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The current research prioritizes the dimensions of a higher-order customer engagement construct in the tourism destination context in order of their relative importance as perceived by tourists to provide meaningful insights to the tourism industry player.

Data was collected from 429 tourists' from selected tourist destinations. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used for data analysis using SPSS. The scale items were prioritized through hybrid evidence-based modeling using the RIDIT-GRA (Relative to an Identified Distribution and Grey Relational Analysis, respectively) approach.

The prioritization of customer engagement scale items is done through RIDIT analysis and is verified through GRA. The rankings of two independent methodologies show a 93% correlation, thereby ensuring the ranking's robustness.

Prioritizing customer engagement scale items may assist destination managers in strategy formulation to ensure tourists' high-level loyalty transcending purchase. The findings help develop key response areas (KRA's) for effective destination brand management.

Such precedence analysis of customer engagement scale items has not been done in the tourism studies yet. Also, the present study verified the results by incorporating two independent methodologies, thus providing more valid results.

This paper aims to develop a parsimonious and robust formative index for evaluating and measuring the brand relationship quality of automobile brands.

Survey questionnaires were used to collect empirical data from 395 car owners, out of which 362 samples were included in the final analysis. Partial least squares technique was used for index construction.

The empirical findings exhibit that the automobile brand relationship quality (ABRQ) index based on the final set of six indicators effectively captures the conceptual domain of brand relationship quality. In addition, the external validity check affirms positive and significant influence of ABRQ index toward enhancing customer loyalty.

ABRQ index can assist the brand managers and academicians for benchmarking and market strategy formulation while contributing to the limited literature on brand relationship quality. Also, this index having six-indicators can considerably reduce the time and effort of respondents for filling the questionnaires, in turn, improving response rates.

This study represents a novel attempt to formulate a brand relationship quality index using formative measurement indicators, and as per the authors’ knowledge, has not been attempted by prior researchers in this domain.

The importance of consumer experience in service industries, particularly healthcare, is widely acknowledged as it captures the intricacies of quality management. In tandem with the emerging research trends that evaluate service excellence through user experience, this study renders a performance analysis of the dimensions of consumer experience that individually or collectively shape healthcare consumers’ perceptions of service quality.

A cross-sectional study was conducted across 13 mid-tier corporate hospitals to collect data from 438 patients. The data was processed through factor analysis in SPSS to confirm sample adequacy and factor extractability. Further, two independent multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tools, Fuzzy Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (F-TOPSIS) and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA), were executed to render performance analysis of identified factors.

Using F-TOPSIS, factors such as “information” and “hospital environment” received higher performance ratings, while items related to “communication with doctors” and “humanistic care” received lower rankings. Minor yet anticipated deviations were observed while verifying performance scores using GRA. Nonetheless, both outcomes exhibited a strong correlation coefficient of 97.14%, confirming analytical consistency.

Hitherto, such usages of hybrid MCDM techniques have rarely been executed to convey a clear understanding of consumers’ experiences in healthcare services. Moreover, the findings provide a clear insight into consumers’ key response areas, which can further be translated to maximize consumer gratification, thus assisting healthcare managers in improving service performance and clinical decision-making.

This study identifies antecedents and consequences of destination brand engagement (DBE) that have redefined the tourists' behavior during the COVID-19 outbreak. Specifically, it assesses the impact of social media interaction and destination authenticity on DBE and DBE's effect on tourists' willingness to pay (WTP). Further, it examines the mediating role of affective attitude and the moderating role of perceived risk between the associations of DBE and WTP.

Survey data were collected from 436 respondents through a structured questionnaire from selected tourism destinations in India. Structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) is employed to empirically examine the formulated hypotheses. Besides, hierarchical second-order confirmatory factor analysis is also deployed to analyze certain constructs as higher-order factors.

Social media interaction and destination authenticity elevate DBE, and DBE enhances affective attitude and WTP. Affective attitude mediates the relationship between DBE and WTP. Hence, the association between tourists' engagement and spending behavior becomes crucial under elevated affective attitude conditions. Finally, perceived risk during the pandemic dampens the association between DBE and WTP.

The findings may provide newer insights to the tourism companies, marketers and policymakers to create targeted strategies to minimize the risk perception and improve engagement levels of the tourists, which can yield economic returns in the long run.

Based on the cues from protection motivation theory (PMT), this study develops a DBE framework and identifies the factors affecting its sustenance in the pandemic hit tourism sector. Further, suggesting implications to ensure safety measures in the tourism industry that may assist in establishing economic resilience.

Previous research has indicated that entrepreneurial marketing (EM) positively influences small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) performance. While most studies have examined the relationship in a stable environment, EMs’ effectiveness during environmental instability remains uncertain. Therefore, the study aims to investigate the influence of EM on Indian manufacturing-based SMEs’ performance during the COVID-19-induced environmental instability. Additionally, it explores the mediating role of innovative performance in the relationship between EM and SME performance.

The data were collected by distributing a structured survey questionnaire to 302 owners/managers of SMEs. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The result indicates that EM significantly impacts both innovation and SME performance. Furthermore, the innovative performance partially mediates the link between EM and SME performance. The findings suggest that even within severely affected sectors (manufacturing) during the pandemic, SMEs can achieve growth and innovation through effective EM practices.

This study validates the theoretical notion that EM remains effective even in unpredictable environments such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings offer valuable insights for SMEs seeking innovative strategies to enhance their performance, particularly those in emerging economies.

Prior studies have relied on a single layer of abstraction to analyze the impact of EM. The present study is the first to extend standard construct (EM) conceptualization. Furthermore, it evaluated the efficiency of EM in situations characterized by instability, which is rare in the EM and SME literature.

The present research attempts to empirically examine the influence of consumer-brand engagement, its potent antecedents, and relationship quality towards creating and enhancing brand loyalty of automobile brands in Indian context.

Primary data through survey questionnaires were used to gather empirical data from 443 automobile consumers, out of which 417 samples were included in the final analysis. Structural equation modelling technique was used for assessing the hypothesized direct and indirect relationships among the constructs.

The empirical findings exhibit consumer involvement and brand interactivity contributes positively and significantly towards consumer-brand engagement, while self-brand image congruity does not significantly influence consumer-brand engagement. Further, mediation analysis results show that relationship quality partially mediates the linkage between consumer-brand engagement and brand loyalty.

The outcomes of this research may provide novel insights and contribute to the limited body of knowledge regarding consumer-brand engagement. In addition, the findings may assist the automobile brand managers and market strategists to design strategies aimed at developing long-term consumer relationships.

This empirical research assesses the mediating effect of relationship quality in the linkage between consumer-brand engagement and brand loyalty for automobile brands, and to the best of our knowledge, has not been attempted by prior researchers in this domain.

Over the years, despite the best efforts to evaluate service quality through multiple techniques, the connotation between service deliverance and consumer expectation remains sporadic. In the quest to quantify service quality from an innovative perspective, the current study has leveraged consumer-perceived experiences to unveil the novel intricacies of healthcare quality.

Anchoring on the dimensions of patient experience (PX), field data were collected from 244 patients at different private hospitals operating across India. Further, this study incorporated a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) to evaluate consumer preferences and prioritised the dimensions of PX in three categories of Indian hospitals, namely nursing homes (NHs), mid-tier corporate hospitals (MCHs) and top-tier corporate hospitals (TCHs).

The results establish a performance ranking by demonstrating that MCHs outperform the rest alternatives on the grounds of perceived experiences. Tukey's honestly significance difference (HSD) test was executed to confirm the heterogeneity among the participants' preferences across three different hospital categories. The results reveal that for most of the alternatives, the mean scores of the criterion were statistically significantly different.

In healthcare studies, PX dawned as an entity with an ability to propel healthcare quality in a better way than the classical techniques did. The study's findings present a comprehensive picture of a care delivery system by identifying relatively significant dimensions of PX, hence improving the quality quotients by adjusting healthcare offerings in alignment with consumer expectations and organisational strategies.

This research examines the role of a therapist’s attributes, namely, expertise, sociability, likability and mind-set similarity, in building trust, satisfaction and commitment amongst visitors in Indian wellness resorts and hotels.

The text mining approach was adopted to collect a large corpus of 3,94,373 online reviews from TripAdvisor, Google Reviews and hotels.com. Reviews were taken from 1,677 resorts and hotels that deal in spa and wellness care across India. This study uses unsupervised Naïve Bayes classification and n-gram lexical TF-IDF vectorizer method to classify and find the sentiment of the reviews shared by the visitors of the wellness resorts. Additionally, multiple linear regression is performed to understand the impact of the therapist’s identified attributes on the visitor’s relationship quality.

The research found positive sentiment towards the therapist’s likability, and visitors seemed satisfied with the overall wellness service. The sentiment towards trust and commitment is low. The study also found significant links between likability and expertise in building the relationship quality between the therapist and the visitors. The expertise of the therapist enhances visitors’ trust and willingness to return. The therapist’s likability nature helps in increasing visitor satisfaction.

This study helps to understand the service personnel's level of relationship with the customer in hospitality services. Further, the study empirically verifies the important factors that build relationship quality in Indian wellness services.

The present study argues the need for greater clarity in understanding the customer perception of the services provided by wellness therapists in Indian wellness resorts and hotels. The study guides hotel managers to perform training of wellness therapists to improve customer satisfaction. Using the findings of the current study, managers can prioritize therapists’ attributes and realign their core strategies and provide satisfying wellness services to customers.

This study demonstrates the essential qualities a therapist should develop to enhance the relationship with the resort visitors and foster trust, commitment and satisfaction. The study goes a step further by using a vast database of online data for deep insights into the visitor’s view and the use of machine learning for amplifying results.

The purpose of this paper is to assess and compare different private healthcare settings based on perceived service quality in Indian context using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The Indian private healthcare sector has been controlled by three categories of healthcare settings, namely, nursing clinics (NCs), non-corporate hospitals (NCHs) and corporate hospitals (CHs).

AHP was used to rank order of healthcare setting regarding the service quality dimensions and relative standings of every service provider with respect to its competitors. The authors collected random data from nine private hospitals situated in eastern and southern India. The authors proposed a feasible appraising approach based on AHP to decide the sustainability priority of dimensions like reliability, physical environment, empathy, efficiency, timeliness, transparency, affordability, communication, appropriateness and consistency in the Indian private healthcare industry.

The result demonstrates that Indian NCHs are performing better on customers’ perceived service quality, followed by CHs and NCs. The comparative performance of healthcare settings is an attempt to establish a performance ranking.

This research assesses dimensions of the service quality that need urgent attention. The results may provide insight to healthcare managers as to how they can improve their service quality in order to match customer expectation and to improve business performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the activities of environmental consciousness from socio-psychographic perspectives and hence evaluates its effect on brand equity through intervening elements of environmental attributes (EAt). It further attempts to research the effect of the environmental performance, environmental communication and environmental positioning in enhancing brand equity. Indian refrigeration industry, particularly the air conditioners and refrigerator brands are chosen to convey and receive the research inputs as their impact on environment is easily interpretable.

A hypothesized model comprising the environment consciousness and association dimensions with brand equity is framed. In total, 74 expert respondents from four state capital cities of India participated in the survey and the model has been tested in the scope of analytical hierarchy process (AHP).

The result shows that the EAt and activities can be prioritized and subsequently efficient resource allocation can be done. It also gives theoretical arguments to legitimize the environmental practices.

On the other hand, clients have numerous options, and a competitive advantage may not be maintained. Regardless of the fact that clients are environmentally conscious of a given refrigeration brand at the present time that they are utilizing, they may observe that they are much more charmed with a competitors’ enhanced environmental dimensions. All methods that take a try at an enhanced brand equity must be continually determined by environmental consciousness. The above can be accomplished if the evaluations of competitors by the clients are known. The AHP-ECBE technique depicted in this study accordingly helps refrigeration organization to devise and keep up a pertinent, focused plan for persistent improvements in environmental dimensions. It offers a “greater image” in brand equity administration.

If legitimately done in a generalized way, environmental activities like eco-literacy, interpersonal influence and value orientation can impact EAt and contribute in building brand equity.