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The world continues to grapple with grand challenges – climate change, pandemic, poverty, social injustice and diminishing resources – requiring mitigation if we are to focus on well-being and move towards a more sustainable future. Cultivating sustainable ecosystems offers a possible solution. The purpose of this paper is to understand how sustainable organizations at the meso level can nurture sustainable service ecosystems that provide the potential for greater well-being outcomes for individuals, business, society and the planet.

Case study data is gathered from 11 sustainable fashion organizations operating at the meso level within a complex ecosystem. The analysis includes interviews with founders and/or key managers and secondary information from company websites and publicly available reports.

The findings identify key value co-creation sustainable practices at the meso level that facilitate the function of the service ecosystem to create well-being outcomes. Value co-creation practices include – embedding a sustainable ethos; implementing sustainable strategies that embrace innovation, transparency and stakeholder collaboration; and incorporating sustainable communication practices that engage.

Encapsulating sustainability within macromarketing and service ecosystems enables the development of a sustainable service ecosystems framework that has the potential to offer enhanced well-being. Implications for marketing practice in terms of important factors that facilitate service-sustainable ecosystems to enhance well-being are considered.

This study aims to explore how a postmodern tribe enacts and re-interprets ideologies as a part of consumers’ collective experience, to enhance our understanding of consumer communities in conjunction with ideological capacities.

The community of “presenteers” is conceptualized as a self-organized tribe with heterogeneous components that generate capacities to act. Netnographic observation was conducted on 18 presenteer accounts and lasted around six months. Real-time data were collected by taking screenshots of the posts and stories that these users created and publicly shared. Data were analysed by adopting assemblage theory, combining inductive and deductive approaches. Firstly, a qualitative visual-textual content analysis of the tribe’s defining components was conducted. Then, the process continued with the thematic analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the tribe’s enactments.

Findings shed light on the ways in which consumer communities interpret the entanglement of religious, political, and cultural ideologies in shaping their experiences. In the case of the presenteers tribe, findings reflect a novel ideological interplay between neo-Ottomanism, post-feminism and consumerism.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

The study offers a deep dive into a unique tribe that is being organized around the consumer-created practice of “presenteering” and investigates consumer communalization in alignment with the ideological turn in culture-oriented interpretative research on consumers, consumption, and markets. This exploration helps to bridge the research on the communalization of consumers with the recent discussions of ideology in the postmodern market.

It is crucial for the Indian micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) to implement a few of the most important Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies and reap maximum benefits of sustainability. This paper aims to prioritize I4.0 technologies that can help achieve the sustainable operations and sustainable industrial marketing performance of Indian manufacturing MSMEs.

I4.0-based sustainability model was developed. The model was analyzed using data collected from MSMEs by deploying analytic hierarchy process and utility-function-based goal programming. To have a better understanding, interviews were conducted.

Predictive analytics, machine learning and real-time computing were found to be the most important I4.0 technologies for sustainable performance. Sensitivity analysis further confirmed the robustness of the results. Business-to-business sustainable marketing is prioritized as per the sustainability need of operations of industrial MSME buyers.

This study uniquely integrates literature and practitioners’ insights to explore I4.0’s role in MSMEs sustainability in emerging economies. It fills a research gap by aligning sustainability goals of industrial buyers with suppliers’ marketing strategies. Additionally, it offers practical recommendations for implementing technologies in MSMEs, contributing to both academia and industry practices.

After reviewing the literature focused on real-world course–client marketing projects as well as the literature regarding teaching entrepreneurial marketing (EM), the current paper assesses a census population (N = 106) of course–client projects selected by the current author via Riipen – an online course–project matching hub – for marketing courses taught from Spring 2018 through Spring 2023. The purpose of this paper is to uncover and explore the degree of EM teaching relevance of said course projects over the five-year span indicated.

All Riipen-sourced course–client projects selected by the current author for marketing courses taught from Spring 2018 through Spring 2023 (N = 106) were reviewed so that broad project-level and firm-level characteristics and trends – especially EM relevance – could be excavated and assessed over the five-year/10-semester span. In addition, an in-depth qualitative primacy-recency/bookend approach was taken with regards to the first semester (Spring 2018) and the most recent semester (Spring 2023).

The main finding is that Riipen-sourced course–client projects exhibited an increasingly high degree of EM relevance between Spring 2018 through Spring 2023. Project representatives at the founder/co-founder level or the equivalent made up only 20% of the pool in Spring 2018 yet constituted slightly over 94% of the pool by Spring 2023. Similarly, whereas only 33% of firms sourced and selected in Spring 2018 were in startup mode, fully 100% of firms selected in Spring 2023 were in startup mode.

The population of 106 Riipen-sourced-and-selected course–client projects do not represent a statistically valid basis for “apples-to-apples” comparisons because: the population of projects was spread across multiple courses and across multiple semesters over a five-year span where many shifts and trends were ongoing – including impacts to course-delivery modality due to COVID-19, and it is likely that unconscious idiosyncratic biases of the current author were operant during selection. Moving forward, researchers are encouraged to pursue questions such as the following: are there statistically significant EM-related learning outcomes that differ for students paired to projects that vary across the preliminary project taxonomy detailed?

Many practical teaching recommendations regarding effective ways to source, select and integrate high-EM course–client projects into otherwise standard-issue marketing courses are made. The paper also serves as something of a primer on how best to source and adapt Riipen marketing projects. Cautionary teaching notes and recommendations based on the current author’s observations are also shared.

Over the course of the five-period (Spring 2018 through Spring 2023), it was observed that a rapidly increasing percentage of firms on the Riipen platform self-identified as female-owned, minority-owned and/or LGBTQ-owned. Similarly, a moderately increasing percentage of marketing projects with “social entrepreneurship” and/or “social impact” and/or “environmental impact” elements were posted to the platform.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first peer-reviewed journal article to explore the EM value of real-world course–client marketing projects sourced via Riipen.

The purpose of this study is to consolidate the existing literature on small retail and develop a conceptual framework using thematic analysis.

The relevant set of 224 articles has been obtained from the Scopus database by applying the PRISMA framework. Bibliometric analysis has been performed using Biblioshiny in Bibliometrix and VOSviewer.

Four major themes have been identified within the conceptual structure of the small retail domain, and a conceptual framework has been developed using the interlinkages within the themes. The intellectual structure of the domain has been explored using citation analysis, co-citation analysis and bibliographic coupling. Future research directions are also identified and documented based on the thematic analysis and overall consolidation of the literature.

This is perhaps one of the first attempts to consolidate the published literature on small retail using bibliometric analysis.

This paper addresses the growing fragmentation between traditional and digital service innovation (DSI) research and offers a unifying metatheoretical framework.

Grounded in service-dominant (S-D) logic's service ecosystems perspective, this study builds on an institutional and systemic, rather than product-centric and linear, conceptualization of value creation to offer a unifying framework for (digital) service innovation that applies to both physical and digital service provisions.

This paper questions the commonly perpetuated idea that DSI fundamentally changes the nature of innovation. Instead, it highlights resource liquification—the decoupling of information from the technologies that store, transmit, or process this information—as a distinguishing characteristic of DSI. Liquification, however, does not affect the relational and institutional nature of service innovation, which is always characterized by (1) the emergence of novel outcomes, (2) distributed governance and (3) symbiotic design. Instead, liquification makes these three characteristics more salient.

In presenting a cohesive service innovation framework, this study underscores that all innovation processes are rooted in combinatorial evolution. Here, service-providing actors (re)combine technologies (or more generally, institutions) to adapt their value cocreation practices. This research demonstrates that such (re)combinations exhibit emergence, distributed governance and symbiotic design. While these characteristics may initially seem novel and unique to DSI, it reveals that their fundamental mechanisms are not limited to digital service ecosystems. They are, in fact, integral to service innovation across virtual, physical and blended contexts. The study highlights the importance of exercising caution in assuming that the emergence of novel technologies, including digital technologies, necessitates a concurrent rethinking of the fundamental processes of service innovation.

This study explores the psychological determinants of buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) use in the UK and reviews the efficacy of existing payment constructs.

A total of 533 BNPL users engaged in story stem completion. Template analysis was used, supported by the identification of four BNPL sentiment groups to enable comparison.

Whilst positive attitudes towards BNPL dominate, other psychological determinants are apparent to a varied extent. Psychological distance and ownership of borrowed money are redolent, while transparency and transaction convenience are less appreciable. BNPL users understand temporality beyond its current conceptualizations. Some users construe BNPL as a “savings” product, and hence payment format conceptualizations may be erroneous. Those with a positive sentiment foreground BNPL’s consumption and budget management benefits. However, the potential for unintended consequences is manifest across all users.

The potentially unwanted consequences, or dark side, of BNPL use in the UK are highlighted. The specified constructs, whilst helpful, do not particularize the complex interconnected nature of the psychological determinants of BNPL use. Improved conceptualization offering richness and clarity is needed – temporality specifically requires consideration.

Users’ sophistication and misunderstanding are both evident, necessitating fuller conversations among various stakeholders, including, providers, policymakers, consumers and advocacy groups.

This research advances the scarce literature exploring consumers’ BNPL use determinants and challenges current conceptualizations surrounding payment format perceptions.

The developing field of entrepreneurial marketing reflects input from both marketing and entrepreneurship. Since the early 1980s, it has evolved heterogeneously, without a coherent theory, leading to complex scholarly views. Therefore, this literature review aims to shed light on the recent developments, reveal various research perspectives related to entrepreneurial marketing and derive future research avenues.

To account for recent scientific contributions and establish a more transparent view of divergent insights, the systematic literature review reported herein covers 207 peer-reviewed journal articles published after the “Charleston Summit” over 12 years (2010–2021) and details their contributions based on descriptive and inductive thematic analysis.

First, a descriptive analysis illustrates recent scientific developments indicating that entrepreneurial marketing is a vibrant research field with a continuous increase in publications worldwide and a wide range of research methods applied. Second, the thematic analysis suggests a three-part classification into entrepreneur, business and market perspectives. The authors present the most frequent themes and subthemes within this literature domain, as well as offering a critical assessment of the field that reveals key directions for expanding existing research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first comprehensive review systematically examining entrepreneurial marketing literature while conducting an in-depth thematic analysis. It enhances current knowledge of the field by extending previous narrative and bibliographic reviews and discussing research directions. Aside from specific research questions, an alternative way to narrow down the multiple research objects is elaborated by critically debating the perspectives.