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Most business-related studies on ethics focus on consumers in developed western economies but ignore developing economies. Therefore, to fill this void in the literature and address the concerns of prior studies, the purpose of this paper is to examine the ethical perceptions of Chinese consumers as an example of effective and efficient management of company/brand strategies in an economy experiencing rapid socioeconomic growth.

This study examines 328 Chinese consumers’ purchase intentions based on their ethical perceptions toward Apple and P&G through mediating (i.e. consumer–corporate identification (CCI) and brand trust) and moderating (i.e. consumer gender, age, education and residence) effects. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the constructs and overall model.

The ethical perceptions of consumers translate into purchase intentions, both at the corporate and product brand levels. Similarly, a significant direct relationship between CCI and brand trust reveals that corporate-level ethical identification is a trivial matter to customers, although these perceptions do apply to product brands under a corporate umbrella. Furthermore, to identify target groups of Chinese consumers who are receptive to ethical appeals, moderating variables were found to be useful.

The results confirm that the mediating role of CCI is more influential in the context of Chinese consumers’ ethical perceptions, followed by brand trust. In relation to demographics, ethical perceptions affect CCI and brand trust more positively in females and highly educated consumers in China. Similarly, the relationship between consumers’ ethical perception and their trust in brand is revealed more influential in urban residents than they do in rural. This broadens the applications and contexts of this research model. The results provide managerial guidance on enhancing potential ethical perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of green intellectual capital in fostering societal sustainability. Also, this study investigated how co-creational customer capital mediates the relationship between green intellectual capital and societal sustainability. The paper draws attention to co-creating customer capital and understanding its impact on societal sustainability in high-contact service startups.

Data were collected from responses from 376 high-contact service startup firms headquartered in the Indian subcontinent, particularly emerging markets. The proposed conceptual model was analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach. The analysis is based on primary data obtained from strategic-level employees.

The results highlight the impact of co-creational customer capital in the Green Intellectual Capital – Societal Sustainability (GICS) model. Green intellectual capital components significantly influence societal sustainability outcomes in the existence of co-created customer values. It establishes customer capital as an essential factor that mediates the relationship between green intellectual capital and societal sustainability.

This research provides conceptualization and subsequent investigation of customer value creation in service-led startups. The construct co-creation is more appropriate for the service industry in common.

This paper establishes co-created customer capital as an enabler in transforming underlying components of green intellectual capital into societal sustainability measures. Firms may generate higher customer value by pooling green human and relational capital along with active customer response and shared knowledge. This creates an organizational asset termed co-created customer capital specific to service industries.

The article proposes a novel way to analyze customer value in service organizations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no study has looked at how co-creational customer capital could act as a mediator between green intellectual capital and societal sustainability in the service industry context, particularly for SMEs and startups from emerging economies. Co-created customer capital may be used as an instrument to overcome managerial challenges in the context of transforming green intellectual capital into societal capital.

This research explores the purchasing behavioural drivers of young Chinese consumers purchasing foreign clothing brands. The aim is to include a range of drivers identified by different investigations into a single approach, to determine direct and indirect channels by which these drivers influence purchasing behaviour, and their relative importance in quantitative terms.

The methodology is based on an extended version of the theory of planned behaviour that considers hypotheses based on a number of studies revised in the literature review. This theoretical framework was used as the basis for a questionnaire applied to a sample of 362 young Chinese consumers. A Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling approach was used to analyse the collected data.

The results revealed three main channels influencing purchasing behaviour which were shown to share the same root, corresponding to the influences of the social network young consumers belong to. This result suggests that social norms have a key role in explaining young consumers' purchasing behaviour through its impact on their needs for status and social recognition, their attitudes towards foreign cultures and foreign brands, and their beliefs regarding the attributes of foreign clothing.

The work therefore provides companies operating in the foreign clothing market the confidence to devise business strategies that focus on the channel demonstrating the highest influencing power. A strategy likely to have the highest influencing power is one that uses celebrities to promote the reputation of products and reinforce the messages associated with status and social recognition. Reinforcement of these strategies could include secondary strategies linked to the other channels such as the one related to the adoption of foreign cultural symbolism.

In contrast to the majority of related studies, this investigation also explores indirect channels or paths by which a behavioural driver affects the behaviour of young Chinese consumers. In fact, this investigation not only simultaneously identified the different paths influencing young Chinese consumers purchasing behaviour but also quantitatively identified their relative importance.

This paper examined the relationship between firm innovativeness and consumer trust in the sharing economy. In addition, the authors examine the mediating effect of organizational legitimacy and the moderating effect of social worth.

To examine the hypotheses, the authors collected data from 276 users of a sharing platform (Didi) in China to conduct empirical research. The “lavaan” packages in R and SPSS were used to analyze the data and test the proposed hypotheses.

The results reveal that sharing platforms' innovativeness is positively related to consumer trust, and this relationship is mediated by organizational legitimacy. Furthermore, sharing platforms' social worth moderates the relationship between firm innovativeness and organizational legitimacy as well as the indirect effect of firm innovativeness on consumer trust via organizational legitimacy.

This article proposes strategies that enable sharing platforms to increase consumer trust, which can also better promote the development of the sharing economy.

This paper contributes to the literature by focusing on the social attributes of the sharing economy. By building a more detailed model of consumer trust, this paper adds to the knowledge on the influencing mechanism of consumer trust in the sharing economy.

The recent rise of economic nationalism intensifies consumers' patriotic attitudes toward goods or services and thus encourages enterprises to build patriotic brand images. Nevertheless, few studies have discussed how a patriotic brand image is developed. The purpose of this study aims to fill the gap by examining whether and how a positive corporate image helps a domestic brand establish a patriotic brand image and in turn enhances consumers' purchase intentions in relation to domestic brand products.

A research model identifying the antecedents of patriotic brand image (the components of corporate image) is proposed and empirically tested using structural equations with a questionnaire investigating Taiwanese college students' attitudes toward Taiwanese smartphone brands. Three competing models are also proposed and tested to confirm the appropriateness of the research model.

In addition to the widely recognized impact of perceived quality on purchase intentions, patriotic brand image is found to be effective in enhancing local consumers' intentions to purchase domestic brand products. To shape a patriotic brand image, perceived quality, perceived corporate ability and perceived corporate integrity are the direct approaches, while perceived corporate social responsibility works through perceived corporate integrity, and perceived employer brand enhances only perceived corporate social responsibility.

Potential sampling (college students) and subject (smartphones) biases may limit the generalizability of the presented findings

While patriotic appeals have long been used in marketing communication, they are also likely to precipitate negative brand associations (e.g. nationalism), offending consumers in other countries. By contrast, the development of a positive corporate image serves as an implicit and neutral approach to building a patriotic brand image and can help domestic brands attract local consumers with less harm to foreign markets.

This study is one of notably few studies discussing patriotic brand image and its impacts on purchase intentions. This study also identifies the antecedents of patriotic brand image and how each of them affects patriotic brand image. The findings can help guide domestic brands in building a patriotic brand image.

This study clarifies the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) news reports and firm value and identifies the mechanisms that constitute this relationship. Specifically, it identifies the roles of word of mouth (WOM) and traditional advertising in this relationship.

The data set used for the analysis covers 77 firms in Korea from 2012 to 2015. The random-effects model is applied to verify three hypotheses. Using a three-step regression analysis and the Sobel test, this study reveals the roles of WOM and advertising expenditure in the relationship between CSR news reports and firm value.

CSR news reports positively affect firm value, and this relationship is mediated by WOM and moderated by advertising expenditure. Notably, the positive effect of WOM on firm value is stronger for companies that spend less on advertising.

The evidence implies that marketing managers could benefit from not only conducting CSR activities but also widely publicizing them. CSR news reports could help companies enhance public awareness of and interest in them.

This is the first study to investigate the influence of CSR news reports using empirical data in Korea.

With the upgrade of natural language interaction technology, the simulation extension of intelligent voice assistants (IVAs) and the uncertainty of products and services have received more and more attention. However, most of the existing research focuses on investigating the application of theories to explain consumer behavior related to intention to use and adopt IVAs, while ignoring the impact of its privacy issues on consumer resistance. This article especially examines the negative impact of artificial intelligence-based IVAs’ privacy concerns on consumer resistance, and studies the mediating effect of perceived creepiness in the context of privacy cynicism and privacy paradox and the moderating effect of anthropomorphized roles of IVAs and perceived corporate social responsibility (CSR) of IVAs’ companies. The demographic variables are also included.

Based on the theory of human–computer interaction (HCI), this study addresses the consumer privacy concerns of IVAs, builds a model of the influence mechanism on consumer resistance, and then verifies the mediating effect of perceived creepiness and the moderating effect of anthropomorphized roles of IVAs and perceived CSR of IVAs companies. This research explores underlying mechanism with three experiments.

It turns out that consumers’ privacy concerns are related to their resistance to IVAs through perceived creepiness. The servant (vs. partner) anthropomorphized role of IVAs is likely to induce more privacy concerns and in turn higher resistance. At the same time, when the company’s CSR is perceived high, the impact of the concerns of IVAs’ privacy issues on consumer resistance will be weakened, and the intermediary mechanism of perceiving creepiness in HCI and anthropomorphism of new technology are further explained and verified. The differences between different age and gender are also revealed in the study.

The research conclusions have strategic reference significance for enterprises to build the design framework of IVAs and formulate the response strategy of IVAs’ privacy concerns. And it offers implications for researchers and closes the research gap of IVAs from the perspective of innovation resistance.

This study aims to examine the impact of five consumption values (i.e. ecological, functional, symbolic, experiential and epistemic) on consumers’ intentions to adopt green products. Using Thaler’s utility theory, the authors investigate the indirect effect of values on purchase intention through acquisition utility and transaction utility. Two moderators (materialism orientation and value consciousness) further influence the strength of the effect of consumption values on transaction utility.

The authors used a survey design (N = 437 Chinese customers recruited through a Chinese online panel provider) and structural equation modeling (SEM) to test six hypothesized relationships in the proposed model. Moderated SEM was used for moderation analysis.

Most hypothesized relationships in the model were confirmed, with the exception of the functional value–transaction utility link and the moderating effect of materialism on the experiential value–transaction utility relationship.

Larger-scale research may help to determine whether there are more significant differences in consumer evaluations of different types of green products.

As the concept of green marketing in China evolves, firms should continue to stress the importance and value of green products regarding individuals’ care for the environment, status and self-image. Further, firms should conduct systematic utility analyses and address acquisition and price equity in a strategic process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to adapt utility theory to green consumption and proposes a clearly defined and well-substantiated set of utility types by merging economic and green consumption literature.