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Obesity is today’s most neglected, yet blatantly visible, public health problem. This study aims to examine the role of social media and goal-directed behavior in motivating healthy lifestyle intentions for customers experiencing obesity. It investigates the distinct roles of self-conscious emotions (shame and pride) and weight-transformational posts shared by others on social media as moderators of these relationships.

The conceptual model uses the goal-directed behavior theory and social comparison theory, tested using data collected from 804 obese customers in Fiji through an experimental design.

Weight-loss transformation posts by others on social media, elicit distinct emotions for obese customers. Obese customers who felt guilt and shame due to shared weight-loss transformation posts showed a stronger association between goal disclosure and healthy lifestyle intention. In addition, the association between goal disclosure and healthy lifestyle intention is conditionally mediated by goal commitment, specifically for those obese customers that elicited guilt over shame due to shared weight-loss transformation posts by others on social media.

Despite the adoption of an experimental design using a fictional stimulus being a commonly used method in marketing studies, external validity issues are likely. Also, this study examines obese customer behavior relating to Facebook. In addition, data collection for this study has been done from a single country perspective. Therefore, caution needs to be exercised when generalizing the findings of this study.

The findings assist businesses and marketers in the health and fitness industry to better leverage social media and goal-directed behavior and understand the emotions of obese customers to undertake data-driven precision marketing strategies.

The findings provide novel insights into goal disclosure and commitment, electronic word-of-mouth on social media platforms, self-conscious emotions and healthy lifestyle intentions for customers experiencing obesity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate if accessible luxury fashion brands discriminate overweight and obese consumers.

The physical sizes of garments are surveyed in-store and compared to the body sizes of the population. A gap analysis is carried out in order to determine whether the supply of clothes match the demand of each market segment.

The surveyed accessible luxury garments come in very small sizes compared to the individuals that make up the population.

The survey is limited to London stores but the garment sizes are compared to the British population. It is therefore possible that the discrepancies between assortments and the population are in part attributable to geographic and demographic factors. The study’s results are, however, so strikingly clear that even if some of the effects were due to extraneous variables, it would be hard to disregard the poor match between overweight and obese women and the clothes offered to them.

For symbolic/expressive brands that are conspicuously consumed, that narrowly target distinct and homogenous groups of people in industries where elitist practices are acceptable, companies can build brands via customer rejection.

The results highlight ongoing discrimination of overweight and obese fashion consumers.

The study is the first to provide quantitative evidence for brand building via customer rejection, and it delineates under which conditions this may occur. This extends the theory of typical user imagery.

The thin feminine body ideal in Western society has persisted, despite becoming less representative of the female population, with obesity rates consistently rising since the 1980s. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated obesity rates, due to curtailed interventions, restricted mobility/enforced physical inactivity and increased reliance on processed food with a longer shelf life due to social isolation (World Obesity Foundation, n.d.). Individuals with obesity report weight discrimination in a broad range of settings, including employment, where researchers have documented weight discrimination in relation to hiring, job assignment, promotion, remuneration and work stability. Weight discrimination may be worse for jobs involving public interaction, particularly for women, because heavier women do not conform to societal body ideals, leading to weight stigmatisation such as anti-fat attitudes and beliefs (e.g. negative stereotypes) and prejudice. This chapter presents a systematic literature review of studies that have examined weight discrimination against women with obesity in jobs involving public interaction, i.e. ‘customer-facing roles’.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate students' attitudes towards people of different weights by comparing and contrasting student stereotypes of thin, average, moderately obese and morbidly obese weight individuals, and identify existing prejudices toward the obese and morbidly obese with regards to fashion, style and garment selection. Respondents included 304 college students at a southern university in the USA. Eighty‐seven per cent of the students described their weight as being normal, 10 per cent identified themselves as obese or morbidly obese, and 3 per cent indicated being excessively thin. Results indicated that participants would prefer to seek fashion advice from an average‐weight, as opposed to overweight, person. Ninety‐three per cent of the sample indicated that a thin or average‐weight individual would be more likely to follow fashion as opposed to an obese or morbidly obese person. Thin or average‐weight individuals were perceived to be more flamboyant, having more fashion choices, being more confident with their apparel choices and more willing to pay a high price for their clothing, having an easier time acquiring clothing that fit well, being more able to obtain and desire high‐quality clothing, and also presenting the best overall appearance in their clothing as compared to overweight individuals. The sum or ranking means for the fashion variables of the sample were as follows: thin 24.1, normal 24.4, obese 37.7 and morbidly obese 47.6. (p <0.001).

This study aims to critically review the research on the phenomenon of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services to identify the key thematic areas, scenarios, antecedents and consequences; to provide theoretical propositions for future research; and to propose practical strategies to reduce discrimination and to improve equality in the field.

This paper adopts the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses guidelines to collect relevant academic work on discrimination in hospitality and tourism services from 1985 to 2020 and critically reviews and analyses the studies through bibliometric analysis, content analysis and critical analysis.

The findings show that the main sources of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services include sexism, racism, ethnocentrism, lookism and ego-altruism. Discrimination-related research has temporal and geographical variations. A research map is proposed to present existing knowledge of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services, which indicates that while the impacts (at the individual, organizational and institutional levels) of discrimination in hospitality and tourism services have been thoroughly researched, the nature and characteristics of the phenomenon remain context-based and poorly conceptualized.

An anti-discrimination guideline for hospitality and tourism practitioners is designed to cope with and eliminate discriminatory situations. This evidence-based guideline provides useful coping strategies based on the prevent–monitor–manage principle.

This paper is comprehensive in its scope, methodology and wide coverage of discrimination-related research in hospitality and tourism services. It is the first attempt to review this phenomenon in the existing literature and identifies the research gaps and future research agendas.

Discusses the findings of a study in which 309 service encounters between customers and customer‐contact personnel in service businesses and retail stores were unobtrusively observed, to measure the occurrence of selected service behaviors (i.e. mostly interpersonal behaviors such as smiling, thanking customer, establishing eye contact, etc.), and to investigate possible behavioral biases. On average, only 72 percent of the measured behaviors were observed in each service encounter. Employees’ behaviors were generally less likely to be observed when served customers were male, young, caucasian, or casually dressed. The propensity of frontline workers to systematically discriminate against some types of customers on bases that have little or nothing to do with customers’ service requirements represents a downside of employee discretion dubbed as “empowerment by default”.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) ushered in an era of puzzling, sometimes confounding regulations for retailers. While the mandated changes were welcomed by disability advocate groups and by consumers at large, retailers have been uneven in their implementation and enactment of the ADA’s actual requirements. The present research reports on a study in which a cross‐section of retailers were interviewed concerning their understanding and their actions following the ADA’s implementation. The study examined anticipated differences among retail awareness of and compliance with the ADA at the local versus the regional or national levels. It was expected and found that national and regional chains have a corporate policy enforced by local management, while locally‐owned retailers interpret and develop their own reactions to the ADA. The level of formality, level of accommodation, and amount of investment differ by available resources of each retailer and the ability to effectively manipulate shopping access. Our findings suggest that retailers can choose to implement low‐cost, high impact accommodations which involve simple readjustments of their existing policies. A critical look at problems and solutions suggests that a no‐surprise, high‐respect environment can be achieved with minimal expense to retailers.

This paper aims to identify the influence of dimensions of movie theater service on customer behavior intention, comparing linear and nonlinear methods.

With a sample of 345 cinema customers, the analysis compares penalty–reward contrast analysis (PRCA) and multiple linear regression analysis (MLR).

This research demonstrates that PRCA brings a better identification of the antecedents of customer behavior intention than MLR, showing that a nonlinear analysis can bring superior decision information to movie theater managers. Also, this study shows that superior performance of aspects related to the client's feelings leads the consumer to a tendency to return and recommend the cinema (behavior intention). This study also confirms that successful recovery actions can compensate for failures.

Although the nonlinear antecedents of customer satisfaction have been studied in the scientific literature, there is a gap of studies applying methods to identify nonlinear antecedents of customer behavior intention (tendency to return and recommend), particularly in the industry of movie theater services. The findings of this research may allow movie theaters to improve the service provided, confronting the great challenges of online movie-watching alternatives.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and validate the first instrument to measure the source of customers’ stigmatization of employees with hepatitis C virus (HCV) in Egypt.

The development and validation processes unfolded as follows: an item pool was generated from focus groups and previous studies on stigma; the initial instrument was evaluated by three experts and pilot-tested; the instrument was used to collect data from 500 Egyptian consumers to determine its dimensionality; to test this structure, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on a new sample of 300 Egyptian consumers.

Exploratory factor analysis showed that the instrument captures three factors: devaluation, avoidance and pity. Results confirmed that customers’ stigmatization of employees with HCV is a multidimensional construct that is manifested in these three dimensions.

Despite the importance of disease stigma, management scholars have not given it sufficient attention. This paper offers new insights into the study of a particular type of workplace discrimination and ways of measuring it.