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The advent of digitalization and the trend of social distancing coincide with the individualized lifestyle that is emerging among contemporary shoppers. This study explores the unique market of “smart solo shoppers”. Two empirical studies are conducted, which aim to identify the major dimensions of multi-channel shopping activities that are engaged by the shoppers (Study 1, n = 64) and to differentiate the shoppers' valuation of time invested in the distinct dimensions under different cultural influences (Study 2, n = 519).

A survey questionnaire is used for data collection, and data are analyzed using structural equation modeling.

Results reveal that the shopping activities converge into four principal dimensions: offline shopping, online shopping, post-shopping delivery and product return activities. Shoppers who perceive offline shopping activities as a time burden and online shopping and delivery activities as venues of value creation are more strongly self-identified as smart solo shoppers. Furthermore, smart solo shoppers who are under a strong influence of individualistic culture are found to spend time on multi-channel shopping to make the right purchase the first time, whereas shoppers perceiving being in a weak individualistic culture prefer to engage online channels while being prepared to return the unwanted purchases.

This study highlights an emerging research field in the nexus of solo consumption and smart shopping. Emphasizing the utility-driven and ego-expressive nature of smart solo shoppers, the authors provide an initial profile of these shoppers based on their time-valuation patterns and the contextual impacts of individualistic culture.

This paper aims to investigate how and when visual referents in brand visual aesthetics (i.e. colours, shapes, patterns and materials) serve as design applications that enable consumer diasporic identity.

This paper uses an innovative methodology that triangulates 58 in-depth interviews with diasporic consumers, 9 interviews with brand managers and designers and a visual analysis of brands (food retailer, spices and nuts, skincare, hair and cosmetics, ice cream and wine) to provide a view of the phenomenon from multiple perspectives.

This study illustrates how and when particular applications and compositions of product and design referents support diasporic identity for Middle Eastern consumers living outside the Middle East. Specifically, it illustrates how the design applications of harmonising (applying separate ancestral homeland and culture of living product and design referents simultaneously), homaging (departing from the culture of living product and design referents with a subtle tribute to ancestral homeland culture) and heritaging (departing from the ancestral homeland culture product and design referents with slight updates to a culture of living style) can enable diasporic identity in particular social situations.

Although applied to the Middle Eastern diaspora, this research opens up interesting avenues for future research that assesses diasporic consumers’ responses to brands seeking to use visual design to engage with this market. Moreover, future research should explore these design applications in relation to issues of cultural appreciation and appropriation.

The hybrid design compositions identified in this study can provide brand managers with practical tools for navigating the design process when targeting a diasporic segment. The design applications and their consequences are discussed while visually demonstrating how they can be crafted.

While previous research mainly focused on how consumption from the ancestral homeland occurred, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine how hybrid design compositions that combine a diaspora’s ancestral homeland culture and their culture of living simultaneously and to varying degrees resonate with diasporic consumers.

The United Nation's 2030 mission provides scholars, practitioners and governments with a valuable framework to direct their research in a way that tackles societal issues. Towards this aim, some key Sustainable Development Goals focus on improving the well-being of humans and societies; however, the literature dealing with individual financial well-being is still underdeveloped and fragmented. To address this significant research gap, this paper reviews the literature on financial well-being. It provides an in-depth analysis of different theories, mediators and moderators employed in financial well-being studies to deepen the theoretical framework and widen the scope of financial well-being research.

Using the Web of Science Core Collection database (WoS), the literature on financial well-being was reviewed (n = 32) following a systematic review approach.

Findings revealed that (a) there is a limited application of theories in financial well-being studies (n = 19) with the majority of studies (n = 15) employing only one theory; (b) twenty-one different theories were used with the maximum number of theories employed by any study was four; (c) the theory of planned behavior was the most commonly used (n = 4); (d) While a reasonable number of studies examine mediators and moderators in antecedents-financial well-being relationships, studies examining mediators and moderators relationships in financial well-being-outcomes relationships are limited. Based on these findings, this review identified a need for future theory-based financial well-being research and examining the role of underlying and intervening mechanisms in antecedents-financial well-being-outcomes relationships.

The study concludes by suggesting some relevant theories and prospective variables that can explain potential financial well-being relationships. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first review on the use of theories, mediators and moderators in financial well-being studies.

With the growing market for luxury fashion rental, we aim to examine how renting luxury fashion is related to consumers' construction of the material self, based on material self-framework. We propose that consumers adopt luxury fashion rentals to construct and manage the personal and social aspects of the material self and that their belief in brand essence facilitates the mechanism.

A total of 296 responses of US female participants collected from Cloudresearch were analyzed to test the relationships between constructs in the proposed model.

The results, using structural equation modeling analysis, supported the expected relationships. Specifically, whereas the social material self directly increased adoption intention, the personal material self indirectly increased such intention via the belief that rented luxury items preserve brand essence.

Our findings advance the literature by showing how the self is constructed and managed in collaborative luxury fashion consumption, from self-identity perspective. The current research reveals the important roles of two aspects of material self that respectively contribute to consumers' adoption of luxury fashion rentals.

This study empirically tests the material self theory in the context of luxury fashion rental and demonstrates the processes of how consumers regard a luxury fashion rental as a tool to construct their identity. This study not only validates the two-structure model of material self (social and personal), but also incorporate the role of brand essence in revealing how the two facets of material self differently facilitate luxury fashion rental adoption.

Recent marketing research provides conceptual models to investigate the well-being of collectives, but service system well-being (SSW) remains untested empirically. This research conceptualises and develops a measure for SSW at the micro, meso and macro levels.

Using a series of studies, a multidimensional SSW scale is developed and validated to ensure its generalisability. After the development of preliminary items, Study 1 (N = 435 of service employees) was used to purify items using factor analyses. Study 2 (N = 592 of service employees) used structural equation modelling (SEM) with AMOS and SmartPLS to test the scale's dimensionality, reliability and validity.

The results confirm the validity and reliability of the nine dimensions of SSW. The measure was validated as a third-order micro-, meso- and macro-level construct. The dimensions of existential and transformative well-being contribute to micro-level well-being. The dimensions of social, community and collaborative well-being contribute to meso-level well-being. Government, leadership, strategic and resource well-being drive macro-level well-being. In addition, a nomological network was specified to assess the impact of SSW on service actor life satisfaction and customer orientation.

The study contributes to services literature by theorising SSW as a hierarchical structure and empirically validating the dimensions and micro-meso-macro levels that contribute to SSW.

The SSW scale is a useful diagnostic tool for assessing levels of well-being across different systems and providing insights that can help develop interventions to improve the well-being of collectives.

The research is the first study to theorise the micro, meso and macro levels of service system well-being and operationally validate the SSW construct.

The purpose of this paper is to build upon reward-learning theory and examine the role of indulgent food consumption and habitual eating behaviors as a means of emotional coping.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods were enlisted to explore emotional eating and indulgent tendencies. In Phase 1 of this research, participants responded to open-ended questions regarding the drivers of emotional eating. In Phase 2, a theoretically driven model was developed from Phase 1 findings and quantitative data was collected to test it.

Phase 1 findings indicate that negative terms such as “stressed” and “distract” were more prevalent in the high emotional coping group as opposed to the low emotional coping group. Building from Phase 1, findings from Phase 2 demonstrate a link between emotional eating and indulgent food consumption, underscoring the impact of habitual behaviors. Specifically, emotional coping frequency fully explains the relationship between emotional eating habits and indulgent eating frequency, while intentions to eat indulgent foods partially mediates the relationship between attitude toward indulgent foods and indulgent food consumption frequency. In addition, intentions to eat indulgent foods partially mediates the relationship between emotional coping frequency and indulgent food consumption frequency.

Social marketing efforts can be enlisted to de-market fatty foods to individuals prone to engaging in emotional eating. Individuals might also be encouraged to use emotion regulation techniques to help manage negative emotions.

This research contributes to the existing marketing and consumer well-being literature by exploring the role of habit formation in the development of emotional eating and indulgent food consumption.

The purpose of this paper is aimed to examine natives' Fervid Attachment to religious rites, as a part of cultural heritage, in its extrinsic (sense of belonging, rituality) and intrinsic (intimate bond, emotionality) characteristics, by shedding light on how leveraging on these characteristics could be emphasized to promote sustainable local development.

Based on the principles of an ethnographic research approach based on observational methods, this paper analyzes the rites of Holy Week in Taranto, a city located in the Southern Italy, by capturing individuals' behavior according the concept of Fervid Attachment.

Results show that tourism destinations preserving their traditions and religious rites as part of their cultural heritage can satisfy tourists' spirituality needs and, by promoting the interaction with the local population (natives) in terms of relationship between them and tourists, supporting local communities' development. Moreover their Fervid Attachment in terms of sense of belonging, rituality, intimate bond and emotionality could be empathized to promote sustainable local development.

Our results provide suggestions on how local policymakers and tourism marketers could leverage natives' attachment to religious rites to boost religious tourism.

This paper shows from a new perspective based on the concept of natives' Fervid Attachment how local people are relevant in promoting a tourism destination.

This study aims to examine the role of hope and hate in political leaders’ messages in influencing liberals versus conservatives’ social-distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the increasing political partisanship across the world today, using the appropriate message framing has important implications for social and public policy.

The authors use two Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods – a pretrained package (HateSonar) and a classifier built to implement our supervised neural network-based model architecture using RoBERTa – to analyze 61,466 tweets by each US state’s governor and two senators with the goal of examining the association between message factors invoking hate and hope and increased or decreased social distancing from March to May 2020. The authors examine individuals’ social-distancing behaviors (the amount of nonessential driving undertaken) using data from 3,047 US counties between March 13 and May 31, 2020, as reported by Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports and the New York Times repository of COVID-19 data.

The results show that for conservative state leaders, the use of hate increases nonessential driving of state residents. However, when these leaders use hope in their speech, nonessential driving of state residents decreases. For liberal state leaders, the use of hate displays a directionally different result as compared to their conservative counterparts.

Amid the emergence of new analytic techniques and novel data sources, the findings demonstrate that the use of global positioning systems data and social media analysis can provide valuable and precise insights into individual behavior. They also contribute to the literature on political ideology and emotion by demonstrating the use of specific emotion appeals in targeting specific consumer segments based on their political ideology.

The findings have significant implications for policymakers and public health officials regarding the importance of considering partisanship when developing and implementing public health policies. As partisanship continues to increase, applying the appropriate emotion appeal in messages will become increasingly crucial. The findings can help marketers and policymakers develop more effective social marketing campaigns by tailoring specific appeals given the political identity of the consumer.

Using Neural NLP methods, this study identifies the specific factors linking social media messaging from political leaders and increased compliance with health directives in a partisan population.

Globally, urban planners and decision makers are pursuing place-based initiatives to develop and enhance urban infrastructure to optimise city performance, competitiveness and sustainability credentials. New discourses associated with big data, Building Information Modelling, SMART cities, green and biophilic thinking inform research, policy and practice agendas to varying extents. However, these discourses remain relatively isolated as much city planning is still pursued within traditional sectoral silos hindering integration. This research explores new conceptual ground at the Smart – Natural City interface within a safe interdisciplinary opportunity space. Using the city of Birmingham UK as a case study, a methodology was developed championing co-design, integration and social learning to develop a conceptual framework to navigate the challenges and opportunities at the Smart-Natural city interface. An innovation workshop and supplementary interviews drew upon the insights and experiences of 25 experts leading to the identification of five key spaces for the conceptualisation and delivery at the Smart-Natural city interface. At the core is the space for connectivity; surrounded by spaces for visioning, place-making, citizen-led participatorylearning and monitoring.The framework provides a starting point for improved discussions, understandings and negotiations to cover all components of this particular interface. Our results show the importance of using all spaces within shared narratives; moving towards ‘silver-green’ and living infrastructure and developing data in response to identified priorities. Whilst the need for vision has dominated traditional urban planning discourses we have identified the need for improved connectivity as a prerequisite. The use of all 5 characteristics collectively takes forward the literature on socio-ecological-technological relationships and heralds significant potential to inform and improve city governance frameworks, including the benefits of a transferable deliberative and co-design method that generates ownership with a real stake in the outcomes.