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This paper aims to examine the marketing strategies designed by three innovative early 1900s food companies. It traces the coordination of these businesses’ research funding, advertising, direct mail and promotional tactics to show how they intersected and impacted consumers and health professionals in the period when scientists were first able to quantify the relationship between good health and food. The paper analyzes internal company documents, advertisements and marketing materials from Knox Gelatine, Borden and Sunkist.

Research for this paper benefited from the author’s unlimited access to the private documents of the Knox Gelatine Company and its executives. These documents were analyzed chronologically and thematically. They chronicled the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and the ways it cultivated home economists. The paper also used publicly available digitized documents from Sunkist and Borden. The paper would benefit from further detailed analysis of these documents to parse Knox’s targeting by race and ethnicity.

In the 1920s, Knox, Borden and Sunkist developed a marketing strategy which leveraged a new class of experts – the hundreds of thousands of medical professionals, home economists, teachers and government agents who advised American women. By distributing specific laboratory research on the nutritional benefits of their products to this emerging class of health professionals and the consumers who trusted them, these companies developed relationships with opinion leaders designed specifically to influence product sales.

This research benefited from access to the private documents of Knox Gelatine Company which divulge the company’s attempts to influence the medical world and cultivate home economists. The paper would benefit from further analysis of these documents to parse the company’s targeting by race and ethnicity as well as a deeper comparison to companies that tried to work with health professionals unsuccessfully and companies that adopted this tactic in the household products or tobacco area. Opportunities also exist to do a fuller analysis of variations in food marketing by rural versus urban as well as race.

By reconstructing the sequencing and content of these three companies’ 1920s marketing strategies, this research uncovers a form of early 20th century food marketing directed at health and science professionals which has been neglected in advertising histories.

TikTok social media app has become one of the most popular forms of leisure and entertainment activities, but how hedonic consumption experiences (comprising fantasy, escapism, enjoyment, role projection, sensory, arousal and emotional involvement) of the TikTok app determine users' intention to use the app and its resulting impact on the actual usage behavior remains limited in the information systems literature, especially featuring the hedonic consumption perspective in entertainment industry.

This study employs uses & gratification theory to answer the “why” via predicting the role of hedonic consumption experiences that serve as gratifications to trigger technology acceptance behavior (especially, in form of users' behavioral intention to use the TikTok app and its further impact on usage behavior). This study utilizes the partial least squares-structural equation modeling approach to perform data analyses on 258 TikTok app users.

Our results provide a strong support such that users' playful consumption experiences (i.e. escapism, role projection, arousal, sensory experience and enjoyment) positively influence their intention to use the TikTok app and its resultant effect on users' actual usage of the app. In contrast, fantasy and emotional involvement fail to influence users' intention to use the TikTok app.

To the best of our knowledge, our investigation is one of the first studies to apply the hedonic consumption experiences as potential gratifications that derive users' intention and its subsequent influence on the actual usage of the TikTok app. Our study results would assist marketing and brand managers to redefine approaches and tactics to create effective strategies that implement essential determinants to increase behavioral intention among entertainment service providers.