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This study aims to explore how a relational brand experience can be designed using an integrated retail experience. It addresses the research gap between relational brand experience strategy, retail experience design, as well as online-offline integration, by providing applicable tools and knowledge.

Based on a literature review, a relational experience analytical framework (REAF) was developed as a diagnostic tool for relational brand experience. A case study was then conducted using the REAF to determine the relational brand experience factors, strategies in practice and related initiatives.

Three distinguishing integrated relational brand experience factors were identified (online-offline integration, overall activeness and the centre of relationships). A typology for an integrated relational brand experience was established with clarifying experiential characteristics and the required initiatives for each type. Based on the findings, a framework was proposed for an integrated brand experience design and its application in the retail experience design process.

The frameworks and strategies proposed can serve as a guide to industry professionals in designing integrated relational brand experiences.

The theoretical contributions of this study are in clarifying the relational brand experience dimensions and an integrated relational brand experience strategy typology. It also illustrates the strategic application of integrated retail experience based on a brand experience strategy using the proposed framework and the process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how sensory, cognitive, affective experiences affect relational brand experience in regards to different channels (i.e. online vs store), how relational brand experience influences brand awareness and brand loyalty.

By employing self-administered questionnaires, the data on 393 respondents were collected from students enrolled at a major southwestern university in the USA. The moderation regression analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses and propositions.

The study supports most of the hypotheses and propositions regarding the impacts of brand experiences on brand resonance in multi-channel retailing. The moderating effects of channel type are founded in relationships between sensory experience, affective experience and relational experience. Further, relational experience impacts on brand awareness and loyalty in any channel.

Given the exploratory nature of this approach, there are methodological limitations in generalizing research findings. However, the study solidifies the branding theory by understanding the multi-dimensional brand experience, and moderating effects of channel type enrich brand experience managements in the multi-channel retailing for fashion brands.

This study implies that relational experience through sensory, affective and cognitive brand experiences in multiple-channel setting has a huge business potential to concrete consumer and brand value.

This study substantiates the robust effects of brand experiences on brand resonance and the causal structure of multi-dimensional aspects of brand experiences in conjunction with the moderating effect of channel type.

This study aims to examine the relationships between three styles of conflict management [cooperative conflict management (COP), competitive conflict management (COM) and avoidance conflict management (AVO)], the subjective relational experience, perceived insider status, organization-based self-esteem and employees’ service innovation behavior in the airline industry.

Through both offline and online survey methods, a total of 304 Korean employees of eight airline firms in Asia were asked to complete the questionnaire. A structural equation modeling analysis was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

COP and AVO had significant positive effects on the subjective relational experience, and COM had a significant negative effect on the subjective relational experience. In the subsequent process, the subjective relational experience had a significant positive effect on the perceived insider status but not on organization-based self-esteem and employees’ service innovation behavior. Finally, the perceived insider status and organization-based self-esteem had significant positive effects on employees’ service innovation behavior.

The results have important practical implications for developing human resource management (HRM) practices in airline firms. More specifically, airline firms should provide management training courses that encourage team leaders to create environments in which employees can form an attitude of “we are in it together”, collect conflict issues from employees in a unanimous manner and then resolve them smoothly without further problems and avoid treating conflicts as win-lose contests. These guidelines may help employees unwind from conflict situations and maintain positive relationships with their colleagues.

Previous studies have paid little attention to effects of conflict management styles on employees’ service innovation behavior through positive psychological experiences based on a holistic model. The results offer new insights into the extended model and have valuable implications for HRM practices in the airline industry.

The purpose of this study is to analyse online consumers' experiential responses towards visual user-generated content in social commerce fashion online shopping environments. The study develops and tests a UGC OCE framework incorporating aesthetic and relational experiential paths in the OCE.

This paper adopts a quantitative approach to examine fashion consumers experiential responses to UGC content. The sample comprised 555 respondents recruited via a consumer panel. SEM analysis was employed to analyse and test the framework model.

The findings illustrate that consumers are initially stimulated by an aesthetic experience, which then triggers a combination of relational, emotional and interactive experiences in fashion social commerce. The study extends the S-O-R framework by integrating it to the experiential “path” that indicates the series of experiences consumers encounter. Using S-O-R, the study presents the consumers' online experiential responses to viewing visual UGC, revealing that there are five experiential responses, all of which have an influence on online consumer behaviour. Responses towards visual UGC include visual, relational, emotional, cognitive engagement and interactive engagement, which were all identified to influence purchase intention.

This study is original in finding that, in the context of online fashion shopping, aesthetics drive relational experiences, and relational experiences drive flow and interactive behaviour and also purchase intention. Aesthetic experiences and positive emotions are powerful drivers of purchase intention and drive connectedness, flow and interactive behaviour. This study extends the literature by extending the frameworks in OCE and CE into the fashion UGC context.

As teacher education moves online, there is an increasing need for teacher educators who subscribe to relational stances that attend to and enact liberating pedagogies with preservice teachers preparing to teach and inservice teachers who come to online courses for professional development.

This chapter explores common frameworks for interactive relational models of teaching from John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, and Paulo Friere and then proposes, using examples from the author’s practice, how these models translate into online contexts.

Diversity in education calls for increased awareness of individuals using a relational stance. This stance should apply both to schoolchildren as well as the teacher candidates and teachers in development that are coming to teacher education to build and improve their practice.

More research on relationality in online learning is necessary. This research should take shape through using theories that are complex enough to provide insights that marry the pedagogical with the relational aspects of teaching as part of a comprehensive teacher education experience.

This chapter makes a valuable contribution to research in teaching online through its thorough inquiry into theories of learning and teaching and they apply – or do not – online.

Interest in employee mindfulness has increased dramatically in recent years, fueled by several important conceptual articles, numerous studies documenting the benefits of mindfulness for employee outcomes, and the adoption of mindfulness-based practices in many Fortune 500 organizations. Despite this growing interest, the vast majority of research on employee mindfulness has taken an intrapersonal focus, failing to appreciate the ways in which mindfulness may enhance work-related relational processes and outcomes. The authors explore possible associations between mindfulness and relationally oriented workplace phenomena, drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship examining mindfulness in romantic relationships, child–parent relationships, patient–healthcare provider relationships, and student–teacher relationships. A framework is proposed that links mindfulness to three distinct relationally oriented processes, which are expected to have downstream effects on work-related relational outcomes. The authors then take the proposed framework and discuss possible extensions to a variety of unique workplace relationships and discuss critical next steps in advancing the relational science of mindfulness.

This paper aims to examine the interplay of emotions and consumption within intergenerational exchanges. It shows how emotions pervade the trajectories of grandmothers’ relational identities with their grandchildren through consumption practices.

This study analyses qualitative data gathered via 28 long interviews with French grandmothers and 27 semi-structured interviews with their grandchildren. This study draws on attachment theory to interpret the voices of both grandmothers and their grandchildren within these dyads.

This study uncovers distinct relational identities of grandmothers linked to emotions and the age of the grandchild, as embedded in consumption. It identifies the defining characteristics of the trajectory of social/relational identities and finds these to be linked to grandchildren’s ages.

This study elicits the emotion profiles, which influence grandmothers’ patterns of consumption in their relationships with their grandchildren. It further uncovers distinct attachment styles (embedded in emotions) between grandmothers and grandchildren in the context of their consumption experiences. Finally, it provides evidence that emotions occur at the interpersonal level. This observation is an addition to existing literature in consumer research, which has often conceived of consumer emotions as being only a private matter and as an intrapersonal phenomenon.

The findings offer avenues for the development of strategies for intergenerational marketing, particularly promotion campaigns which link either the reinforcement or the suppression of emotion profiles in advertising messages with the consumption of products or services by different generations.

This study suggests that public institutions might multiply opportunities for family and consumer experiences to combat specific societal issues related to elderly people’s isolation.

In contrast to earlier work, which has examined emotions within the ebb and flow of individual and multiple social identities, this study examines how emotions and consumption play out in social/relational identity trajectories.

Being grounded in interdependence theory, this study aims to address the following research question: Do managers’ negotiation styles (collaborative versus competitive) make employees’ relational justice-emotional experiences links sporadic?

Data elicited from N = 139 Pakistani undergraduate students participating in an online scenario-based experiment were used to employ repeated measures analysis and partial least square structural equation modeling techniques.

Results suggest that employees’ relational justice is likely to be higher when managers use a collaborative negotiation style than when they use competitive style in performance review meetings. Moreover, per managers’ different negotiation styles, employees’ relational justice perceptions may predict their positive emotions differently. That is, when managers use collaborative negotiation style, employees’ relational justice perceptions may positively predict their hope but not optimism, whereas when managers use competitive negotiation style, employees’ relational justice perceptions may positively predict their optimism but not hope. Furthermore, the positive relationship between employees’ relational justice and their optimism is stronger when their trust in manager is low than when it is high.

The study is of value for performance management theorists who aim to address the issue of ineffectiveness of the practice through relational means. The study includes the recently explicated concept of relational justice and examines its links with employee emotional reactions to performance reviews. Moreover, the study unveils how managers’ negotiation styles in performance review meetings cause variations in the links between employees’ perceptions of relational justice and their emotional experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the direct experience of a practitioner undertaking real-time research in his organization to offer insights into the dual role of practical insider and theoretical outsider. The duality helps the researcher to live “in” and think “out” of the research context to develop a theory for practice and then transpose it to a practice for theory through the collaboration of an external theoretical insider.

This is a theoretical account of the reflexive experience of the practitioner reintroducing relational ethnography, where the researcher regards processes and spaces as the objects of analysis rather than bounded groups and places. It emphasizes the relational significance of the researcher, researched, and theoretical insider in exploring the structures of relations and meanings in the field of professional practice.

The paper argues that understanding the complementariness and paradoxes of the dual role helps the researcher to identify knowledge gaps and contest commonsense knowledge in search of critical knowledge and theoretical insights. The transition between the bounded (restrained) and unbounded (unrestrained) selves occurs in the holding space of research, influencing the position from which the researcher views himself, his subjects, and his social world.

The paper extends the dimension of ethnographic research, which de-centers the authority and control of the researcher to that of the relationship between the researcher and informants, by focusing on the relational significance between the researcher, researched, and theoretical insider. This perspective gives rise to a deeper understanding of relational ethnography, seen largely in sociological research, as relevant to organizational research, where structures of relations and actions explored in real time could account for the configuration, conflict, and coordination of work practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which customer experience and relationship marketing (RM), as two widely used service management approaches, can effectively determine satisfaction and commitment as two relational quality constructs, and their impact on loyalty and word-of-mouth (WoM) as relational outcomes for retail bank services in Kuwait. This country is chosen as an exemplar of an Arabian Peninsula culture with a predominantly Islamic heritage and a capital-surplus economy.

The relational benefits scale and customer experience quality were used as independent measures to collect data using multiple methods (interview, paper and pencil, online) from 1,013 customers of local and international banks. Standard translation procedures, CFA procedures and parallel analysis were employed to examine the dimensionality of all scales. SEM procedures were applied for each approach to assess its impact on the four indigenous dependent constructs using a multitude of fit indices, examination of validity and reliability measures for all constructs as well as structural paths.

Results show the factor structure of both scales differed from their original conceptualization, with fewer items forming each latent factor when applied in Kuwait. The explanatory and predictive power of the EXQ model performed slightly better than RBS, although both explained substantial variance on dependent measures, confirming their relevance despite the lack of noticeable correlation between most factors contained in both scales.

This study underscores the importance of establishing the validity of measures prior to their cross-cultural application, with particular focus on the content validity of scale items to measure the intended construct properly. It also shows how two approaches can complement each other rather than compete to effectively manage bank services. As is the case with all cross-sectional research paradigms, longitudinal analysis linking expressed loyalty/WoM with actual behavior can better assess tested relationships than the current research.

Retail banks’ marketing strategy should simultaneously address customer relationships and customer experience to reduce attrition and enhance customer life-time value.

Effects of service experience and RM are examined in a Middle-Eastern market, where internationalization of banks has created strong competition, leading customers to view bank services as less differentiated. Caution and examination of service quality measures are needed before using them as metrics in annual reports and performance reviews.