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Adopting a customer-dominant logic perspective, the purpose of this paper is to understand how some tourists decide on unusual trips and how they associate meanings to transform their experience into an event.

This research is exploratory and involves three qualitative data collection techniques. The authors conducted individual interviews complemented by travel narratives with tourists that decided to undertake off-track travel. The third method is ethnographic and focuses on tourists participating in a singular ritualistic festival.

Several factors explained how off-track travelers associate meanings to turn their real-life experience into a successful event. These factors cover three main concepts: discovery, social link and identity.

The authors propose managerial implications for ordinary service providers in the tourism sector. Managers should attempt to provide tourists with a framework within which they can create their own events and take initiatives. They must be supportive of tourists re-enhancing their experience and making efforts to create their own event.

This research explains how services must be less standardized to satisfy tourists looking for immersion, exoticism and authenticity and to support their initiatives.

This paper aims to explore the virtual experience to understand its components and its effects on consumers’ real world.

Our approach relies on a rarely used projective method: “Album-on-Line” (AOL). This technique allows identifying consumers’ representations of their experience. It uses images to immerse participants in a virtual experience and to lead an individual reflection, then a group reflection.

Virtual experiences have utilitarian, hedonic, psychological and social dimensions. When immersing in virtual experiences, consumers’ perception and consumption of products and services change. A projection occurs leading to an identification to virtual characters. This projection also leads to a consumption aiming at finding back the excitement and challenge lived during virtual experiences.

The main limitation of this research relates with the fuzzy distinction between the virtual and the electronic in consumers’ minds and even in the literature. Future work should propose a multidisciplinary definition of the virtual experience, considering its specificities and components.

This research offers companies a better understanding of consumers’ motivations to live virtual experiences. It may bring insights on how to provide a more customized offering and a more adapted communication.

Compared to previous work, the present research offers a better understanding of the components of online and offline virtual experiences by considering the virtual in its broadest meaning. The use of the AOL technique enabled a closer look at the specificities of the virtual experience as perceived by consumers. It was also possible to explore the “post-experience” stage by understanding the effect of virtual experiences on consumers’ perceptions and consumptions.

Taking an emerging country perspective, this paper aims to investigate consumers’ preferences for over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, regarding three attributes: country-of-origin (COO), brand status (branded versus generic) and price. The second purpose is to test the effect of COO and brand status on consumers’ perceptions of quality, trust and purchasing intentions.

After a preliminary qualitative study, consumers answered a follow-up questionnaire to evaluate eight product combinations (COO/brand status/price) for three categories of OTC drugs. Conjoint analysis allowed assessing the importance of COO compared to brand status and price, while ANOVA was used to test the effect of COO and branding status on consumers’ responses.

Findings show that, in an emerging countries context, COO is less important than brand status in consumers’ preferences. COO and brand status have a greater effect on consumers’ perceptions of drug quality and trust than on purchasing intentions.

The limited number of factors (brand status/COO/price) could have amplified their relative importance.

Pharmaceutical companies from industrialized countries, exporting generic drugs to emerging markets, can benefit from the favorably perceived COO of their drugs and thus help the acceptance of generic drugs in these markets.

The study has two major contributions. It aims to contribute to a better understanding of consumer behavior in the pharmaceutical field. It also transposes the framework on COO to the context of an emerging country: Tunisia.

The existing literature dealing with attractiveness during a service encounter focuses on employee attractiveness and its consequences. This paper aims to consider the other side of the coin by focusing on customers’ attractiveness.

On the basis of two studies, this paper presents and tests a model explaining the specific role that employee social attraction plays in customer service perception and satisfaction judgment.

It suggests that the appraisal of customers’ physical attractiveness and homophily may lead to situations in which employees are socially attracted to customers, thus influencing customer service perception.

Consequently, this research provides insights into the role of attraction determinants in a service context. In addition, it demonstrates how employees’ social attraction is triggered in a service context. The findings contribute to satisfaction research by extending prior research perceptions on dyadic service encounters and examining both employee attitude and customer perceptions in service interactions.

The purpose of the current study is to attempt to contribute to the understanding of some socio-cultural factors likely to explain the preference for international products in emerging countries, and more specifically those characterising former colonised countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The chosen approach is exploratory and of a qualitative inductive nature. It was based on a series of semi-structured and unstructured in-depth interviews with Tunisian consumers about their relationship to local and foreign products.

A set of complex and inter-related explanatory factors of the country-of-origin phenomenon emerged through the analysis, notably the complex of the decolonised, acculturation in situ, frustration towards the West and sensitivity to the Western fashion system.

The main limitation of this research is that the interviews were carried out among people living in the three main cities of Tunisia, which are urban settings.

This research proposes a general framework and a set of new constructs that may be used by leaders of businesses, communications agencies or distribution companies. These elements may help them for segmentation, assortment and range decisions, and brand names.

Given the failure of “buy local” campaigns, this research shows the importance to revive Tunisian consumers’ feeling of identification with their local culture and to reconcile them with their own identity. Suggestions are given to reach these objectives.

This research proposes a framework explaining how the country-of-origin effect in emerging countries operates in a different manner from what has been suggested in the studies conducted in Western contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the motivations and inhibitions linked to the entrepreneurial act in Tunisia, a country belonging to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The findings of such a study help to better understand why new graduates are reluctant to create their own firms in spite of the political efforts made by the government.

A qualitative approach is adopted. It is based on 38 semi-directive in-depth interviews conducted with new graduates in entrepreneurship, some of them being young entrepreneurs, and others who did not go through the entrepreneurial process. On the basis of the data collected, a thematic content analysis has been carried out.

A set of contextual and cultural factors has been highlighted by the analysis. When the context is characterised by poverty, mafia, corruption, or even by a popular revolution or a war in a neighbouring country, these factors may significantly affect new graduates’ decision to create their own firm. Besides, the entrepreneurial decision may be affected by cultural factors: the bureaucratic system, autocracy, and the existence of entrepreneurial milieus such as social class, region, and geographical regions.

The inductive qualitative approach adopted in a research study affects the generalisable character of the results. This study is also geographically limited to the great Tunis area (the capital and its suburbs).

This study has been carried out in a context of an emergent country from the MENA region. This special setting leads to the valorisation of an understudied set of contextual and cultural motivations and inhibitors of entrepreneurship.

This article aims to: conceptualize customer‐service firm attachment; as well as to propose a theoretical framework that provides insights into the formation and development of affectionate ties in customer‐service firm relationships.

Toward these two goals, the authors integrate conclusions from a multidisciplinary literature that covers attachment theory, brand attachment, and place attachment.

The authors formally define customer‐service firm attachment as the emotional bond connecting a customer with a service firm. They offer a conceptual framework that assumes that customer satisfaction, service quality, customer trust towards the service firm and its personnel, customer‐firm image congruence, and positive emotions felt during the service experience are the main drivers of customer‐service firm attachment.

Notwithstanding the fact that this article remains conceptual in spirit, it provides several theoretical and managerial implications.

This article reviews and merges the latest insights from diverse attachment theories and concepts in diverse disciplines (i.e. social psychology, environmental psychology, leisure science, consumer behavior, and marketing). It also presents attachment styles as a new consumer segmenting criteria.

The present research responds to researchers’ calls for more research of consumer animosity on potential boundary conditions (e.g. product categories) and marketing strategies that may mitigate such negative impacts on marketers’ product and/or brand performance, with a special focus on the soft service sector. This paper aims to address the unique characteristics of service internationalization, i.e. cultural embeddedness, hybridized country origins and high consumption visibility, by proposing a social identity signaling model to explain consumer animosity effects in the soft service sector.

Two surveys (Pretest with 240 participants and Study 1 with 351 participants) and one experiment (Study 2 with 731 participants) were conducted to empirically test our hypotheses in the Japanese-Chinese relationship context.

The stronger the national/cultural symbolism and social expressiveness, the stronger the consumer avoidance for the service category. Then the consumer culture positioning strategy that can mitigate an offending country’s cultural symbolism can reduce consumer avoidance.

This research introduces two factors that could affect the negative social identity signaling capacity of service categories in the animosity context: the national/cultural symbolism reflecting an offending country and the social expressiveness communicating social identity. In line with the social identity signaling perspective, the present research specifically uses consumer avoidance as the dependent variable to capture the notion that consumers avoid consuming services because they wish to avoid being associated with an offending country that may threaten their in-group social identities.