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The authors used role-playing with subsequent focus group interviews in order to explore how adolescents negotiate conflicting food messages they encounter in their everyday lives. The purpose of this paper is to describe adolescents’ perceptions about different messages and their sources and to explore the trust they place in such sources.

In total, 31 adolescents aged 15-16 years participated in role-playing with subsequent focus group interviews. A qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data.

The adolescents depicted an everyday life with multiple and different messages about food and eating. In addition, they stated that these messages were conveyed by a wide range of sources at different levels, for example, by parents, teachers, sports coaches and media. The messages from different sources were conflicting and covered many different perspectives on food and eating. When negotiating food choices in the role-playing and in the focus group discussing how to handle different and conflicting messages, trust became visible. The trustworthiness of messages and trust in their sources were associated with several important aspects in regard to whether or not the messages were based on knowledge about food and nutrition, care for the person receiving the messages, and/or commercial interest. In addition, the results indicate that the situation and the social relationship to the person providing the message were of importance for trustworthiness.

This study is novel as it uses role-playing as a research method and describes the trust adolescents place on food messages and their sources. To understand the factors that enhance such trust is important for the development and provision of education, information, and other health-promotion activities related to food in order to support and strengthen adolescents’ critical reflections on food messages from different sources.

This chapter draws on both theoretical and empirical literature on trust and discusses the role of trust in strategic communication. It also examines the importance of trust for organizational success, the dimensions of trust and distrust and discusses quantifiable proxies to measure trust and distrust on social media. The theoretically driven dimensions of trust and distrust served as a framework to examine how Boeing and Airbus use Twitter to communicate with their stakeholders and publics. 6,926 Twitter messages were examined in the process of content analysis. The following proxies of stakeholder and publics' trust in an organization were identified for Twitter: number of followers, friends and likes; frequency of online activities; length of messages; use of hashtags, links, exclamation and questions marks; and use of specific words and phrases in messages. Two separate lists of words and phrases were created, one for proxies of trust and one for proxies of distrust. In addition, the following trust building actions that organization can engage in on Twitter were identified: listening and engaging in dialogue by following users, mentioning users in messages, replying to enquiries, providing and encouraging feedback.

This paper aims to investigate whether a message from a brand with stronger brand equity generates more trust than a message from a brand with lower brand equity, and thus is more likely to encourage consumers to write online reviews. This paper also explores what happens when consumers become aware that brands are trying to persuade them to write a review.

Through three experimental studies, where participants were randomly assigned to a brand that has either a stronger or weaker brand equity, participants’ intention to write reviews was measured. Trust in the message was measured to study its mediating role, and persuasion knowledge of the participants was manipulated to investigate its moderating effect.

The findings confirm that consumers are more likely to write online reviews when a message comes from a brand that has stronger brand equity, trust in the message mediates the relationship between brand equity and consumer intention to write an online review, and persuasion knowledge has a differential effect on consumer intention to write reviews.

The study adds to the brand equity and online review literature by providing evidence that a higher level of consumer trust on brands that have stronger brand equity leads to an increased intention to write a review for the brand. It also shows that consumers’ awareness of the motive of the brand is more beneficial for brands with strong brand equity, contributing to persuasion knowledge literature.

As fake information has become the norm on the internet, it is important to investigate how skepticism impacts an individual’s attitude toward word-of-mouth (eWOM). This study examines eWOM skepticism via three dimensions: suspicion of motivation, suspicion of truthfulness and suspicion of identity. It investigates not only which of the three dimensions is more influential in eWOM situations but also the variations and relationships among these three. Furthermore, this study evaluates how an individual’s dispositional trust and perceptions regarding structural assurance can impact each dimension, which in turn affects the assessment of the eWOM messages’ credibility.

Using an online scenario-based survey, data were collected via Amazon Mechanical Turk from 195 participants in the U.S. PLS and cluster analysis were used to analyze the data.

The results reveal that the suspicion of identity play a major role in message credibility assessment and that people who are naturally less likely to trust others also hold higher suspicion of motivation and truthfulness. Further, structural assurance has significant negative effects on all three dimensions.

The findings highlight the importance of enhancing the protective measures on eWOM platforms and call for stricter regulations to prevent organizations from adopting deceptive eWOM propagandas.

This research contributes to the literature by exploring the impact of skepticism on eWOM message credibility assessment and helping to validate this newly created construct by considering eWOM skepticism as a formative construct.

Riding on the wave of intelligent transportation systems, the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is becoming a popular research topic. VANET is designed to build an environment where the vehicles can exchange information about the traffic conditions or vehicle situation to help the vehicles avoid traffic accidents or traffic jams. In order to keep the privacy of vehicles, the vehicles must be anonymous and the routing must be untraceable while still being able to be verified as legal entities. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The exchanged messages must be authenticated to be genuine and verified that they were sent by a legal vehicle. The vehicles also can mutually trust and communicate confidentially. In VANETs, road-side units (RSUs) are installed to help the vehicles to obtain message authentication or communicate confidentially. However, the coverage of RSUs is limited due to the high cost of wide area installation. Therefore the vehicles must be able to obtain message authentication by themselves – without an RSU.

The authors take the concept of random key pre-distribution used in wireless sensor networks, modify it into a random secret pre-distribution, and integrate it with identity-based cryptography to make anonymous message authentication and private communication easier and safer. The authors construct a two-tier structure. The tier 1, trust authority, assigns n anonymous identities and embeds n secrets into these identities to be the private secret keys for the tier 2, registered vehicles. At any time, the vehicles can randomly choose one of n anonymous identities to obtain message authentication or communicate confidentially with other vehicles.

The processes of building neighbor set, setting pairing value, and message authenticating are proposed in this paper. The proposed method can protect against the attacks of compromising, masquerading, forging, and replying, and can also achieve the security requirements of VANET in message authentication, confidential communication, anonymity, and un-traceability. The performance of the proposed method is superior to the related works.

Service failures are common and companies must decide how best to respond to these incidents. The purpose of this study is to examine service recovery efforts that incorporate a donation component, in addition to financial compensation. More specifically, the relative effectiveness of these recovery efforts was explored according to the regulatory focus framing (i.e. prevention- or promotion-focused) of the donation message.

Three experiments are conducted to test the hypotheses.

Drawing from regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997), the authors determined that prevention framing (e.g. highlighting the negative outcomes avoided by a donation) leads to better service recovery outcomes compared to promotion framing (e.g. highlighting the positive outcomes of a donation) the donation message. Furthermore, warmth (e.g. perceptions of caring and helpfulness) and competence (e.g. perceptions of capability and usefulness) underlie this effect and message trust moderates the effect of regulatory framing on warmth.

This study offers several theoretical and managerial implications. First, a novel recovery approach that benefits multiple stakeholders was illustrated, particularly when the donation message is prevention (vs promotion) framed. The authors focused on donations in particular, but future researchers should explore other corporate social responsibility activities such as those pertaining to sustainability, ethical labor practices or educational training.

Companies should consider incorporating donations into service recovery efforts. Moreover, companies should use prevention as opposed to promotion frames in their donation messages. Using a prevention frame enhances perceptions of company warmth and competence.

Very little research has explored the effectiveness of donations following service failures despite evidence that companies use donations in this context. This research highlights the importance of regulatory focus framing and demonstrates how a donation, paired with financial compensation, is more/less effective according to the framing of the communication. Thus, this research demonstrates a novel effect, identifies its underlying mechanism through warmth and competence and establishes an important boundary condition according to message trust.

This study aims to analyze the role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) customer perceptions, customer–company identification and customer trust on customer engagement (CE), paying special attention to the moderating effects of two types of social media communication, firm-generated content and user-generated content.

The study uses a mixed-methods’ approach. First, a single-factor experiment using Twitter posts as stimuli with 227 hotel guests. The structural model was analyzed using SmartPLS 3.2.7. Second, structured in-depth interviews were undertaken with three hotel industry experts to complement the conclusions of the quantitative study.

The results show that when a customer trusts a hotel and identifies with its corporate values, CSR tweets generate CE toward the hotel. CSR communications made by customers reinforce the impact of CSR tweets on customer trust more than CSR tweets posted by hotels. Hotel industry experts give insights to explain these results in different types of hotels.

CSR communications made through Twitter affect customers’ perceptions of a hotel’s CSR activities and customer trust in hotels, especially if they originate from a source external to the company. This result can be of use for hotel managers who have not previously given importance to active CSR communications or the interactivity of social media.

The authors show the moderating effect of user-generated content in the relationship between CSR customer perceptions and customer trust, thus contributing to the research into the effectiveness of social media. They use a mixed-methods’ approach to increase the validity of the results.

Este estudio analiza el papel de las percepciones de RSC, la identificación cliente-empresa (CCI) y la confianza en el engagement del cliente (CE), prestando especial atención al efecto moderador de dos tipos de comunicación en redes sociales: Contenido Generado por la Empresa (FGC) y Contenido Generado por el Usuario (UGC).

Se emplean métodos mixtos: un experimento de un factor usando publicaciones de Twitter como estímulo con 227 huéspedes del hotel, cuyo modelo estructural se analizó con SmartPLS 3.2.7., y 3 entrevistas en profundidad con expertos de la industria hotelera.

Los resultados muestran que, cuando un cliente confía en el hotel y se identifica con sus valores corporativos, los tweets de RSC generan engagement. La comunicación de RSC emitida por usuarios refuerza el impacto de los tweets de RSC en la confianza del cliente más que los tweets publicados por hoteles. Los expertos de la industria hotelera aportan nociones para explicar estos resultados en diferentes tipos de hoteles.

La comunicación de RSC realizada a través de Twitter afecta las percepciones del cliente sobre las actividades de RSC del hotel y la confianza en el mismo, especialmente si proceden de una fuente externa a la empresa. Este resultado puede ser útil para gerentes de hoteles que no se benefician de la comunicación activa de RSC o la interactividad de las redes sociales.

Se valida el efecto moderador del UGC en la relación entre las percepciones de RSC y la confianza de los clientes, contribuyendo así a la investigación sobre la efectividad de las redes sociales. Se emplea un diseño mixto para incrementar la validez de los resultados.

Comunicación de RSC, Engagement del Consumidor, Fuente del mensaje, Contenido generado por la empresa, Contenido generado por el usuario, Twitter, Compromiso con el cliente

Trabajo de investigación

The study aims to identify and explore the antecedents to short message service (SMS) advertising acceptance as an effect to the entire process of communicating the SMS ad.

The study follows a sequential mixed-methods approach, starting with qualitative interviews, to build the research model following the grounded theory approach and then a quantitative survey study to apply the model to two types of ads (discount and notification ads).

Perceived value, ad trust and channel acceptance are crucial to the attitude towards SMS ads. Relevance, content, brand equity and perceived usefulness are significant triggers to perceived value and trust, with an emphasis on importance of brand equity in trusting discount ads.

Accurate targeting and personalisation are crucial to ensure that SMS ads are useful and relevant to recipients. SMS advertising is more effective when the recipients are already connected with the brand. Including the brand name as the sender increases both value and trust. Transparency and adequate information are important for gaining trust especially for discount ads.

The study proposes an integrative model for SMS advertising acceptance after a rigorous consideration of all elements in the process of communicating the SMS ad following the GTA. The study also highlights the differences between the acceptance models for discount and notification ads.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a model and note the ranking of the trust factors of messages about organic food in social networks.

The research was divided into four phases. The first employed the literature review about Trust, Trust of products, Trust of organic foods and Trust in the social networks. This review was prepared as some hypothesis about the trust of messages about organic food in the social network. The second employed a focused interview to supplement the mentioned hypothesis to 31 factors that affect the trust of messages about organic food in social networks. In the third phase, 300 forms were used to collect information from Iranian consumers for exploratory factor analysis. Finally, neural networks were used to determine the ranking of the mentioned factors.

The results show 31 factors that affect the trust of messages about organic food in social networks. The results of this study showed that Iranian and international organic foods producers may be able to spread messages of trust about their products in social networks by attending to these 31 factors. This study also explored a model constructed using EFA that showed that six factors have a positive effect on the level of trust of messages about organic food in social networks.

This research effectively helps organic food producers to better understand the trust factors and ways to improve that trust in cyberspace marketing plans and to increase their sales.

For the first time, this research seeks a model for the factors affecting consumer trust in organic foods in social networks, and in the next step, it ranks these factors with artificial neural networks.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) credibility. Further, the authors propose a comprehensive and integrated model on eWOM credibility.

The authors conducted a systematic review of the extant literature on marketing, sociology and psychology to identify the factors that affect eWOM credibility. Further, the authors developed themes and identified factors which lead to eWOM credibility.

Four factors were identified, i.e. content, communicator, context and consumer, which affect eWOM credibility. Several variables associated with these four factors were identified, which result in eWOM credibility. Further, the authors developed 22 propositions to explain the causal relationship between these variables and eWOM credibility.

The conceptual model needs empirical validation across various eWOM platforms, i.e. social networking websites, e-commerce websites, etc.

Managers and e-commerce vendors can use these inputs to develop specific design elements and assessment tools which can help consumers to identify credible eWOM messages. Credible eWOM messages, in turn, will increase the “trust” and “loyalty” of the customers on e-commerce vendors.

This paper provides a conclusive takeaway of eWOM credibility literature by integrating multiple perspectives and arguments from the extant literature. This study also presents an integrated model, which provides a theoretical framework for researchers to further examine the interaction effect of various variables, which results in eWOM credibility.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0263