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The purpose of the paper is to analyze the supply and demand of marketing and communication consulting services and evaluate actual and perceived gaps.

The paper uses two different datasets to assess the gap. The supply database comes from desk research carried out in the province of Bergamo (n. 159 consulting agencies). The demand dates are the results of 100 structured interviews with local companies that requested marketing and communication consulting services both inside and outside the province.

Findings show that there is no significant shortage in local service supply. Nonetheless, a limited gap exists between the provision of specific services and their overall quality. Conversely, the perceived gap is wider, leading to an impression of scarce availability – a notion disproven by the analysis of the actual supply.

The study suggests that local agencies may overcome their “myopic” attitude and need to increase their visibility, competencies and expertise by investing in these areas and improving networking.

There are no previous studies that compare the supply and demand for marketing and communication consulting services. The paper also provides insights into actual and perceived gaps in a hypercompetitive environment.

At the moment, in terms of both research and commercial products, smart shoe technology and applications seem not to attract the same magnitude of attention compared to smart garments and other smart wearables such as wrist watches and wrist bands. The purpose of this study is to fill this knowledge gap by discussing issues regarding smart shoe sensing technologies, smart shoe sensor placements, factors that affect sensor placements and finally the areas of smart shoe applications.

Through a review of relevant literature, this study first and foremost attempts to explain what constitutes a smart shoe and subsequently discusses the current trends in smart shoe applications. Discussed in this study are relevant sensing technologies, sensor placement and areas of smart shoe applications.

This study outlined 13 important areas of smart shoe applications. It also uncovered that majority of smart shoe functionality are physical activity tracking, health rehabilitation and ambulation assistance for the blind. Also highlighted in this review are some of the bottlenecks of smart shoe development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review paper focused on smart shoe applications, and therefore serves as an apt reference for researchers within the field of smart footwear.

Traditional sports have seen declining participation at many levels, with football being no different. This is occurring at a time when emergent technologies present new challenges, particularly to the crucial yet ignored cohort of millennials. Without meeting the needs of millennials, football cannot be successful in the future. This research seeks to understand how millennial football fandom (sport, not team) in Australia impacts football participation, whilst empirically examining the impact of football video games (FVGs).

Survey data are collected from online groups, forums and social media pages of Australian football (soccer) fans. Quantitative analysis of millennial fandom and its influence on football participation (for the first time demarcated into play and engagement) is undertaken, including the moderating influence of time spent playing FVGs, amidst covariate influences of age and number of children.

Results highlight the multi-dimensionality of millennial football fandom in Australia, reveal the typical hours spent playing football across a range of participation types (including play and engagement), support fan involvement’s influence on engagement with football, establish that a desire to interact with other football fans manifests in playing more football, specify how playing FVGs moderates these relationships, supports the covariate influences of age and evidences that playing FVGs does not hamper football play.

This is the first study to examine millennial fans of football (the sport, not tied to a club) and the influence of fandom on football participation. By separating football participation into two forms, play and engagement, we highlight discrete influences, whilst evaluating for the first time the moderating influence of the time millennials spend playing FVGs. For sport managers and administrators, these are important findings to facilitate better segmentation, recruitment, retention and participation, each with broader societal health benefits. This is undertaken in Australia where football is not a dominant code, relegating fandom to a niche, thus revealing important findings for sports and business management.

This paper aims to examine the impact of metaverse experiences on customers’ offline behavioral intentions: How do customers’ visits to a hospitality business’s virtual property in the metaverse affect their intentions to visit the physical property in the real world?

Based on the general learning model and social cognitive theory, this research hypothesizes the positive impact of metaverse experiences on customers’ visit intentions and explores two boundary conditions for positive impact: user–avatar resemblance and servicescape similarity. Two experimental studies were conducted.

Metaverse experience has a significant impact on customers’ visit intentions, and this impact is moderated by user–avatar resemblance and servicescape similarity.

This research addresses the call for empirical studies regarding the effects of metaverse experience on people’s behavioral intentions.

As one of the earliest empirical studies on the marketing effects of the metaverse, this research provides a basis for future metaverse studies in the hospitality field.

This paper investigates how two characteristics of language, abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity, influence user engagement in communication exercises on innovation targeted to the general audience. The proposed conceptual model suggests that innovation fits well with more abstract language because of the association of innovation with imagination and distal construal. Moreover, communication of innovation may benefit from greater adherence to the narrativity arc, that is, early staging, increasing plot progression and climax optimal point. These effects are moderated by content variety and emotional tone, respectively.

Based on a Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) application on a sample of 3225 TED Talks transcripts, the authors identify 287 TED Talks on innovation, and then applied econometric analyses to test the hypotheses on the effects of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity on engagement, and on the moderation effects of content variety and emotional tone.

The authors found that abstractness (vs concreteness) and narrativity have positive effects on engagement. These two effects are stronger with higher content variety and more positive emotional tone, respectively.

This paper extends the literature on communication of innovation, linguistics and text analysis by evaluating the roles of abstractness vs concreteness and narrativity in shaping appreciation of innovation.

This paper reports conceptual and empirical analyses on innovation dissemination through a popular medium – TED Talks – and applies modern text analysis algorithms to test hypotheses on the effects of two pivotal dimensions of language on user engagement.

The empirical study of factors related to digital transformation (DT) in the banking sector is still limited, even though the importance of the topic is universally evident. To bridge that gap, this paper aims to explore the role of digital leadership (DL), innovative culture (IC) and technostress inhibitors (TI) to support engagement for improved digital innovation (DI). Based on the literature, these variables are crucial aspects of digitalisation, even though there is no agreement on their conclusiveness.

This quantitative study tested a new conceptual model using survey data from five major banks in Libya. Partial least squares structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data from the 292 usable responses.

The results showed that DL and IC positively affect DI. Techno-work engagement (TE) mediated the relationship between leadership, culture and innovation. TI played a significant moderating role in leadership, culture and engagement relationships.

The research findings highlight critical issues about how leadership style and fostering organisational support in the banking sector can enhance DT. Leaders must demonstrate a commitment to long-term resource allocation to avoid possible negative effects from digital stress while pursuing DI through work engagement.

The study suggests that fostering organisational support can enhance DT in retail banks, potentially leading to improved customer experiences and increased access to financial services. These programs will help banks contribute to societal and economic development.

This timely study examines predictor mechanisms of innovation in retail banking that resonate within the restrictions of organisational and DI frameworks and the social exchange theory. Exploring the intervening effect of TE in the leadership, culture and innovation associations is unprecedented.

In recent years, there has been significant interest in adopting XR (extended reality) technologies such as VR (virtual reality) and AR (augmented reality), particularly in retail. However, extending activities through reality-mediation is still mostly believed to offer an inferior experience due to their shortcomings in usability, wearability, graphical fidelity, etc. This study aims to address the research gap by experimentally examining the acceptance of metaverse shopping.

This study conducts a 2 (VR: with vs. without) × 2 (AR: with vs. without) between-subjects laboratory experiment involving 157 participants in simulated daily shopping environments. This study builds a physical brick-and-mortar store at the campus and stocked it with approximately 600 products with accompanying product information and pricing. The XR devices and a 3D laser scanner were used in constructing the three XR shopping conditions.

Results indicate that XR can offer an experience comparable to, or even surpassing, traditional shopping in terms of its instrumental and hedonic aspects, regardless of a slightly reduced perception of usability. AR negatively affected perceived ease of use, while VR significantly increased perceived enjoyment. It is surprising that the lower perceived ease of use appeared to be disconnected from the attitude toward metaverse shopping.

This study provides important experimental evidence on the acceptance of XR shopping, and the finding that low perceived ease of use may not always be detrimental adds to the theory of technology adoption as a whole. Additionally, it provides an important reference point for future randomized controlled studies exploring the effects of technology on adoption.

The proposed model aims to consider the flying hours as a criterion to initiate maintenance operation. Based on this condition, aircraft must be checked before flying hours threshold is met. After receiving maintenance service, the model ignores previous flying hours and the aircraft can keep on flying until the threshold value is reached again. Moreover, the model considers aircraft age and efficiency to assign them to flights.

The aircraft maintenance routing problem (AMRP), as one of the most important problems in the aviation industry, determines the optimal route for each aircraft along with meeting maintenance requirements. This paper presents a bi-objective mixed-integer programming model for AMRP in which several criteria such as aircraft efficiency and ferrying flights are considered.

As the solution approaches, epsilon-constraint method and a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), including a new initializing algorithm, are used. To verify the efficiency of NSGA-II, 31 test problems in different scales are solved using NSGA-II and GAMS. The results show that the optimality gap in NSGA-II is less than 0.06%. Finally, the model was solved based on real data of American Eagle Airlines extracted from Kaggle datasets.

The authors confirm that it is an original paper, has not been published elsewhere and is not currently under consideration of any other journal.

This study aims to examine the influence of condominium attributes on resident satisfaction and word of mouth from the perspectives of the elderly in Thailand.

Data were collected from 338 elderly residents through a questionnaire survey and analysed by using descriptive statistics and structural equation modelling procedures.

The results showed that the strongest predictor of resident satisfaction was design functionality, followed by social environment, safety and security and service quality. In addition, the strongest predictor of word of mouth was safety and security, followed by design functionality, proximity, service quality and social environment.

The data were drawn at the level of the overall characteristics of elderly residents. People may be different in terms of their demographic characters such as gender, age, and user experience.

The study suggests that condominium developers and designers should pay attention to design functionality both physically and mentally such as suitable materials, lighting and common areas. Moreover, the developers should focus on the proximity of the nearest hospitals, safety and security measures, well-trained security personnel and social activity arrangement.

Elderly condominium markets are increasingly growing as a result of the ageing society in Thailand. However, very few empirical studies investigate condominium attributes that affect resident satisfaction and word of mouth provided by real estate developers. The paper aims to determine driving factors that enhance the better well-being of elderly residents.

Understanding the effect of assortment composition on attentional levels is an essential topic for academic researchers and practitioners. This work has important implications when analyzing the influence of shopping frame time and search effort on the relationship between the reaction to assortment composition and visual attention to stock-keeping units (SKUs) pricing.

Two experimental studies through gauze behavior analysis technology (using eye-tracking equipment) analyze the variable's large assortment, visual attention to SKU pricing, search effort and shopping frame time.

The results suggest that, although it increases the search effort, a large assortment decreases the visual attention to SKU pricing. Further, our results indicate a moderating effect associated with mitigating the negative effect by medium-low levels of search effort and a moderating impact of time in this relation.

Marketing professionals can carefully optimize the in-store experience by managing the assortment and variety and by influencing consumers' visual attention to SKU pricing along the journey as part of the experience. Assortment and SKU pricing strategies need to be aligned with consumer journey design.

Our findings contribute to assortment theory and management by detailing the relationship between consumers' reactions to assortment perception and visual attention to SKU pricing in time flow. We reinforce the importance of considering assortment strategies from the consumer perspective and giving reliable information about in-store behavior.