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The study aims to explore the digital fashion trend within the Metaverse, characterized by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), across Twitter networks. Integrating theories of diffusion of innovation, two-step flow of communication and self-efficacy, the authors aimed to uncover the diffusion structure and the influencer's social roles undertaken by social entities in fostering communication and collaboration for the advancement of Metaverse fashion.

Social network analysis examined the critical graph metrics to profile, visualize, and cluster the unstructured network data. The authors used the NodeXL program to analyze two hashtag keyword networks, “#metaverse fashion” and “#metawear,” using Twitter API data. Cluster, semantic, and time series analyses were performed to visualize the contents and contexts of communication and collaboration in the diffusion of Metaverse fashion.

The results unraveled the “broadcast network” structure and the influencers' social roles of opinion leaders and market mavens within Twitter's “#metaverse fashion” diffusion. The roles of innovators and early adopters among influencers were comparable in collaborating within the competition venues, promoting awareness and participation in digital fashion diffusion during specific “fad” periods, particularly when digital fashion NFTs and cryptocurrencies became intertwined with the competition in the Metaverse.

The study contributed to theory building by integrating three theories, emphasizing effective communication and collaboration among influencers, organizations, and competition venues in broadcasting digital fashion within shared networks. The validation of multi-faceted Social Network Analysis was crucial for timely insights, highlighting the critical digital fashion equity in capturing consumers' attention and driving engagement and ownership of Metaverse fashion.

Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms.

The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings.

This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts.

This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors.

The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research.

Influencer marketing mediated by social media is prevalent in social commerce. Micro-, meso- and macro-influencers all play an irreplaceable role in marketing. The purpose of this paper is to explore how companies with limited budgets choose influencers according to products' various levels of brand familiarity.

This study constructs an evolutionary game model of influencer marketing based on evolutionary game theory on complex networks. This model initiates various networks to demonstrate how influencers disseminate information and constructs update mechanisms to depict how individuals react to this information based on individuals' information utility and friends' strategies.

Simulation results suggest that companies should invest more in macro-influencers than in meso-influencers, however investing all in macro-influencers is not a good choice. The investment in meso-influencers will increase as brand familiarity decreases, whereas it will not exceed investment in macro-influencers. Furthermore, the accumulation of micro-influencers can accelerate the marketing process.

This study examines the combined effects of micro-influencers, meso-influencers and macro-influencers in marketing by simulating the marketing process initiated by influencers on social media.

This study aimed to identify distinctive characteristics of hotel guests and understand their perception of guestroom technologies (GRTs) in hotels by utilizing the theory of consumer innovativeness and the social influence theory.

The data were collected from 268 hotel guests. The K-means clustering algorithm was employed to identify participants based on their views on the significance of technologies provided in guest rooms. A multivariate analysis of variance was applied to investigate if there were significant differences among clusters regarding social influence on hotel bookings, technology innovativeness and technology expertise and knowledge.

Two clusters were identified: technology compassionates and casual users of technology. Findings revealed that technology compassionates are more influenced by their friends when booking a hotel compared to casual users of technology. The ability to link up multiple wireless mobile devices, accessible outlets and mobile websites were the most critical GRTs for technology compassionates.

Technology should be considered a crucial part of the hotel guest experience. Hoteliers ought to continue investing in smart technologies to improve their guests' experiences. GRTs can reduce overhead staff costs while giving guests more control over their stay by utilizing everyday items like smartphones and offering them more power over their lodging experience.

This study advances the existing literature on GRTs by identifying which GRTs produce the most customer satisfaction. Moreover, this study explores the impact of social influence, innovativeness as a personality trait and having expert knowledge of technologies on preferences for GRTs.

Generation Z (Gen-Z), sometimes known as “digital natives”, represents the first generation to become immersed in digital communication. In a multicultural environment, this study aims to explore which types of factors are most beneficial in connection with Gen-Z’s impulsive purchase behaviour.

This study adopts an exploratory sequential mixed-method design, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative approaches. In Study 1, focus group discussions are conducted to address “why” and “how” questions, whereas Study 2 uses a quantitative method to test the hypothetical model. The model is assessed using structural equation modelling. This study used the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework in the context of Instagram.

Building on Mehrabian and Russell’s (1974) concept and focus group discussions, Study 1 introduces a novel SOR model tailored to Instagram. In Study 2, the model is tested, and results confirm most hypotheses, except for three. Factors such as aesthetic appeal, scarcity promotions and discounted prices stimulate impulse buying behaviour in Gen-Z. Positive emotional responses evoked by these factors also influence impulse buying, whereas the impact of negative emotional responses is found to be insignificant.

This mixed-methods study enhances the theoretical understanding of Gen-Zers’ impulse buying behaviour by highlighting the influence of diverse independent variables. By using the SOR framework, it reveals the intricate emotional aspects impacting impulsive purchase decisions. The research provides new insights into online impulsive buying behaviour, particularly relevant to consumer psychology and behavioural economics among young collectivist consumers.

Blogs are websites that contain posts about a wide range of topics, often written by fashion enthusiasts referred to as bloggers. With the increasing prevalence and popularity of digital media and social media, fashion bloggers help to attract business and influence and engage various stakeholders, especially customers. The present exploratory study provided valuable insights regarding fashion consumption, preference, and buying behavior of young women consumers of metropolitan cities of India like Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Pune, and Mumbai. The study was conducted under the domain of exploratory study. Snowball and Purposive random sampling techniques were employed to identify and reach respondents of both categories – women consumers and bloggers. A conscious attempt was made to include women from different demographics such as age, marital status, income, area of residence, employment status, etc. Primary data were collected with the help of questionnaires. The findings of the research revealed bloggers through their blogs are the new trendsetters and influence fashion adoption, especially by the young social media savvy consumers. Their blogs impact public perceptions of fashion and sometimes are precursors of new fashion trends. The findings of the study interestingly brought forth the fact that millennial women buying decision is significantly influenced by fashion blogs for the purchase of clothing and accessories. The findings also clearly indicated that blogs significantly influenced respondents’ attitude toward the purchase of branded merchandise. Fashion bloggers besides providing information and inspiration to the blog readers, also at times assist and/or give consultation to their followers.

In the present era, the achievement of employee Islamic performance has become a significant challenge for organizations. The purpose of the study is to examine the effect of Islamic leadership on employee Islamic performance directly and indirectly by bridging the connections between employees’ Islamic organizational values, Islamic organizational culture, and Islamic work motivation among the employees of Egyptian banks.

The authors used quantitative methods in this study and based its findings on the data received from 312 respondents in response to a questionnaire.

By using SmartPLS 4, this study’s findings demonstrate that Islamic leadership has a positive and significant effect on Islamic organizational values, culture, employee Islamic performance and work motivation. While Islamic organizational values and Islamic organizational culture do not significantly impact employee Islamic performance, Islamic work motivation is a significant predictor of employee Islamic performance. On the one hand, Islamic organizational values and Islamic organizational culture do not mediate the relationship between Islamic leadership and employee Islamic performance. On the other hand, Islamic work motivation is a mediating variable that significantly develops the relationship between Islamic leadership and employee Islamic performance.

The study’s findings support policymakers and human resource management practitioners to develop plans and strategies which enhance the Islamic performance of organizations’ employees. In addition, this study’s findings provide insights for researchers and academicians in developing Islamic leadership within their organizations so that they operate by Islamic values and codes.

Finally, by offering an integrated model of Islamic leadership, Islamic organizational values, Islamic organizational culture and employee Islamic performance, this study’s findings fill the gaps in the context of bank employees in a developing country, namely, Egypt.

This study examines opinion leadership's personal and social characteristics to see which one is more effective in opinion leadership in four different industries: fashion, travel and tourism, wellness and book and literature. The specific subject of this investigation is how largely openness, exhibitionism and competence in interpersonal relationships and status and attitude homophily affect the opinion leadership and the decision-making of opinion leaders' followers.

The proposed model was tested with the questionnaire shared via stories featured on Instagram among followers of four micro-influencers in different industries. For the purpose of testing the offered hypotheses of this study, the partial least squares method was used.

The findings show that openness, exhibitionism and competence in interpersonal relationships have a substantial effect on opinion leadership. It was also evident that status and attitude homophily impact opinion leadership. The model supports the effect of both personal and social characteristics on opinion leadership; however, based on the results, the effect of personal characteristics on opinion leadership is more remarkable, both in a direct relationship and through the mediating role of para-social interaction.

This study is novel in categorizing opinion leaders' attributes in two different extents of personal and social characteristics. The authors defined a model of the effectiveness of each personal and social characteristic on opinion leaders. The model investigates whether the personal or social characteristics have the most effect on opinion leadership, particularly with the mediating role of para-social interaction.

Building on social media and destination brand-related literature, this study aims to explore World Heritage Sites’ (WHSs) brand diffusion and formation process from long-term and short-term perspectives, which includes brand diffusion, user-generated content (UGC), opinion leaders and brand events’ impact.

This study uses a mixed-method including text mining, keyword analysis and social network analysis to explore the brand formation process of four popular WHSs in Beijing, namely, the Palace Museum, Great Wall, Summer Palace and Temple of Heaven and more than 10,000,000 users’ data on Sina Weibo has been implemented to uncover the underlying social media branding mechanism.

The results show that the number of postings keeps in a stable range in most months, but, in general, there are no common rules for changing trends among the four WHSs; long-term high-frequency keywords related to history and culture account for a higher percentage; different kinds of accounts have varying impacts on information diffusion, in which media accounts lead to a bigger influence. However, more followers do not necessarily mean more interactions and most of the interaction ratio is much lower than 0.01000; brand events facilitate brand dissemination and have an impact on the creation of UGC.

This study is valuable for destination marketers to deeper understand brand diffusion and formation and provides valuable insights for developing effective destination marketing strategies.

Unlike previous studies that only concern a few parts of destination brand formation via social media (e.g. brand diffusion, brand events or opinion leaders’ impact), this study takes a more comprehensive perspective by systematically analyzing the brand formation process of WHSs on social media. By considering both long-term diffusion and short-term representative events, this study provides a more holistic understanding of the branding mechanism.

This study aims to investigate the factors influencing team innovation from the perspective of strategic leaders. The study draws from the leader–member exchange (LMX) theory to propose that the quality of exchange the leaders perceive with the team members may provide a useful cue to identify the key elements and processes that may help drive team innovation.

A qualitative study using a hybrid approach was used, and a thematic analysis was performed. The data were based on 25 interviews collected from strategic leaders using the long interview technique.

The findings revealed themes and factors influencing innovation orientation among leaders and team members. Five themes were identified, namely modeling leadership behavior, autonomy and psychological safety for teams, organizational structure and technology, innovation and the decision-making process and innovation during times of uncertainty.

Because of the purposefully chosen sample of only leaders who were involved in the innovation process, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to corroborate the finding using a sample of teams involved in the innovation process.

A conceptual model is proposed with guidance for implementing innovation decisions and strategies in practice.

While the strategic leadership and team innovation literature emphasizes the interaction between leaders and team members, research on how these interactions unfold is still nascent. This paper fulfills these needs from a strategic leader’s perspective.