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This study explores the link between additional reviews, credibility, and consumers’ online purchasing behavior.

We employ a 2 × 2 between-subjects design to measure subjects’ purchasing behavior with versus without additional reviews and with important versus non-important attributes. A total of 529 valid questionnaires are collected from university students across 30 Chinese provinces.

The addition of negative reviews to a positive initial review enhances consumers’ perceived credibility of the reviewer and the overall review content. This effect is positively moderated by the attribute importance in additional reviews. Moreover, we find that as the time interval increases, consumers’ perceived credibility gradually increases but eventually decreases after reaching a certain threshold. In addition, the attribute importance in additional reviews negatively moderates the impact of perceived credibility on consumer purchasing behavior.

Existing studies on first and subsequent reviews mainly focus on the difference in perceived usefulness between the two. They do not examine how additional reviews affect potential customers’ perceived credibility and their purchase decision-making. This study bridges the gap between the word-of-mouth literature and marketing practices.

The article investigates different types of strategies for managing user-generated content (UGC) and provides some insights into their implications.

A unique sample of Italian hotels with current and prospective customers in the digital environment is investigated. A taxonomy of user-provider interactions mediated by UGC is developed. A mixed approach was designed to meet the study aims. Firstly, an exploratory factor analysis was performed in order to illuminate different strategies of UGC and electronic word-of-mouth (E-WOM) management. Secondly, a cluster analysis was implemented in order to explain hoteliers' behavior toward users' contents.

The study results suggested the existence of three clusters, which reflected three different types of interactions between hotels and customers in the digital domain. Interestingly, most of Italian hotels were found to adopt a reductionist approach to UGC and E-WOM management, turning out to be ineffective to exploit them for the purpose of quality improvement and hospitality service excellence.

Hotels were found to be largely unaware of the importance of UGC and web-based communication with customers to improve their digital business strategy. Tailored management approaches are needed to realize the full potential of hotels' online content responsiveness for the purpose of value co-creation and service co-production.

This is one of the first studies investigating the strategic and management perspectives embraced by hotels to handle their interactions with customers in the digital arena.

Although trade volumes in e-retailing have increased significantly in recent years, logistics service failures are inevitable, especially at the delivery stage. Therefore, it is essential to provide customers with effective recovery strategies to increase their satisfaction and repurchase intentions. There is a lack of empirical evidence on whether the response time or the discount offered in compensation is more crucial for customers. Therefore, this study aims to determine whether the response time or the discount offered for high and low criticality failures has a greater impact on customer satisfaction levels and repurchase intentions for female and male customers.

A scenario-based experimental design method has been adopted to collect data, and 697 participants aged 18 and 58 years have been reached. The research utilized a between-subjects design, incorporating three factors: gender (female vs male), criticality (high vs low) and compensation (7 days: 10% discount, 10 days: 20% discount and 14 days: 30% discount). Six scenarios depicting the failure of an online retailer were created, and factorial univariate ANOVA was conducted to test the hypotheses.

The study's results show that in terms of customer satisfaction, female customers attach more importance to the response time in the case of high criticality and the amount of discount offered in the case of low criticality. On the other hand, male customers give more importance to the response time in terms of customer satisfaction when they experience a high or low criticality failure. In the case of low criticality, response time is more important for male customers to increase their repurchase intentions, while the amount of the discount is more important for female customers.

The study demonstrates the relative importance of the response time and discount amount according to the criticality level of failures and to guide business managers in terms of the recovery strategies they will implement. It focuses on gender differences and determine whether the response time or discount amount is more important for male and female customers in high or low-criticality situations.

This study aims to integrate and extend leading contemporary underpinning frameworks such as the Stimulus Organism Response (S-O-R) model, Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to assess the determinants of M-commerce usage during COVID-19 times. Besides direct effects, the study examines the mediating role of behavioral intention in affecting the relationship between a few external stimuli, internal states (of the organism) and M-commerce usage (the response). The study has also examined the moderating role of habitual behavior in the relationship between behavioral intention and M-commerce usage.

Data were gathered from 312 customers through an online survey using a structured questionnaire. PLS-based SEM, using Smart PLS 4.0, was employed to calibrate the measurement and structural models.

The study found that stimuli like social influence, perceived ease of use and perceived value substantially affected M-commerce usage. Behavioral intention has been found to mediate these cause-and-effect relationships partially or fully among the subject constructs. Additionally, a significant negative but weak moderating impact of habit (or habitual behavior) on the relationship between behavioral intentions and M-commerce usage has been corroborated.

Several studies have investigated the factors influencing the adoption and continued usage of M-commerce services while appealing to diverse theoretical frameworks. However, more research has yet to be expended to arrive at an integrated explanation grounded in these theoretical frameworks to examine the dynamics of M-commerce usage in tempestuous times like the COVID-19 outbreak. The most significant (counterintuitive) findings have been suppressing the effects of otherwise crucial elements like perceived security and habit in prompting M-commerce usage in the face of the socio-psychological pressures stemming from COVID-19 restrictions and consumers' lack of digital readiness. The study's outcomes offer several theoretical and practical implications for researchers, managers, practitioners, businesses and policymakers to develop effective strategies to mature M-commerce usage among the masses, especially during unusual times like COVID-19.

While the proliferation of chatbots allows companies to connect with their customers in a cost- and time-efficient manner, it is not deniable that they quite often fail expectations and may even pose negative impacts on user experience. The purpose of the study is to empirically explore the negative user experience with chatbots and understand how users respond to service failure caused by chatbots.

This study adopts a qualitative research method and conducts thematic analysis of 23 interview transcripts.

It identifies common areas where chatbots fail user expectations and cause service failure. These include their inability to comprehend and provide information, over-enquiry of personal or sensitive information, fake humanity, poor integration with human agents, and their inability to solve complicated user queries. Negative emotions such as anger, frustration, betrayal and passive defeat were experienced by participants when they interacted with chatbots. We also reveal four coping strategies users employ following a chatbots-induced failure: expressive support seeking, active coping, acceptance and withdrawal.

Our study extends our current understanding of human-chatbot interactions and provides significant managerial implications. It highlights the importance for organizations to re-consider the role of their chatbots in user interactions and balance the use of human and chatbots in the service context, particularly in customer service interactions that involve resolving complex issues or handling non-routinized tasks.

This paper aims to explore the effectiveness of customer inoculation strategies in the context of AI service failures in the hospitality and tourism industries. Furthermore, it examines how these strategies can enhance customer complaint behavior and satisfaction with service recovery, thereby improving the overall service experience.

Four distinct studies were conducted: Study 1 investigated the influence of customer inoculation on complaint behavior post-AI service failure. Study 2 assessed the impact of service remedies on customer satisfaction. Study 3 explored the implications of initial purchase and usage intentions. Finally, Study 4 validated the findings using a large-scale online survey.

The results indicated that customer inoculation significantly increases customer complaint behavior and satisfaction with service remedies following AI service failures. They also showed that this relationship is mediated by psychological distance. Furthermore, customer inoculation positively affects initial purchase and usage intentions, demonstrating effectiveness at various customer engagement stages.

This study enriches the literature on AI hospitality service failure and recovery by introducing the novel concept of customer inoculation. Additionally, it significantly contributes to the inoculation theory literature, which covers diverse fields. Practically, this study proposes an efficient and low-cost strategy for marketers.

This study introduces the concept of customer inoculation in the context of AI service failures, a novel approach in the hospitality and tourism literature. It provides empirical evidence of the efficacy of the strategy, bridging a crucial gap in understanding customer behavior in the face of technological disruptions.

Engaging in webcare, i.e. responding to online reviews, can positively affect consumer attitudes, intentions and behavior. Research is often scarce or inconsistent regarding the effects of specific webcare strategies on business performance. Therefore, this study tests whether and how several webcare strategies affect hotel bookings.

We apply machine learning classifiers to secondary data (webcare messages) to classify webcare variables to be included in a regression analysis looking at the effect of these strategies on hotel bookings while controlling for possible confounds such as seasonality and hotel-specific effects.

The strategies that have a positive effect on bookings are directing reviewers to a private channel, being defensive, offering compensation and having managers sign the response. Webcare strategies to be avoided are apologies, merely asking for more information, inviting customers for another visit and adding informal non-verbal cues. Strategies that do not appear to affect future bookings are expressing gratitude, personalizing and having staff members (rather than managers) sign webcare.

These findings help managers optimize their webcare strategy for better business results and develop automated webcare.

We look into several commonly used and studied webcare strategies that affect actual business outcomes, being that most previous research studies are experimental or look into a very limited set of strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the development of social media marketing strategy in an international context. We specifically look at the potential drivers and barriers throughout the social media marketing strategy development process and how cultural differences shape social media marketing strategy decision-making among firms in international markets.

The study is conducted with an inductive research approach involving in-depth interviews with 32 firms from Finland, China and Brazil. Using inductive data analysis, we identify both internal and external factors that drive and hinder the development of firms’ social media marketing strategies. Moreover, we explore the essential elements in social media marketing strategy development based on the key practices observed among these firms, which enables us to conduct a comparative analysis of how cultural values influence the development of social media marketing strategies.

Our findings underscore the importance of both internal (i.e. resources and capabilities) and external (i.e. market-level and country-level) factors that influence the development of social media marketing strategy. Our analysis also unveiled four key practices throughout the social media marketing strategy development process: social selling, content marketing, risk management and relationship management. Additionally, we identified three distinct mindsets regarding firms’ social media selling objectives across companies in the three countries.

The comparative approach provides novel insight into firms' international social media marketing strategy. Our proposed conceptual model shows the development process of social media marketing strategy in the international context. The research propositions highlight the role of cultural values and open up new avenues for future research.

This paper aims to analyse the determinants of the intention to share a post about an environmental issue posted by a tourism destination on Facebook. The authors use the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) model as a theoretical framework and consider cognitive variables (destination social responsibility, tourist social responsibility and three types of congruence) as antecedents of emotions and of the tourists’ response (intention to share). Specific factors related to the social platform (attachment and active use of social media) are also included.

The model was tested for two destinations with different positioning (green tourism versus sun and beach). For the sampling strategy, the authors conducted an online poll targeting Facebook users who had undertaken at least one trip in the previous year. The sample consisted of 1,001 individuals.

The empirical evidence obtained indicates that consumer–cause congruence is the most important variable for explaining the intention to share the post for both destinations, with the destination–cause congruence being non-significant. The authors also observed that active participation on the social network stimulated the intention to share this specific content.

Unlike prior research, this paper examined consumer motivators for engaging with online corporate social responsibility content for tourism destinations, specifically focusing on destination social responsibility in sustainable tourism. The model also incorporates three types of congruence, revealing variations in their impact on explaining the intention to share sustainability-related posts.

The purpose of this study is to identify the structural determinants of e-returns service interactions, examine their impact on online shoppers' loyalty and propose returns service interventions from an interactive marketing perspective to facilitate consumer interaction and repeat purchase intentions with e-retailers.

This study empirically tests the research hypotheses based on cross-sectional survey data collected from Chinese online consumers who experienced interactions during the product returns process.

E-return service interaction includes three determinants: access support, friendly interaction and communication support. These interactions positively impact ease of return, returns satisfaction and customer loyalty. Returns satisfaction is a key mediator in the relationship between return service interaction and loyalty. Access support and friendly interaction have both direct and indirect effects on loyalty, while communication support has only an indirect effect.

This study contributes to understanding e-returns service interaction by analyzing its structural determinants, providing a robust scale foundation and analytical framework for future empirical research. Additionally, this study explores the driving role of e-returns service interaction in forming e-customer loyalty, offering a theoretical basis for the service recovery function of e-returns service interaction. It enriches the application of service recovery theory and relationship marketing theory in the field of interactive marketing.