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The paper focuses on resistance driven by animosity toward a country due to cultural, political, military and economic reasons. Previous research has linked animosity toward a given country to explicit judgments and purchases of products from that country, thus ignoring the possibility that latent ideological beliefs may reveal themselves behaviorally more subtly. This research focuses on implicit consumption expressions of country‐based consumption resistance.

Cross‐sectional survey data were collected from French moviegoers in seemingly unrelated studies. In study one, respondents reported the movies they had watched at a movie theater over the past month and these movies were subsequently coded by country of origin. Animosity, ethnocentrism, and global openness were measured in study two. Finally, participants selected lottery tickets for either a French or foreign movie. This choice measure captures whether ethnocentric consumption tendencies emerge after animosity is made salient.

Ideological resistance to the US expresses itself in the anti‐consumption of US movies. Further, when animosity toward the US is made salient, high animosity French respondents express an increased preference for domestic consumption choices, even though they are not generally ethnocentric.

The focus on actual consumption data provides an externally valid test of both latent and explicit expressions of ideological resistance to a country in the form of consumption choices.

The aims of this paper are to provide an integrated literature review of factors influencing consumers' responses to brand websites; to describe the state of research in the past ten years; and to give an overview of the theories used in brand website studies.

Using a vote‐counting procedure, 736 findings from 50 empirical studies are synthesized. In a vote‐counting analysis the number of positive and negative significant relations between the same two variables is compared to the number of non‐significant relationships.

The analysis reveals which person‐related factors (e.g. involvement or flow) and website‐related factors (e.g. usability or interactivity) influence responses to websites and brands. To explain such responses many studies integrate new theoretical concepts (e.g. interactivity or telepresence) into traditional theories. Furthermore, the review shows that the current state of research is limited by the use of forced exposure, student samples and the measurement of affective responses.

The present study investigates an increasingly popular approach to promote brands at the internet: the use of brand websites. The study gives insight into factors influencing the effectiveness of these websites. Marketers can use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of their websites.

The paper provides a valuable contribution to the literature on brand websites. The paper can form the basis for future research on this topic.

As an extension to Assael’s (2011) review on media synergy, this chapter examines the latest evolvement of media synergy research in the past 10 years by integrating studies from a wide range of leading journals.

We searched a total of 17 major journals in advertising, communication, and marketing from 2005 to 2014 and identified a total of 42 articles on media synergy. These studies were reviewed to assess the current status of media synergy research.

Studies of inter-media interaction at the individual level provide mixed support for a media synergistic effect, and the occurrence of this effect demands certain boundary conditions. Research on multi-media engagement has been gaining momentum in the past few years and is a promising subject in media synergy research.

We envision two growing approaches in future media synergy research: the neuroscientific approach and the data mining approach.

This chapter posits that media synergy research has evolved in the most recent years to a new phase, which is multi-media engagement. Hence, this chapter extends Assael’s work in terms of explicating media synergy in the context of social media engagement and identifying research gaps in current literature.

To elaborate the nature of infotainment as a mediating concept between information and entertainment by analysing how the concept of infotainment is approached in diverse domains such as communication research.

Conceptual analysis was conducted by focussing on 41 key studies on the topic. First, it was examined how researchers have approached the relationships between informational and entertaining elements of infotainment. Thereafter, attention was directed to the ways in which people make use of infotainment. The conceptual analysis is based on the comparison of the similarities and differences between the characterizations of the above issues.

Early studies characterized infotainment in terms of soft news which is distinct from hard news offering factual information. Later investigations offer a more nuanced picture by approaching infotainment as phenomenon with diverse dimensions depicting the topics, focus and presentation style. Studies on the use of infotainment offer contradictory evidence of the extent to which infotaining programmes can increase people's interest in social, political and health issues, for example.

As the study concentrates on the analysis of an individual concept, that is, infotainment, the findings cannot be generalized to concern the ways in which informational and entertaining phenomena are related as a whole.

By elaborating the conceptual nature of infotainment, the study contributes to information behaviour research by refining the picture of the relationships between information and entertainment.

This study focuses on how brands participate in social network sites (SNSs) and investigates both the different strategies they adopt and the factors that influence these strategies.

The activities of top brands in SNSs were investigated through a content analysis of brand web sites in three countries, measuring two primary dimensions: presence in SNSs and level of engagement which the brand hoped to establish with stakeholders. The study then built logistic regression models to understand which factors drive brands to adopt and use SNSs, using insights from previous studies related to internet innovation adoption cycles.

The study confirmed that SNS adoption follows a general path of Internet innovation adoption by brands. Industry markets exert influence, with technology and consumer intensive brands being more likely than all other industry segments to be present in SNSs and to participate at higher engagement levels, while brands targeting younger audiences also engage at higher levels than brands targeting generic audiences. The country in which the brand operates plays a significant role in a brand's likelihood of adopting SNSs: web sites in the USA are more likely to use SNSs than other countries, even after controlling for factors such as pre‐existing web operations or the headquarters being in the same country. It was also found that top brands operate in a global world, as shown by their preference for SNSs with global coverage compared to local SNS, even when the penetration rates of these local SNSs were higher.

The paper advances research on SNS adoption by brands from an organizational standpoint, at a time when the majority of the top global brands actively promote such services.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the influence of online brand communities on customers’ attitude, who engage with such communities, and their further influence on purchase intention (PI).

A conceptual framework was developed by reviewing literature and then validating it in the context of customers, engaged with Facebook brand pages. The framework empirically examined the influence of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, social influence and attachment with brand (AWB) on attitude towards brand and PI; alongside the influence of AWB on PI, from 206 responses gathered from an online survey administered to Facebook users. The framework was validated by using structural equation modelling.

The results demonstrate that the proposed framework was found to have a good fit, and seven of eight relationships hypothesized were found to be significant. The study establishes that the online brand communities have an impact on the customers’ attitude, which in turn has an influence on customers’ intention to purchase.

This study is first of its kind to analyse the engagement on Facebook online brand communities and the influence they have on the customers’ attitude towards a brand which further develops the PI of the customer. The paper suggests and supports the adoption and usage of online brand communities as a part marketing and communication strategy.