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Given the importance of the growing segmentation of ageing consumers and their increasing interaction with the Internet, digital marketing scholars are becoming more interested in this market. Prior research needs to pay more attention to this market in many contexts of digital marketing. This study aims to provide insights into ageing consumers’ content usage, content typology choices, and online brand advocacy (OBA).

Semi-structured interviews were applied, and 16 consumers from Southern Europe aged 55+ were included. The interviews were transcribed and examined following the principles of content analysis.

According to the research, older consumers display their usage and concerns regarding online content. They have different decision-making processes depending on whether they are purchasing products or services. Likewise, their choices of content typology vary based on the utilitarian or hedonic product category.

This study contributes to the literature by providing insights into this growing segmentation and proposing an OBA framework for older consumers related to content marketing. Finally, the study suggests that older consumers are passive online and active offline brand advocates.

Through the lens of self-perception theory, this paper investigates how avatar design (i.e. avatar user similarity) affects users' self-awareness and shapes their task engagement and performance in the Metaverse.

The authors conducted a 2 (avatar user similarity: high vs low) × 2 (task type: procedural vs creative) lab experiment and collected data from questionnaires, the recording of users' behavior during tasks and their actual task performance.

The results show that higher avatar user similarity leads to higher task engagement in general. Furthermore, while a similar avatar promotes users to regulate their behaviors and achieve better performance in a procedural task, high similarity also inhibits users' creativity by invoking habitual thinking, resulting in worse performance in generating original ideas in a creative task.

This study is expected to contribute to the information systems literature by revealing the value of avatar design and providing new perspectives on improving users' experiences in the Metaverse.

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.

This study aims to predict the effect of cultural distance, perceived risk and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) on higher education institutes' students' destination image. In addition, it examines the mediating role of destination image in relation to students' travel intentions.

An online survey was employed to collect data from 200 graduate and postgraduate students. The partial least squares was employed to analyse the hypothesised relationships.

The results of this study found support for the positive effect of cultural distance and eWOM on destination image. Additionally, the mediating effect of destination image was also supported.

This research confirms the vital role of destination image as an antecedent of students' future intention to visit the destination. Moreover, this study contributes to marketing theory by predicting the critical drivers of higher education students' destination image and discussing their applications in the education sector.

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.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of service recovery experiences on customer engagement in negative word-of-mouth (WOM) in the hotel industry and explore the psychological motives and mediating mechanisms driving consumer behavior.

A scenario-based experimental design on Qualtrics was used, with a pre-test (N = 200). The main study data were collected using Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform.

Findings reveal that negative service experiences lead to higher engagement in negative WOM compared to positive and satisfactory recovery service experiences. Even well-executed recovery efforts may not completely eliminate negative WOM. The mediating role of emotional responses is substantiated, as heightened negative service experiences result in more intense negative emotional responses, leading to increased engagement in negative WOM.

The study emphasizes the importance of service recovery strategies and the need for businesses to consistently strive for exceptional service quality. It also highlights the complexity of customer reactions to service experiences, suggesting that further research is needed to explore the factors that minimize negative WOM across various service contexts.

By extending Edmans et al.’s (2021) music sentiment measures to the Vietnam market, the authors aim to investigate the impacts of music sentiment on stock market returns and volatility.

The authors adopted Edmans et al.’s (2021) music-based sentiment to proxy for investor mood. The current study uses linear regression analysis.

The authors find that music sentiment is significantly and positively related to both stock returns and stock market volatility. The authors also show that music sentiment has a contagious effect: Global music sentiment and those in the United States, France and Hong Kong are significant drivers of the Vietnamese stock market. The authors also examine the effect on different industry returns and find that returns on stocks of firms in the communication services, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, energy, financials, healthcare, real-estate, information technology and utility sectors are significantly related to music sentiment. In addition to valence, the authors find that other Spotify audio features can be used to quantify music sentiment.

This study contributes to the behavioral finance literature that focuses on investor sentiment. The authors address this topic in Vietnam using high-frequency data.

Intangible capital (IC) is an important factor for economic growth and firm performance. The role IC has played has become even more crucial in recent decades, possibly influencing debt capacity and default risk assessment. This paper studies how entrepreneurial and employee-based IC affects financial leverage.

Employer–employee unbalanced panel data provided by Statistics Finland that refer to Finnish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are used. Intangibles are measured with an expenditure-based method. Employee-based IC and entrepreneurial knowledge are used to explain debt financing in SMEs.

The findings imply that IC-intensive firms have less debt capacity due to weak pledgeability and asymmetric information between borrower and lender. Entrepreneurs with managerial or financial knowledge increase the firm's debt capacity compared to other entrepreneurs, especially in knowledge-intensive services (KIS). One explanation is that the entrepreneurs are more competent in negotiating with lenders as the entrepreneurs possess better financial skills. Entrepreneurs with technical knowledge decrease the firm's debt capacity in all industries.

While some earlier research focused on the IC–financial leverage relationship, hardly any study has looked at entrepreneurial IC. This paper provides new insights by including entrepreneurial IC alongside employee-based IC.

This paper presents a survey of research into interactive robotic systems for the purpose of identifying the state of the art capabilities as well as the extant gaps in this emerging field. Communication is multimodal. Multimodality is a representation of many modes chosen from rhetorical aspects for its communication potentials. The author seeks to define the available automation capabilities in communication using multimodalities that will support a proposed Interactive Robot System (IRS) as an AI mounted robotic platform to advance the speed and quality of military operational and tactical decision making.

This review will begin by presenting key developments in the robotic interaction field with the objective of identifying essential technological developments that set conditions for robotic platforms to function autonomously. After surveying the key aspects in Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Unmanned Autonomous System (UAS), visualization, Virtual Environment (VE) and prediction, the paper then proceeds to describe the gaps in the application areas that will require extension and integration to enable the prototyping of the IRS. A brief examination of other work in HRI-related fields concludes with a recapitulation of the IRS challenge that will set conditions for future success.

Using insights from a balanced cross section of sources from the government, academic, and commercial entities that contribute to HRI a multimodal IRS in military communication is introduced. Multimodal IRS (MIRS) in military communication has yet to be deployed.

Multimodal robotic interface for the MIRS is an interdisciplinary endeavour. This is not realistic that one can comprehend all expert and related knowledge and skills to design and develop such multimodal interactive robotic interface. In this brief preliminary survey, the author has discussed extant AI, robotics, NLP, CV, VDM, and VE applications that is directly related to multimodal interaction. Each mode of this multimodal communication is an active research area. Multimodal human/military robot communication is the ultimate goal of this research.

A multimodal autonomous robot in military communication using speech, images, gestures, VST and VE has yet to be deployed. Autonomous multimodal communication is expected to open wider possibilities for all armed forces. Given the density of the land domain, the army is in a position to exploit the opportunities for human–machine teaming (HMT) exposure. Naval and air forces will adopt platform specific suites for specially selected operators to integrate with and leverage this emerging technology. The possession of a flexible communications means that readily adapts to virtual training will enhance planning and mission rehearsals tremendously.

Interaction, perception, cognition and visualization based multimodal communication system is yet missing. Options to communicate, express and convey information in HMT setting with multiple options, suggestions and recommendations will certainly enhance military communication, strength, engagement, security, cognition, perception as well as the ability to act confidently for a successful mission.

The objective is to develop a multimodal autonomous interactive robot for military communications. This survey reports the state of the art, what exists and what is missing, what can be done and possibilities of extension that support the military in maintaining effective communication using multimodalities. There are some separate ongoing progresses, such as in machine-enabled speech, image recognition, tracking, visualizations for situational awareness, and virtual environments. At this time, there is no integrated approach for multimodal human robot interaction that proposes a flexible and agile communication. The report briefly introduces the research proposal about multimodal interactive robot in military communication.