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The referendum debate in Ireland on whether voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty has filled the pages of newspapers and the online media. Several anti-EU campaigns have emerged and politicians have shown their own attitudes towards the ratification process. Being our first contact with reality newspapers enable potential readers to better understand their lives and socio-political events (Van Dijk, 1991; Richardson, 2007). It has been argued that newspapers construe public identities for individuals and social groups through specific textual strategies and contribute to our understanding of belonging to a community (Fairclough, 1995a). Some scholars have proved that, in reporting on European matters, British newspapers are mainly Eurosceptic and tend to depict EU leaders in a negative light (Musolff, 2004; Nasti, 2012). It has also been demonstrated that when reporting on European integration newspapers tend to define what it means to be a European citizen by construing their own images of Europe. By doing so, newspapers have the power to support or subvert the feeling of European belonging by showing desired or unwanted scenarios. In his analysis of newspaper discourse, Fowler (1991) points out how transitivity is of great interest in newspaper analysis as it is a potential tool to investigate the same event in different ways, thus providing different views on the social and political events reported.

Against this framework, the present chapter aims to analyse, by combining a quantitative and a qualitative approach, how newspapers construct professional, social and private identity of the European politicians involved in the Lisbon Treaty debate following the features introduced by Fairclough (1995b) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004) transitivity model. This study also investigates what qualities and features are attributed to EU leaders and to what extent the stereotyped roles of previous studies are also revealed through the analysis of material, mental and verbal processes.

This study aims to address the need to empirically investigate the luxury customer service experiences of the ultra-high-net-worth individual (UHNWI) segment by conducting and analyzing interviews with 20 clients flying private jets. The results lead to a conceptualization of the UHNW private aviation customer experience.

This study applied a three-step method to explore the meaning and domain of the UHNWI luxury service experience. First, the perception and corresponding attributes of customers’ experiences using private aviation services were examined through 20 in-depth interviews and by using the soft laddering technique. Second, this study coded and, subsequently, purified the data by means of a systematic comparison approach and hierarchical coding. Third, a panel of judges, using the emerging consensus technique, scrutinized and validated the emerging dimensions.

The analysis reveals the customer experience (CX) and motivations differ significantly between business and leisure use, moving from a functional toward an experiential value focus. The findings emphasize the lack of social value for the UHNWI CX and introduce time as a new value dimension.

This study provides multiple contributions to the customer experience, luxury and luxury services literature. This study enhances scholarly understandings of the holistic UHNWI CX in the context of an absolute luxury offering, thus providing a needed conceptualization of an underresearched customer segment, namely, the UHNWI. It delivers insights on the different motivations and experience UHNWI are seeking for according to the context. This study proposes a new luxury value dimension: time.

This study highlights multiple opportunities for UHNWI customer experience improvement. The findings reveal that different clients are looking for different experiences in terms of business versus leisure use. The key drivers and expectations shift from functional (price/availability/flexibility) to experiential factors (comfort/onboard experience/relationship with crew and pilot). Communication, marketing and CX management strategies and tactics need to emphasize this important distinction regarding what drives client behavior in the private aviation setting.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it defines UHNWI characteristics and overall experiences using the unique über-service of private aviation, thus advancing scholarly understanding of both the luxury customer and the luxury customer service experience beyond the proposed traditional drivers of luxury consumption. Second, this study expands the conceptual foundation for the UHNWI “über-luxury” service experience, which, given the importance of the UHNWI segment, is important. Third, this study contributes to theoretical knowledge by extending customer value perception in the luxury context by introducing the luxury value dimension of time. This study concludes with a discussion of its findings’ implications for luxury research and practice, providing a future research agenda with regard to UHNW.

The purpose of this paper is to replicate the EXQ measurement scale in the business-to-business (B2B) environment of two African countries. This paper contrasts EXQ’s measurement specification and structure in these two countries with a European sample.

This paper carried out two empirical studies to replicate and test the EXQ scale in an African context. Following the scale’s previous application, this paper replicated the EXQ in Morocco and South Africa, and added a European study conducted in the UK.

The findings highlight that, despite having the same customer experience (CX) delivery structure, the B2B experience in Africa differs significantly from other countries. Further research replicating CX measurement in the African environment is therefore needed, preferably starting with a qualitative study.

This study provides insight into how the B2B CX, measured by EXQ, differs from one country to another. Most significantly, the Moroccan sample demonstrates a never-before-reported high correlation between the service and post-purchase experience.

This study aims to explore the customer experiences (CXs) of an under-researched luxury client segment, the ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWI) in three settings, yacht-made clothing services, chartering a yacht and art collection.

The author conducted 13 interviews with UHNWI, enquiring about their experiences with different services. The author collected and analyzed the data using a recommended three-step approach: in-depth interviews using soft-laddering; coding and purifying data through a systematic approach and hierarchical coding; and using the emerging consensus technique to scrutinize and validate the emerging themes.

This study revealed UHNWI drivers or purchasing and repurchasing behavior as (mis)managing expectations, personal relationships with personnel and achieving convenience-driven time savings. The corresponding conceptual framework is the UHNWI luxury CX.

This study reveals how über luxury brand managers need to carefully manage the UHNWI clientele expectations, focusing their investment on their brand personnel and the way they can save their clients’ valuable time.

This study is the first to explore UHNWI perceptions of their experience with über luxury providers across multiple contexts. This study highlights that the luxury experience, not the acquisition and owning of luxury goods, drives the UHNWI decision-making and purchase behavior.

After discussing recent academic attempts to assess the status of worldwide military transparency and accountability in nations which adopted open governance paradigms, this paper tries to show that such countries allegedly committed to democracy and open data should coherently fight for military transparency and citizen inclusion in the governance process, avoiding the prevalence of military secrecy over military transparency. The most important contribution of the paper is discussing the lack of military transparency, until now taken for granted as a traditional armed forces ’informal right, and proposing concrete definitions of military transparency and secrecy within the context of the open government partnership. In addition to the definitions, an exploratory model of how military accountability can affect military transparency has been suggested.

For the proposed endeavour, first a description on the context of open governance where the involved public defence sector is inserted is given. Second, notions of military transparency and secrecy are proposed. Finally, the paper discusses when military secrecy could be granted and what it means for military information to be unjustifiably kept secret. At the end, the urge of the citizen involvement to open the still insulated military governance systems is highlighted.

This paper proposes notions of military secrecy and military transparency and suggests the second term as a broader notion which includes the first. This paper also indirectly identifies the conditions for the inadmissibility of military secrecy and calls attention to the bad externalities of unjustifiably holding public information back.

The consideration of the proposed notions of military secrecy and military transparency could minimize the traditional excuse of military confidentiality that armed forces worldwide tend to not to convey public information to the public while making military accountability perfectly possible without overexposing its strategies regarding national defence.

Providing armed forces and citizens with concrete definitions of military secrecy and military transparency could not only help military institutions to develop a sincere transparency policy based on open government terms, but it could also guide interested media and citizens with their control and oversight tasks by establishing clear limits for alleged secrecy while releasing the borders for military transparency.

The suggested approach for military transparency and secrecy is not only adequate to the globalized strategy of open governance but also mainly a way to finally reward citizens’ often misused and manipulated trust.

It is the first attempt of an academic definition for military secrecy and military transparency taking into consideration the open government terms and aiming at improving military accountability.

Traditionally, international luxury marketing highlights possible disparities of cultural and value perception. The context-specific nature of traditional international luxury marketing, which ranges from educational and cultural to financial and offering-based variations, delivers little guidance to managers in the field regarding how to cater best to their highest target segment. The study aims to exemplify the relevance of global consumer culture (GCC) theory for the ultra-high-net-worth-individual (UHNWI) context. The authors' research on UHNWIs maps the DNA, so to speak, of the UHNWI customer experience (CX) by determining what drives UHNWI purchasing behavior independent of background – in other words, what matters most to this exclusive consumer segment.

Interviewing 15 UHNWIs using a means-end approach and incorporating the emerging consensus technique (ECT), the authors explored the CX of UHNWIs leading to their purchasing decisions.

The authors' analysis reveals the three main constituents of the UHNWI CX: the value of time, expectation mismanagement and the utilitarian nature of luxury. The findings highlight that UHNWIs see traditional luxury as a necessity rather than a luxury and value different factors, such as time, much more highly. The findings highlight the UHNWI homogenous nature, connecting GCC to purchasing behavior.

The authors' study delivers empirical evidence of what matters most to the UHNWI segment and drives their purchasing behavior. The authors are questioning existing luxury segmentation strategies and lay out a clear guidance on how to design and deliver effective and efficient marketing, sales and communications strategies for the elusive UHNWI segment. The research highlights that it is the experience and the three main dimensions, namely expectation mismanagement, luxury as a utility and the value of time. Following UHNWI CX DNA framework will allow luxury companies to build their marketing and client acquisition efforts on a solid understanding of what matters most to the UHNWI target segment.

The study highlights the commonalities of UHNWIs in terms of what matters most to them. Based on this, the authors develop a UHNWI CX DNA. The authors propose that traditional context-specific differences upheld by international marketing researchers might not apply to the UHNWI segment. The authors deliver evidence that UHNWI are an excellent example of the applicability of GCC theory. The only difference in perception the authors noticed was between CX evaluations of self-made UHNWIs and those who inherited their wealth in an otherwise homogenous segment.

Previous mountain tourism research addressed economic, environmental, social and political impacts. Because limited studies evaluated visitors’ perception of their experience, this study aims to examine the tangible and intangible visitor experience in a Tyrolean alpine tourist attraction.

The study adopted Klaus and Maklan’s (2012) customer experience model, suggesting that customers base their experience perception on the quality of product experience, outcome focus, moments of truth and peace-of-mind. Their model was used to validate the impact on overall customer experience quality at the mountain attraction through conducting a structured survey with 207 face-to-face interviews on-site.

The results of the confirmatory factor analysis did not confirm the four-dimensional structure, probably due to the differences between mountain tourism experience and the mortgage lending experience in the original study. Instead, principal component analysis suggested a different dimensional structure of components that were arbitrarily named as functional, social, comparative and normative aspects of the visitors’ experience.

The results are based on a sample in a given period of time, using convenience sampling. While the sample size satisfied the data analysis requirements, confirmatory factor analysis would benefit from a larger sample size.

Consumer experience dimensions while visiting a mountain attraction may not be concrete or objective, and consequently may yield different types of attributes that influence behavior.

The social exchange theory could explain relationships between visitors and service providers and their consequences. Attraction managers should increase benefits for visitors and service providers to enhance their relationships, and thus experience.

The study explored the applicability of an existing experiential consumption model in a mountain attraction context. The findings introduce a revised model that may be applicable in other tourist attractions.

This study aims to investigate customer experience (CE) and its relationship with intermediate variables to analyze the impact of digital banking (DB) on banks’ financial performance (FP) before Covid-19 and during the lockdown in Vietnam.

These research data are from a survey of Vietnamese customers. The survey was deployed to a sample of 238 and 218 customers of 20 Vietnamese commercial banks via email in 2018Q4 and 2020Q2, respectively. FP is measured using banks’ quarterly financial statements before Covid-19 and during the lockdown.

CE with DB had a significant and positive impact on FP via customer satisfaction before Covid-19, while the other two intermediate variables (word-of-mouth [WoM] and trust) had no considerable impact. During the lockdown, only WoM had a positive impact on FP. These findings indicate that before Covid-19, when customers could easily interact with their bank through many touchpoints, customer satisfaction with DB services created higher FP for the bank. However, during the lockdown, DB became the customer’s main touchpoint and WoM mediated the CE–FP relationship.

During the national lockdown from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2020, customers in Vietnam may have had different experiences with DB when no alternate modes of payment were available. The study uses Covid-19 as a moderator variable to offer different viewpoints and findings related to CE with DB and its impact on FP.

Klaus Reichardt grew up in Germany and moved to the United States in 1978 to study. He attended Pepperdine University in California, where he received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Business and Management. After completing his academic career, Reichardt was interested in working for himself, and therefore, he imported a line of fashion jewelry from Germany to sell in the United States. This was an attractive venture, because the product was of high quality and the U.S. dollar was low, and therefore, it could be purchased inexpensively. He set up a network of about 25 representatives across the country to help him sell the product to department stores as well as small boutiques. Reichardt sold the jewelry for five years. However, in the late 1980s, the value of the dollar fell and the product he was purchasing became very expensive. The dollar dropped so fast that Reichardt could not adjust his pricing for the market and eventually lost his business. At this point in his life, Reichardt had a family to support and therefore needed to find another form of income quickly.