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Mobile appstores have fast sprung up during the last few years. The large number of apps in these appstores results in increased search effort for the customer as well as fierce competition leading to poorer revenues for both appstores as well as developers. Therefore, appstores allow developers to resort to bundling apps so as to increase the revenues and improve customer loyalty. Since an app-bundle is a mix of two or more apps, it may induce both positive and negative emotions simultaneously in the consumer. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of app-bundling strategy from consumers’ perspective, and help developers design app-bundles.

Based on ambivalence theories, this research investigate different antecedents and influence of positive attitude and negative attitude on purchase behavior, and derives seven key app-bundles attributes through an exploratory study. The data were collected from 930 consumers of app-bundles in China and analyzed using SEM approach.

The findings indicate that positive attitude and negative attitude are two separate concepts and the identified seven app-bundling attributes have distinct effect on shaping consumers’ positive and negative attitude.

This study makes three key contributions to theory and practice. First, this study identifies the specific attributes of app-bundles using exploratory study. Second, this study addresses the challenges involved in examining bundles using ambivalence theory. In doing so, it characterizes attitude as positive and negative and treats them as separate constructs. Third, as called forth by previous studies, this study establishes the co-existence of positive attitude and negative attitude.

The authors' research examines how negative electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) alters focal customers' post-recovery justice perceptions and attitudes to determine their future behavior with the service provider. Specifically, this paper develops and tests a conceptual model to investigate how negative e-WOM alters focal customers' perceptual and attitudinal outcomes after the service recovery experience. It also examines the post-recovery effect of negative e-WOM on focal customers’ willingness to patronize the service after their recovery experience.

To test the hypotheses, two pretests and two experimental studies with created scenarios in the retail context were conducted.

The authors' findings reveal that services are judged during and well beyond failure and recovery occurrences. To maintain a loyal customer base, service managers should develop processes that address service complaints both within and beyond the service consumption stage. The authors also find that despite a favorable recovery, focal customers gravitate toward the failure experience and develop unfavorable attitudes toward the service provider, leading to likely defections.

The authors' research demonstrates the persuasive power of negative e-WOM at the post-service recovery stage, making a unique contribution to the service recovery literature. This research also contributes to the persuasive effect of negative e-WOM, demonstrating message context as a boundary condition of negative e-WOM effects. In general, the authors' work highlights the importance of understanding the psychological processes involved in eliciting the persuasive influence of negative e-WOM in the post-service recovery stage that may lead to the defection of “so-called” successfully recovered customers.

This study aims to examine the effects of celebrity negative publicity on attitude towards brand, corporation, brand reputation and corporate reputation, both directly and through the moderating effects of social media involvement, brand commitment, identification and attribution (both types). Associative network theory has been used to explain these effects.

A quantitative survey of 550 respondents was carried out in London and surrounding areas. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data.

The findings suggest that celebrity negative publicity affects brand reputation and corporate reputation. Further, the moderating effects of social media involvement and brand commitment on attitude towards brand and corporation, identification on attitude towards brand, attribution types on attitude towards corporation were not found.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to examine the effects of celebrity negative publicity on attitudes towards brand, attitude towards corporation, brand reputation and corporation reputation, directly, and through the moderating effects of attribution (both types), identification, commitment and social media. Findings from this study will minimise the gap in the literature on the topic and will help managers and policymakers to understand the effects of celebrity negative publicity in detail.

This study aims to understand the influence of negative publicity on brand image, brand attitude and brand purchase intention. Specifically, the study examines the role of attribution (or brand blame) and information characteristics in Chinese consumers’ responses to negative publicity.

The study used a quasi-experimental approach involving two negative publicity scenarios (mild and high severity) and a sample of 203 young and educated Chinese consumers. Partial least squares was used to test the hypotheses.

A common assumption is that negative brand information has a negative influence on all aspects of a brand. However, this study finds that brand blame and information severity have differential effects on consumer evaluations of the affected brand. Specifically, brand blame negatively impacted attitudes and purchase intentions, but not brand image. In contrast, information severity negatively impacted brand image, but not attitudes or intentions. Further, the relations between brand image and brand attitudes and intentions depended on the level of information severity. In the mild-severity condition, brand image positively influenced attitudes and intentions, but not in the high-severity condition.

Future research should examine consumer responses to negative publicity across different media and product categories. Cross-cultural studies should also be explored in the future.

When a brand encounters negative publicity, its marketer or brand manager should assess to what extent various brand equity components are influenced by negative publicity before adopting any cognitive-based or imagery-based communication strategies.

This paper contributes to the limited and fragmented literature on consumer response to negative publicity by examining the impact of consumer’s attributions of blame to the brand under conditions of mild and severe negative information on a range of important brand-related outcomes. Specifically, the authors find that negative publicity has a different impact on brand image, brand attitudes and intentions to purchase. The authors suggest that brand managers use this information to guide their marketing communications.

The purpose of this paper is to present paradoxical employee attitudes towards interacting with artificial intelligence (AI).

This is a conceptual paper, which builds on prior research, especially on the widely accepted notion of not-invented-here attitudes in technology adoption.

Many companies experience barriers in implementing AI owing to negative attitudes among their employees. This paper develops the concept of no-human-interaction attitudes, which describe employees’ preference to collaborate with real humans rather than having virtual colleagues. If they perceive a benefit from voluntarily using AI, however, many employees exhibit positive attitudes, leading to the concept of intelligent-automation attitudes. Jointly, these attitudes lead to the paradox that the same persons may have positive or negative attitudes to AI, depending on the particular situation. Firms need to address these attitudes because the interface of human and AI will be a key driver of competitive advantage in the future.

The new concepts of negative and positive employee attitudes contribute to our understanding of firms’ success and problems in implementing AI. Moreover, the paradox of negative and positive attitudes among the same employees helps to reconcile partly diverging findings in extant studies. A thorough understanding of the roots of these employee attitudes, along with several examples, further provides immediate starting points for actively influencing these attitudes in practice.

The purpose of this study is to examine how direct-negative and indirect-negative contact experiences affect students' attitudes toward the police by race and test the mediation effect of social distance on the relationship.

Using the data collected from two US 4-year public universities, this study employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the impacts of the key variables, direct-negative and indirect-negative contact experience, on the students' attitudes toward the police. This study also tests whether indirect negative contact with the police is a stronger factor than direct negative contacts among racial/ethnic minority people.

Results show that both direct-negative and indirect-negative contacts are stronger predictors of the dependent variable. In particular, the indirect-negative contact has significant direct and indirect effects through social distance on the dependent variable in racial minorities. The study also shows that indirect contact more strongly affects racial minorities than direct-negative contact experiences do.

This study is the first sophisticatedly to examine students' negative contact experiences into two variables: direct-negative and indirect-negative contacts with the police.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on the cognitive capacity theory. The paper aims to examine the effects of advertising recipients' positive and negative associations, that is their memories and fantasies evoked by the advertising stimulus, on brand attitude for advertisements that require little effort to process; focusing on positively framed advertisements.

This paper suggests a model on the effects of positive and negative association on brand attitude and tests it using partial least square. Advertisements that are easy to process were selected in a pre‐test.

It is shown that if advertisements are easy to process, the effects of consumers' associations depend on their favourableness: positive associations have a positive effect and negative associations have a negative effect on brand attitude. These findings are an extension of knowledge on the effects of associations, because for informational advertisements previous research has demonstrated that associations generally have a negative effect on brand attitude.

Results of this study suggest that evoking positive memories and fantasies in the target group enhances the effectiveness of advertisements that require little effort to process.

Effects of associations on brand attitude have not been studied for advertisements that require little effort to process. Previous studies have not distinguished positive and negative associations; this study analyses their effects separately.

This paper aims to investigate consumers’ attitudinal and behavioral responses to brand crisis and examine an empirical model to explain consumer’s internal process in the context of negative information about a brand, analyzing the relationships between the brand association types, brand-customer relationship strength and consumers’ responses depending on the types of brand crises.

This study uses an integrative approach based on qualitative and quantitative methods: a focus-group interview and an experiment.

The results indicated that consumers’ responses were more favorable in the corporate ability (CA) crisis than in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) crisis. In addition, consumers with high brand-customer relationship strength and brand associations for CA (CSR) showed more favorable responses to a brand crisis related to CA (CSR) than to that related to CSR (CA).

Managerially, firms should improve their marketing activity to reinforce particular brand association type that strongly related customers mainly have. In addition, firms should carefully find the best timing and channel that strongly related customers usually access, to present corporate corresponding statements in brand crisis and information of their corporate crisis-coping process.

Theoretically, this study will contribute to the literature on brand crises by providing critical insights into the mechanism underlying consumers’ responses to brand crises.

This paper aims to investigate whether the interactional effects of recommendation valence, tie strength and service type produce different effects on attitude and buying intention in a social networking context.

A 2 × 3 × 3 between-subject experiment was carried out, involving 616 participants, and MANOVA was used to test hypotheses.

The interactions of valence by tie strength and valence by service type affect attitude, but not intention. The review valence × tie strength × service type interaction influences both attitude and intention, and its effect on intention is fully mediated by attitude.

Negative recommendations for credence and experiential services communicated by individuals with no-tie relationships have a strong negative effect on attitude. However, positive recommendations from strong and weak ties for search and experience services are more influential than recommendations from no ties for credence services.

The results are explained by using cue sufficiency theory, which suggests that a single extreme cue serves as a defining feature.

This study aims to investigate if different types of negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) have various negative effects on the attitude of the consumer toward a product (Laptop) and whether this newfound attitude remains unaffected by the subsequent influence of positive eWOM.

A quantitative study in Germany was conducted. In the two-part experimental setting, first, a factorial repeated-measures between-subjects design was used in which the types of negative eWOM have been manipulated. The second part is characterized by a mixed between–within subjects design to test the durability of attitudinal changes.

The results demonstrate that destructive and ethical eWOM only provoke a small decline in consumer attitude compared to functional product criticism. Furthermore, the examination shows that renewed positive eWOM can improve the attitude, whereas ethical criticism is the most difficult to correct.

The study views negative eWOM differentiated. Researchers could adopt this approach by analyzing online communication more precisely. Ambivalent relationships between negative eWOM and their outcomes can be explained.

The findings lessen the fear of permanent loss of brand reputation caused by negative reviews. The harmful effects on the attitude can be compensated through targeted marketing management actions. The study shows which content companies need to focus on.

Previous literature has predominantly overlooked the complex nature of negative eWOM. Therefore, the study provides first empirical results about the divergent effect of different content types of negative eWOM on consumer attitude toward a product. Additionally, the durability of consumer negativity could be measured over time.