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The purpose of this paper is to present the first known empirically‐tested model of Employee Based Brand Equity (EBBE). In doing so, it seeks to provide insight into how organisations can not only effectively manage the internal brand building‐process but also, more importantly, appreciate the subsequent employee effects and organisational benefits.

Data were collected via an online survey of 371 employees who work in service organisations, sourced from a market research database list.

Strong support was found for nine out of the ten hypothesised relationships, thus providing strong validation for the proposed model.

The employment of surveys can present data collection problems stemming from such things as lack of willingness to participate on behalf of the respondent, loss of validity when using structured questionnaires, and inherent challenges of wording questions properly. However, in acknowledging these limitations, actions, such as the utilisation of a national database of “opt in” survey participants coupled with the good reliability results and the methodical four‐stage survey design process undertaken, it is suggested that every effort was made to negate the limitations.

Knowledge is gained from empirically validating a model of EBBE: it further enriches the application of traditional brand management techniques; provides a framework for brand communication training; increases organisational understanding of how to engender positive employee actions; and increases the accountability of such an internal investment by identifying measurable organisational benefits that accrue as a result of such efforts.

The paper makes three important contributions: expanding the existing brand equity literature to incorporate a third yet equally relevant perspective, that being the employee; the adoption of a multi‐disciplined approach to addressing a marketing issue and, in doing so, extending beyond the connectionist cognitive psychology view of brand equity to incorporate a contextual/organisation cultural element; and reflecting the perceptions of employees, who are currently under‐represented in the internal brand management literature.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the continued viability of the European Union emissions trading scheme (EU ETS) as a tool for climate control in the face of continued criticisms.

This evaluative study makes use of connected existing studies and other secondary data from economics, management, politics and law.

The study found that though there were various flaws in the scheme in its initial launching phase, the insights gained are being applied in the second and subsequent phase of the EU ETS. It is also ascertained that despite initial doubts, a market for carbon finance is successfully established in the EU albeit with various limitations. The scheme is also poised to link with other regional schemes to address climate control.

Though the study relied primarily on secondary data, the findings were sufficiently triangulated with perspectives from economics, politics, management and law. The findings would also provide useful and relevant information to those engage in the theory and practice of carbon finance.

This paper updates on the legal and economic significance of the EU ETS as a market mechanism to address climate change.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that text message mobile coupons are marketing communications that are becoming more service‐like in nature. As such, mobile coupons will benefit from firm‐generated service customization strategies.

An experiment compared a mobile coupon with a customized versus non‐customized delivery time. A sample of 244 undergraduate students from a large southeastern US university completed an online questionnaire. The between‐subject design randomly assigned participants to the custom or non‐custom condition. Results were assessed with MANCOVA.

Customizing the delivery time of a mobile coupon improved attitude toward and intention to use the coupon, as well as attitude toward and purchase intent with the firm.

The paper focuses on only one mobile coupon campaign in one product category, while measuring attitudes and intentions, not actual purchase behavior. The sample is also limited by having student participants. Future research should examine these limitations.

The paper provides practitioners with an alternative view of mobile coupons. Whereas traditional paper coupons are mass marketing communications, mobile coupons should be viewed similar to an important service to consumers. Allowing consumers to customize these communications, similar to how consumers customize important service offerings, will enhance the coupon and image of the firm.

This study is the first to suggest that mobile coupons be guided by services marketing theory. This is also the first study to suggest and empirically assess the customization of marketing communications as a firm‐generated strategy designed to enhance mobile coupons. Customization in this context is a co‐production activity.

The purpose of this paper is to draw together in one place knowledge that is relevant to the possible role of RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) in contractor monitoring. The paper uses multiple case studies and internet survey methods to explore several issues in RFIDenabled monitoring of contractors. It also offers some conceptual frameworks to help decision makers think through ways RFID might emerge as a contractor monitoring technology as well as some of the key reasons for using this mechanism of monitoring. The paper concludes with research challenges and key issues for practitioners.

This study aims to explore the perception of algorithm accuracy among data professionals in higher education.

Social justice theory guided the qualitative descriptive study and emphasized four principles: access, participation, equity and human rights. Data collection included eight online open-ended questionnaires and six semi-structured interviews. Participants included higher education professionals who have worked with predictive algorithm (PA) recommendations programmed with student data.

Participants are aware of systemic and racial bias in their PA inputs and outputs and acknowledge their responsibility to ethically use PA recommendations with students in historically underrepresented groups (HUGs). For some participants, examining these topics through the lens of social justice was a new experience, which caused them to look at PAs in new ways.

Small sample size is a limitation of the study. Implications for practice include increased stakeholder training, creating an ethical data strategy that protects students, incorporating adverse childhood experiences data with algorithm recommendations, and applying a modified critical race theory framework to algorithm outputs.

The study explored the perception of algorithm accuracy among data professionals in higher education. Examining this topic through a social justice lens contributes to limited research in the field. It also presents implications for addressing racial bias when using PAs with students in HUGs.

This paper aims to propose an information privacy culture index framework (IPCIF) with a validated information privacy culture index instrument (IPCII) to measure information privacy culture across nations. The framework is based on consumers’ privacy expectations, their actual experiences when organisations process their personal information and their general privacy concerns.

A survey method was deployed to collect data in South Africa – the first participating country in the study – to start building a global information privacy culture index (IPCI) and to validate the questionnaire.

The IPCI revealed that there seems to be a disconnect between what consumers expect in terms of privacy and the way in which organisations are honouring (or failing to honour) those expectations, which results in a breach of trust and the social contract being violated.

Governments, information regulators and organisations can leverage the results of the privacy culture index to implement corrective actions and controls aimed at addressing the gaps identified from a consumer and compliance perspective. The validated IPCII can be used by both academia and industry to measure the information privacy culture of an institution, organisation or country to identify what to improve to address consumer privacy expectations and concerns.

The IPCIF and validated IPCII are the first tools that combine the concepts of consumer expectations and their confidence levels in whether organisations are meeting their privacy expectations, which are in line with the fair information practice principles and the privacy guidelines of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, to determine gaps and define improvement plans.

Smart card-based E-payment systems are receiving increasing attention as the number of implementations is witnessed on the rise globally. Understanding of user adoption behavior of E-payment systems that employ smart card technology becomes a research area that is of particular value and interest to both IS researchers and professionals. However, research interest focuses mostly on why a smart card-based E-payment system results in a failure or how the system could have grown into a success. This signals the fact that researchers have not had much opportunity to critically review a smart card-based E-payment system that has gained wide support and overcome the hurdle of critical mass adoption. The Octopus in Hong Kong has provided a rare opportunity for investigating smart card-based E-payment system because of its unprecedented success. This research seeks to thoroughly analyze the Octopus from technology adoption behavior perspectives.

Cultural impacts on adoption behavior are one of the key areas that this research posits to investigate. Since the present research is conducted in Hong Kong where a majority of population is Chinese ethnicity and yet is westernized in a number of aspects, assuming that users in Hong Kong are characterized by eastern or western culture is less useful. Explicit cultural characteristics at individual level are tapped into here instead of applying generalization of cultural beliefs to users to more accurately reflect cultural bias. In this vein, the technology acceptance model (TAM) is adapted, extended, and tested for its applicability cross-culturally in Hong Kong on the Octopus. Four cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede are included in this study, namely uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, individualism, and Confucian Dynamism (long-term orientation), to explore their influence on usage behavior through the mediation of perceived usefulness.

TAM is also integrated with the innovation diffusion theory (IDT) to borrow two constructs in relation to innovative characteristics, namely relative advantage and compatibility, in order to enhance the explanatory power of the proposed research model. Besides, the normative accountability of the research model is strengthened by embracing two social influences, namely subjective norm and image. As the last antecedent to perceived usefulness, prior experience serves to bring in the time variation factor to allow level of prior experience to exert both direct and moderating effects on perceived usefulness.

The resulting research model is analyzed by partial least squares (PLS)-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The research findings reveal that all cultural dimensions demonstrate direct effect on perceived usefulness though the influence of uncertainty avoidance is found marginally significant. Other constructs on innovative characteristics and social influences are validated to be significant as hypothesized. Prior experience does indeed significantly moderate the two influences that perceived usefulness receives from relative advantage and compatibility, respectively. The research model has demonstrated convincing explanatory power and so may be employed for further studies in other contexts. In particular, cultural effects play a key role in contributing to the uniqueness of the model, enabling it to be an effective tool to help critically understand increasingly internationalized IS system development and implementation efforts. This research also suggests several practical implications in view of the findings that could better inform managerial decisions for designing, implementing, or promoting smart card-based E-payment system.

The proliferation of online brand communities has shifted control over brands from firms to consumers. Demonstrating how marketers can stimulate consumers to use these opportunities and engage with the brand in such communities, the purpose of this paper is to address the effectiveness of normative and utilitarian appeals commonly employed in practice for enhancing engagement intensity and brand equity in turn.

This paper presents two studies at an individual user level. The first study builds on matched data on marketing actions, user behavior, and user perceptions from a Facebook brand community. The second study uses an experiment with members of a firm-hosted online brand community. The authors employ seemingly unrelated regressions while controlling for self-selection.

Marketer-generated appeals have a positive effect on brand equity that is mediated by engagement intensity. However, the strength of these effects depends highly on community, user, and relationship characteristics.

Generally speaking, marketer-generated appeals are effective tools for marketers to build brand equity through enhanced user engagement. However, their effectiveness can be improved when managers use a targeted approach. To offer precise managerial guidance, this paper shows how entertainment value, content consumption asymmetry (e.g. whether a user prefers user-generated content over marketer-generated content), and membership duration increase or lower the impact of appeals in building the brand through engagement intensity.

The authors provide evidence that appeals designed to drive user engagement in online brand communities are effective tools for boosting brand equity.

This paper aims to investigate how location-based advertising (LBA) elicits in-store purchase intention. To deepen the understanding of LBA’s effect on consumers’ purchase decision, the research examines the role of consumers’ time consciousness in click intention in pull or opt-out LBA approaches. The study also explores how consumers react to LBA with an asymmetric dominance decoy versus a compromise decoy message.

Two field experiments were conducted, and a total of 363 volunteers within 3 km of a shopping mall participated. The participants were asked to turn on their global positioning system and then informed that a convenience store was planning to launch a mobile coupon subscription service. Data collected were analysed using analysis of variance, regression analysis, bootstrapping and spotlight tests.

The results demonstrate that consumers had a higher intention to click pull LBA than to click opt-out push LBA. Consumers with high time-consciousness had greater click intentions for pull LBA than for opt-out push LBA. Consumers with low time-consciousness, however, showed no difference in click intention for either LBA approach. Further, click intention mediates the effect of LBA on in-store purchase intention, and the asymmetric dominance decoy message is a more powerful strategy for LBA to increase the likelihood of in-store purchase.

This research provides insight into location-based services marketing by revealing how time-consciousness and decoy promotional messages affect consumers’ reaction to LBA and in-store purchase intentions. The findings offer practical suggestions for retailers on how to reach and engage with consumers more effectively through the use of LBA.

Startup ecosystems and traditional economic development models have historically excluded non-traditional, alternative, and diverse entrepreneurs. These ecosystems often ignore the authentic groups of entrepreneurs and businesses that make a community unique and instead try to encourage only high-impact, high-growth tech startups. By only focusing on this narrower scope of a defined startup ecosystem versus an entrepreneurial ecosystem, smaller cities (and alternative marketplaces) face extreme challenges and miss opportunities for enhanced economic development. This chapter includes a case study of Tucson’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and the evolution of the entrepreneurial support organization Startup Tucson from one focused only on startups to a now industry-agnostic driver of inclusive ecosystem building. An account of this transition is provided for review, including the community-based feedback process used by the organization to redefine its goals. By adopting a broader definition of entrepreneurship and supporting entrepreneurs truly rooted in Tucson’s strengths, Startup Tucson has seen more diverse businesses (and ventures of all types) and founders opting-in to the ecosystem, thereby increasing the Tucson’s economic development. This case study will provide those interested in ecosystem development with ideas on how to implement ecosystems within alternative markets.