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With the gradual decline of the small retail sector in the past recent years, few researchers have been addressing the issue from a motivational approach. This paper aimed to examine the role of utilitarian, hedonic and ethical motives in the process of forming consumer loyalty in a retail setting.

A total of 213 surveys were carried out among regular fashion and accessories shoppers in Spanish small-sized retailers. A two-step methodology proposed by Anderson and Gerbing (1988) was applied to test the model.

Ethical shopping motivation was found to have the most relevant impact on its perceived quality and on its reassurance to a small-sized retailer, as it represented a strategic asset. Although the most appropriate approach would not be focused mainly on ethical aspects in order to be competitive in the new retailing landscape, consumers should recognize that they are contributing to a worthy cause while enjoying the shopping experience.

Small-sized retailers should provide consumers with good reasons for shopping in their businesses rather than their competitors’. Moreover, it is key to differentiate and build customer loyalty with the purpose of becoming more competitive. As a consequence, in this paper, we propose a measurement scale that can be used to evaluate abstract and complex consumers’ shopping motivations.

The pursuit of more precise knowledge of factors that lead consumers to shop for a specific product is vital for small-sized retailers, toward sustainable competitiveness. Here we analyzed the impact of the three innovative dimensions in shopping motivation on consumers’ perceived quality and their influence on repurchase intention.

This paper aims to demonstrate that aspects of a rational or functional character and aspects of an emotional and social nature condition the perceived value of the exchange relationships among firms in an industrial cluster.

The research uses structural equation models (SEM) to test the models and applies the maximum likelihood estimation method in all the causal models obtained in the course of the data analysis.

The results obtained support the hypotheses put forward, and in particular the importance of emotional and social values in industrial relations.

Recent advances in consumer and services marketing consider that perceived value and satisfaction are central to explaining customer loyalty. However, very few studies in B2B explain the multidimensionality of perceived value. For this purpose, the authors test their working hypotheses in the Spanish ceramic tiles cluster. Specifically, they analyze the relationships between manufacturers and a supplier of frits, enamels and ceramic colors and related services.

An empirical study demonstrates that experience and interpersonal relationships are more important than price and switching costs in an industrial cluster context. The empirical study and the results provide evidence for managers: the critical influence of the emotional and social values perceived by the customer on his level of satisfaction and on the achievement of final loyalty.

The paper highlights the importance of the most intangible dimensions of value for the relations between companies in an industrial cluster.

This study aims to analyze communication from the perspective of social marketing, positive emotions, and the topics chosen by Spanish tourist destinations to show their destination image. Additionally, this research shows a message classification model, based on the aforementioned characteristics, that has generated a greater impact, offering clarity to tourism managers on the type of content they should publish to achieve greater visibility.

The methodology used in this work combines content analysis and data mining techniques. The classification tree using the chi-square automatic interaction detector (CHAID) algorithm was selected to determine predictors of like behaviour.

The results show that the predictor variables have been emotions, social marketing and topics. Also, the characteristics of the messages most likely to have a high impact are those related to emotions of joy or happiness, their purpose is behavioural, and they talk about rural, cultural issues, special dates, getaways, or highlights of a town or city for something specific.

This study is the first to analyze the content of the tweets shared by destination tourism managers from a social marketing, positive emotions, and sustainability perspective, determining the possible predictors of likes on Twitter. The authors contribute to the literature by deepening the understanding of how social marketing and the positive emotions promoted drive a more significant impact in tourism communication campaigns on social media. The authors provide destination managers with a way better to understand the variables relevant to users in tourism content.

Trust in financial institutions has been eroded through the collapse of mortgage-related securities, with confidence further denuded through well publicized cases of rogue traders and rate fixing cases, such as with the Lehman brothers, the Libor rate-fixing scandals, and the hypo real estate breakdown. In response to these events, governments have introduced a range of distinct policy initiatives designed to restore trust in this sector. Thus, the question arises: are these regulations and control mechanisms sufficient in isolation, or are there other elements that this sector needs to pay attention to in efforts to build and sustain customers’ trust? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

There is a compelling agenda for both financial organizations and academics to understand better organizational trust in this context especially the role and impact of regulatory mechanisms in its development and repair. The paper therefore examines the special facets of the financial services sector in comparison to other sectors, such as manufacturing, to consider whether trust is fundamentally different in this context than others, and thus address how far there are special challenges concerning trust and the banking industry. The paper analyses, by using a meta-analytical design, 93 studies (N=38,631), of which 20 empirically investigate organizational trust in the financial sector with a combined N of 11,224 respondents.

The paper shows that the banking sector is heavily affected by two distinct forces: first, customers’ perception of an organization's level of compliance and conformity with laws and regulations is a necessity for banks’ sociopolitical legitimization, and second it is also related to how non-compliance is dealt with. Importantly, this meta-analysis indicates that regulation is just one of a suite of devices that organizations need to deploy in their efforts to restore trust. The paper identified two further elements of significance: customers require direct evidence, derived either from their own or others’ satisfaction with the goods or services provided, and customers do take note of the external endorsement of the firm, especially in Asia, where customers place huge emphasis on the firm's reputation.

First, meta-analysis is inherently reliant on the earlier studies and therefore retains their weaknesses. Some of the relationships included self-report variables collected at the same point in time and therefore may be inflated by common method bias. Second, due to the focus and because of the limited number of studies in this sector, and a paucity of attention on some key topics, such as perceptions of regulation, second-order sampling error may also be a limitation. Third, some relationships were not investigated frequently enough in studies to enable us to include them in the review, such as cooperation, opportunistic behaviour or quality. Finally, despite calls for trust scholars to include propensity to trust measures within their studies, many of these studies do not include this measure and therefore it is more difficult to identify and control individual difference factors.

The results show the merit of multi-strand trust development strategies. There is a striking paucity of financial institutions, which have examined how far their trust deficit may be related to their internal culture, and whether recent corporate corruption could be the product of bonuses and the internal short-term individualized reward systems. The analysis reveals that although external regulations and controls are an effective and powerful devise for organizational trust, over the last two periods of significant crisis, their impact appears to be warning; Yet reassuring customers of their expectations of the other party's future behaviour is central to trust. Alternative remedies need to be considered, such as the establishment of a more effective regulator, or board of governors who oversee and assure compliance. Monitoring and surveillance offer a further external means of reducing the possibility of future misbehaviours. However, as the analysis indicates, other strands are required to build trust, including greater attention by firms on customers’ direct experiences, which in turn would enhance the third part endorsement of their competence and goodwill intentions of organizations.

Significantly, the results indicate the potentially partial erosion of credence factors, and thus confidence, in this sector over the last 20 years, during what has been a period of repeated exposure to trust breaches. The paper shows that single strand solutions, such as improvements to customer communication, are no longer sufficient, nor, more importantly, do they have the same impact. Instead, the paper shows the necessity to utilize more effectively and target attention towards three distinct antecedents: external regulations and their enforcement; third party and expert endorsements, and therefore external reputations; and customer satisfaction in terms of the effective delivery of customer expectations.

Organizational trust has been shown as critical in positively affecting and repairing broken relationships through uncertainty reduction and confidence enhancement. In the past, different meta-analyses of trust have been undertaken, but this, to the authors knowledge, is the first meta-analytic study measuring trust on an organizational level in the context of the financial services sector and its regulatory environment. This meta-analysis indicates that regulation is just one of a suite of devices that organizations need to deploy in their efforts to restore trust. The paper identified two further elements: customers require direct evidence, and do take note of the external endorsement of the firm.

The last two decades have witnessed a substantial increase in the body of research on the theoretical perspective of the performance of international joint ventures (IJVs). However, the evidence on the antecedents of IJVs performance is inconsistent. The purpose of this paper is to critically review the quantitative studies on the antecedents of the performance of IJVs to identify the research gaps in this area and to prepare a future research agenda using the theory, context, characteristics and methodology (TCCM) framework.

Meta-Analysis review is conducted on 97 papers from A*, A and B category journals from the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List.

The results reveal the homogeneity in antecedents such as administrative distance, BOD (board of directors) involvement, resource interdependency, flexibility, learning, competitive overlap, cultural distance, R&D (research and development) intensity, contract, relatedness, the existence of a local IJVs partner, trust, operational experience, partners capability, size asymmetry, goal congruency, capital adequacy, economic distance and heterogeneity in the antecedents such as equity ownership, commitment, control, cooperation and conflict are heterogeneous.

This review seeks to provide deeper insights, which help us to contribute toward the development of the research field of antecedents of the performance of IJVs. The authors have synthesized 97 independent samples with a total sample size of 52,268.

This paper aims to explore the relationships between website quality – through consumer-generated media stimuli-, emotions and consumer-brand engagement in online environments.

Two independent studies are conducted to examine these relationships. Study 1, based on a sample of 366 respondents, uses a structural equation modelling approach to test the research hypotheses. Study 2, based on 1,454 online consumer reviews, uses text-mining technique to examine further the relationship between emotions and consumer-brand engagement.

The findings show that all the consumer-generated media stimuli are positively related to the dimensions of emotions. However, only pleasure and arousal are positively related to the three variables of consumer-brand engagement. The findings also show cognitive processing as the strongest dimension of consumer-brand engagement providing positive sentiments towards brands.

The findings provide marketers with an understanding of how valid, useful and relevant content (i.e. information/content) creates a greater emotional connection and drive consumer-brand engagement. Marketers should be aware that consumer-generated media stimuli influence consumers’ emotions and their reaction.

This study is one of the firsts to adapt and apply the S-O-R framework in explaining online consumer-brand engagement. This study also adds to the brand engagement literature as the first study that combines PLS-SEM approach with text-mining analysis to provide a better understanding of these relationships.