of the system/technology.

The purpose of this study is to investigate online shoppers' adoption of visual sensory enabling technologies, showing that these sensory experience enablers provide a dual role in enhancing online apparel shopping by reducing perceived product risk, and increasing the entertainment value of the online shopping process.

The researchers conducted a focus group interview and pre‐test with a college student sample and a main test with a US national sample of online shoppers. The data were analyzed using single‐ and multiple‐group structural equation modeling.

The findings provide empirical support for perceived usefulness and perceived entertainment value as strong predictors of consumers' attitudes towards using all three of the sensory enabling technologies (SETs) – 2D larger view and alternative views, 3D rotation views, and virtual try‐on. The impact of perceived ease‐of‐use was significant only for 3D rotation views, suggesting that the impact of perceived ease‐of‐use differs by technology. Attitudes towards using sensory enabling technologies had a significant impact on the actual use of all three SETs; however, the impact of technology anxiety and innovativeness on the use of SETs also differed by technology.

The results provide empirical validation of the proposed SE‐TAM model. Based on the current findings, SETs may provide a valuable tool that online apparel retailers can use to increase online purchases, either by reducing the perceived risk through better online product evaluation, or by enhancing consumers' enjoyment of the shopping process on their web site.

Modern businesses strategically focus on improving the online purchase experience (OPE) of customers to acquire a long-term competitive edge. However, the intellectual knowledge structure of OPE research remains uncharted, necessitating further investigation. This study aims to provide a concise synthesis of the evolution, trends and advancements of consumers’ OPE research using bibliometrics.

Firstly, the authors inventorised the relevant OPE literature, and then the bibliometric trends and the domain’s performance (top articles, outlets and authors) were analysed and illustrated through tables and narratives. Secondly, science mapping tools (such as co-occurrence) and visualisation strategy were deployed to pinpoint relevant OPE research themes and highlight the domain’s intellectual structure.

The most significant findings concern the most prolific authors, outlets, most cited articles and five thematic clusters forming the ground for potential future research paths. Also, these thematic clusters depicted the intellectual knowledge structure that emerged from the OPE research domain.

This review may be helpful for future academic researchers to identify future research paths in the domain and practitioners to help make policy decisions while formulating and articulating their marketing strategy.

Deploying the VOSviewer and Bibliometrix-R software together, this review is most likely the first attempt to the best of the authors’ knowledge to provide a thorough bibliometric synthesis of the OPE research domain.

The hygiene factor is always imperative when customers consider a certain restaurant, and the information contained in customer reviews can be an efficient approach to gauge a restaurant's hygiene during gaps in the official inspection. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether information obtained from online reviews could predict the upcoming hygiene rating, specifically, evaluating the impact of both qualitative and quantitative content of reviews on the restaurant hygiene rating.

The quantitative research method with big data analytic techniques was applied in this study. In total, 127,656 pieces of data collected from 1,710 restaurants in four major cities in the USA were used in the analysis. Both quantitative factors (i.e. reviewer's numerical rating, days to review, readability, useful/funny/cool) and qualitative factors (i.e. eight emotional dimensions of textual reviews) were analyzed from the online customer reviews and considered in predicting the restaurant's hygiene rating.

Six out of eight emotional dimensions including anger, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and trust were identified as having significant influences on the restaurant hygiene ratings. While three quantitative variables including days to review, readability and usefulness were identified with significant impacts on the dependent variable of restaurant hygiene rating.

This study opens an avenue for innovative research that establishes a connection between customers' reviews and restaurants' inspection systems. The results allow restaurants to predict an impending hygiene inspection rating upon dynamic assessment of review content and aid in adjusting hygiene measures accordingly.