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With the soaring volumes of brand-related social media conversations, digital marketers have extensive opportunities to track and analyse consumers’ feelings and opinions about brands, products or services embedded within consumer-generated content (CGC). These “Big Data” opportunities render manual approaches to sentiment analysis impractical and raise the need to develop automated tools to analyse consumer sentiment expressed in text format. This paper aims to evaluate and compare the performance of two prominent approaches to automated sentiment analysis applied to CGC on social media and explores the benefits of combining them.

A sample of 850 consumer comments from 83 Facebook brand pages are used to test and compare lexicon-based and machine learning approaches to sentiment analysis, as well as their combination, using the LIWC2015 lexicon and RTextTools machine learning package.

Results show the two approaches are similar in accuracy, both achieving higher accuracy when classifying positive sentiment than negative sentiment. However, they differ substantially in their classification ensembles. The combined approach demonstrates significantly improved performance in classifying positive sentiment.

Further research is required to improve the accuracy of negative sentiment classification. The combined approach needs to be applied to other kinds of CGCs on social media such as tweets.

The findings inform decision-making around which sentiment analysis approaches (or a combination thereof) is best to analyse CGC on social media.

This study combines two sentiment analysis approaches and demonstrates significantly improved performance.

Consumer forgiveness is an important concept in service failure and recovery research. To advance knowledge and develop future research agenda in this domain, this paper provides a systematic review of the literature on factors influencing consumer forgiveness while adopting the customer journey perspective.

Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted of 102 peer-reviewed journal articles, on factors influencing consumer forgiveness, published between January 2000 and December 2020.

The authors' analysis offers a detailed account of the factors influencing consumer forgiveness across the three stages of the service journey: pre-transgression, transgression and recovery. From the review, the authors identified significant gaps relating to the interactions between the relevant factors influencing forgiveness throughout the various stages of the consumer service journey. Based on the findings, the authors offer several research questions to help managers optimize customer forgiveness following a service failure throughout each stage of consumer service journey.

The authors' review synthesizes the literature on factors contributing to consumer forgiveness and integrates these factors into the customer service journey. The authors' findings inform directions for future research and provide insights regarding the measures that service providers should take to understand and encourage consumer forgiveness.

The purpose of this study is to examine the entry probability and performance of private labels at an organic food retailer. For a growing sector with unique market structure and category characteristics, it examines how competitive factors affect the attractiveness of a product category for private label entry by an organic food retailer and how the manufacturer brand assortment that the retailer stocks affects private label share.

This study analyses store level cross‐category data from an independent organic retailer and field data on retail competition.

The findings show that organic private label stock‐keeping units are more likely to be present in categories with supermarket competition. They also show that concentration of shares amongst manufacturer brands (as measured by the Herfindahl index) negatively affect the probability that the retailer will enter a category with a private label stock‐keeping unit (SKU) but positively affects the share of that private label SKU.

Although the results arise from a fairly small sample of around 30 categories, the focal retailer offers a unique opportunity to examine several private label decisions at the store level. Future work could examine in greater depth the competitive interaction between supermarkets and organic retailers and the effects of such competition on their assortment decisions.

By extending private label research beyond the conventional supermarket industry, this study conducts a pioneering test of the effects of competition between retail formats on the likelihood of private label entry.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how and why environmentally conscious consumers rationalise their non-green purchase behaviour.

Seven focus groups were conducted. A total of 51 people, aged 19-70 years, participated in the study. Theoretical thematic analysis was used to organise the data as various themes emerged.

Through application of neutralisation theory, this study identified additional barriers to green consumption. Two new neutralisation techniques emerged, namely protecting (maintaining) one’s sense of self and consumer attachment to the brand. These techniques recognise the impact consumer culture has had on consumers.

The study took place in an urban centre hence the views of the participants may be different from those who live in rural centres; low-income consumers were under-represented; and more male participants would have been desirable.

Despite its limitations, this study reveals that consumers will rationalise their decisions in order to protect their self-esteem and self-identity. Until green becomes a social norm, consumers will continue to place individual goals over collective goals. Understanding this rationalisation process is important if marketers and policy makers want to encourage behavioural change.

This study makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the green attitude-behaviour gap. It provides fresh insights into how environmentally conscious consumers vindicate their non-green consumption behaviours and how marketers and policy makers can overcome these challenges. It also identifies two new neutralisation techniques and extends the theory to a consumer culture context.

This empirical study conceptualizes the institutional environment within which firms function in a transition economy as a number of dimensions, representing the externally set ‘rules of the game’ as perceived by senior managers. It then proposes a mediating model of the links between that environment and the commercial performance of enterprises in which incentive intensity is a key strategic choice, influenced by perceptions of the institutional setting and the influence of that choice is carried on to commercial performance by a set of managerial orientations. The model is tested using survey data from a sample of 959 Chinese enterprises.

Proposes that, arms length economic system (ALS) is not always appropriate for developing nations. The alternative of a relationship based system (RBS) which is often mistaken for crony capitalism as practiced in Malaysia is offered. Entrepreneurial spirit so fundamental to the development of an economy may be so lacking as to perish under an ALS yet be able to flourish under RBS. Explains three major aspects of how the Malaysian Economy was able to flourish under the RBS (1) the cultural reform of the majority indigenous group (2) the multi‐cultural cooperation between the economically superior Chinese and the less economically developed Malays and (3) The spill‐over effect from privatisation policies. Recognising the existence and legitimacy of an RBS as an economic model may offer a new approach towards poverty eradication and economic development of Third World countries.

Limited research has paid attention to the physical attractiveness stereotype in peer-to-peer sharing accommodation settings. Since the high-risk situations in sharing accommodations, this paper aims to exam whether beauty premium is still relevant in peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation.

The mixed method, including 2,506 secondary data analysis and two scenario experiments, is carried out to test the research framework.

The results show that both beauty premium and beauty penalty exist in the e-commerce context. Excessively high attractiveness and plain looking of hosts are likely to decrease consumers’ booking decision while moderately attractive hosts will stimulate more booking behaviors. Moreover, perceived trustworthiness mediates the effect of physical attractiveness on booking decision. Additionally, similarity between hosts and consumers plays a moderating role in the relationship between physical attractiveness and perceived trustworthiness.

This study reveals the physical attractiveness stereotype effects in P2P accommodation and carry implications to P2P platforms and hosts for providing moderately attractive profile photos, enhancing trustworthiness and similarity between hosts and consumers. Further studies can investigate the robustness of the findings as well as more possible reasons for its occurrence.

The research provides a clearer understanding of physical attractiveness stereotype effect in peer-to-peer sharing accommodation platforms. Besides, the linkage between physical attractiveness and perceived trustworthiness is dynamic; a high host – consumer similarity weakens the negative impact of both excessively high attractiveness and plain looking on consumers’ perceived trustworthiness.

Strategy.

Undergraduate final year or MBA.

This teaching case describes the journey undertaken by Yoma Strategic Holdings (YSH) Ltd, a Singapore-listed company that operates predominately in Myanmar, to become a successful and highly profitable conglomerate business empire in Myanmar. The case provides a rich contextual description of how YSH leveraged upon its partnerships and capabilities, especially with its parent and sister companies, to pursue its conglomerate business model. To facilitate the discussion that this teaching case aims to generate among lecturers and students, we have provided a summary of the latest developments in Myanmar since the 2010 general election. This helps to give students an appreciation of the challenges involved in creating a successful business in Myanmar.

The learning outcomes that this teaching case hopes to achieve in students are as follows: Understand the concept of “economies of scope” in corporate strategy; identify and explain the various corporate strategies (i.e. diversification and vertical integration) that can be implemented to develop a conglomerate business model; recognize the organizational and managerial issues arising from implementing these corporate strategies and understand the circumstances that influence its success; and assess the relative advantages of managing a business in a conglomerate business model and advise a company on whether a particular activity should be undertaken internally or outsourced.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the human factors triggering information leakage and investigate how companies mitigate insider threat for information sharing integrity.

The methodology employed is multiple case studies approach with in-depth interviews with five multinational enterprises (MNEs)/multinational corporations (MNCs).

The findings reveal that information leakage can be approached with human governance mechanism such as organizational ethical climate and information security culture. Besides, higher frequency of leakages negatively affects information sharing integrity. Moreover, this paper also contributes to a research framework which could be a guide to overcome information leakage issue in information sharing.

The current study involved MNCs/MNEs operating in Malaysia, while companies in other countries may have different ethical climate and information sharing culture. Thus, for future research, it will be good to replicate the study in a larger geographic region to verify the findings and insights of this research.

This research contributes to the industry and business that are striving toward solving the mounting problem of information leakage by raising awareness of human factors and to take appropriate mitigating governance strategies to pre-empt information leakage. This paper also contributes to a novel theoretical model that characterizes the iniquities of humans in sharing information, and suggests measures which could be a guide to avert disruptive leakages.

This paper is likely an unprecedented research in molding human governance in the domain of information sharing and its Achilles’ heel which is information leakage.

This paper seeks to provide an understanding of the relationship between the management control policy of emerging economy (EE) firms and the knowledge transfer with the acquired firm, as well as the mechanism by which specific management control policy facilitates knowledge transfer with the acquired firms.

Employing an organizational learning theory, this paper examines the knowledge transfer from acquired firms to acquiring EE firms through multiple-case study of three EE firms.

Based on organizational learning theory and the results of case studies, this paper finds that the cooperation and willingness of employees in the acquired firm and language barriers are the main factors influencing the relationship between management control policy and the parent company’s knowledge transfer process.

This study sheds light on cross-border knowledge transfer to EE firms from an organizational learning perspective and broadens the understanding of post-acquisition knowledge transfer in an emerging market context.

This study suggests that the low-level management control facilitates knowledge transfer from acquired firms. This is especially true when the parent company from the EE has limited learning experience and faces substantial language barriers between itself and its acquired firm.

This paper extends existing research by exploring how low-level control of acquired firms in developed markets facilitates knowledge transfer of EE firms after cross-border acquisition. Future research can extend this line of research by examining the knowledge transfer mechanism of EE firms through qualitative and quantitative methods.