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Long sales periods (i.e. Christmas time, Black Friday, etc.) and the risk of contagion while shopping (i.e. during pandemics like COVID-19) showed the extent to which crowded shopping environments have negative effects on consumers’ behavior. Hence, using terror management theory (TMT) and stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) approach, the authors aims to develop a new model to investigate the effect of crowd-checking technology on shopping anxiety, the perceived value of shopping experience and willingness to pay.

Using a cross-sectional research design and with a help of an independent research company, the authors collected 1,000 valid responses from individuals residing in the UK.

Results showed that crowd-checking technology cues reduce shopping anxiety, improve value perceptions and increase willingness to pay. In addition, the efficacy of technology in reducing shopping anxiety is moderated by customers’ shopping orientation.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first one investigating crowd monitoring systems used at the initial stage of consumers’ journey to show the number of consumers in-store in real-time. It contributes to the literature on technology applications in retailing by providing evidence that technology cues reduce shopping anxiety, which in turn enhances customer-perceived value from the shopping experience and increases the willingness to pay in stores with embedded crowd-checker technology. The study also extends the application of TMT in a new context.

Los largos periodos de rebajas (ej. Navidades, Black Friday, etc.) y el riesgo de contagio durante las compras (ej. durante pandemias como la COVID-19) mostraron hasta qué punto los entornos de compras abarrotados tienen efectos negativos en el comportamiento de los consumidores. Utilizando la Teoría de la Gestión del Terror (TMT) y el enfoque Estímulo-Organismo-Respuesta (S-O-R), desarrollamos un nuevo modelo para investigar el efecto de la tecnología de control de multitudes sobre la ansiedad en las compras, el valor percibido de la experiencia de compra y la disposición a pagar.

Utilizando un diseño de investigación transversal y con la ayuda de una empresa de investigación independiente, recogimos 1.000 respuestas válidas de personas residentes en el Reino Unido.

Los resultados mostraron que las señales de la tecnología de comprobación de multitudes reducen la ansiedad en las compras, mejoran la percepción del valor y aumentan la disposición a pagar. Además, la eficacia de la tecnología en la reducción de la ansiedad de compra está moderada por la orientación de compra de los clientes.

Esta investigación es la primera que estudia los sistemas de seguimiento de multitudes utilizados en la fase inicial del viaje de los consumidores para mostrar el número de consumidores en la tienda en tiempo real. Contribuye a la literatura sobre aplicaciones tecnológicas en el comercio minorista aportando pruebas de que las señales tecnológicas reducen la ansiedad de compra, lo que a su vez mejora el valor percibido por el cliente de la experiencia de compra y aumenta la disposición a pagar en tiendas con tecnología de control de multitudes integrada. El estudio también amplía la aplicación de la Teoría de la Gestión del Terror en un nuevo contexto.

漫长的销售期（即圣诞节时间、黑色星期五等）和购物时的传染风险（即在COVID-19等大流行病期间）显示了拥挤的购物环境对消费者行为的负面影响程度。 因此, 利用恐怖管理理论（TMT）和刺激-组织-反应（S-O-R）方法, 我们建立了一个新的模型来研究人群检查技术对购物焦虑、购物体验的感知价值和支付意愿的影响。

在一家独立研究公司的帮助下, 我们采用横断面研究设计, 从居住在英国的个人中收集了1000份有效的答复。

结果显示, 人群检查技术提示减少了购物焦虑, 改善了价值认知, 并提高了支付意愿。此外, 技术在减少购物焦虑方面的功效受到顾客购物取向的调节。

这项研究是第一个调查在消费者旅程的初始阶段使用的人群监测系统, 以实时显示店内消费者的数量。它为零售业技术应用的文献做出了贡献, 提供了技术线索减少购物焦虑的证据, 这反过来又提高了顾客从购物体验中感知到的价值, 并增加了在有嵌入式人群检查器技术的商店中的支付意愿。该研究还扩展了恐怖管理理论在新环境中的应用。

This study introduces three variables related to brands that have the potential to enhance university students' advocacy intentions. The research explores how university brand identification, the perceived prestige of the university brand and the social benefits associated with the university brand impact students' advocacy intentions. Additionally, the study examines the moderating role of gender in these relationships.

Cross-sectional surveys of 326 undergraduate students enrolled in a Spanish university, and structural equation modeling was used to test and validate the conceptual model.

The findings from the structural equation modeling indicate that university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits significantly influence students' advocacy intentions. Furthermore, the multigroup analysis reveals a gender difference in the factors influencing advocacy intentions. Female students demonstrate significance in all three antecedents, whereas male students only show significance in university brand identification and perceived university brand prestige.

The current study's findings provide several insights for higher education institutions in developing enduring and committed relationships with their students.

This study offers relevant insights into the body of research on university branding, explaining the students' advocacy intentions through the variables of university brand identification, perceived university brand prestige and university brand social benefits. Also, this study is a novelty in introducing empirical evidence for the importance of the moderating role of students' gender.

This paper aims to deepen understanding of the role played by new technological tools used in customer–travel agency (TA) interactions by analysing the TA owner/managers' perceptions, pre- and post-Covid-19, regarding the effectiveness of in-store traditional and innovative tools.

This exploratory study is based on a questionnaire-based survey conducted among Italian TAs and distributed via email from September 2020 to January 2021.

The study highlights how, even among TAs, the role of in-store technology is gradually taking on greater importance, and it delves into the specific business and socio-demographic factors that seem to cause differences among agencies.

The study focuses on the Italian context, which does not allow for any generalisations. Furthermore, it is only the travel agent perspective that is observed and not the consumer's.

In addition to helping to bridge the literature gap, this study on in-store technologies focuses on the TAs sector, where human resources and human relationships play a decisive role in customer experience and interaction. The paper investigates the travel agents' point of view regarding the introduction of new in-store technologies; it also highlights their growing adoption and use, overall, despite the travel catalogue still remaining the main tool for interacting with customers. The study also shows how the advent of Covid-19 has increased travel agents' propensity to use digital technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate branding and higher education literature to conceptualize, develop, and empirically examine a model of university social augmenters’ brand equity.

Drawing on an empirical survey of 401 undergraduate students enrolled in private universities in Egypt, this study model was tested using structural equation modeling.

The findings reveal that university social augmenters’ reputation, coach-to-student interactions, and student-to-student interactions influence students’ satisfaction with social augmenters. The results also suggest that students satisfied with university social augmenters are more likely to exhibit outcomes of brand equity – namely, brand identification, willingness to recommend, and willingness to incur an additional premium cost.

The results offer managerial implications for university administrators in their quest to enrich students’ university experiences and build strong sub-brands within the university setting. University social augmenters are found to have strong brand equity manifestations and may hold the potential to differentiate university brands in an industry dominated by experience and credence.

This research contributes to the extant literature by filling two gaps in university branding literature. First, previous research has never unified separate streams of literature related to augmented services and brand equity. Second, limited conceptual and empirical research on university branding in general and university social augmentation in particular has been conducted in emerging markets, which has resulted in conceptual ambiguity for the key factors constructing students’ university social experiences.

Today, customers’ perceived value does not only depend on the products, but also on the services provided by a firm. In e-commerce, it is important to shift the focus beyond the product and discuss the value of personalized services in the context of e-commerce fulfillment. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is twofold: to develop a conceptual framework proposing satisfaction through personalized services as a middle-range theory; and to suggest foundational premises supporting the theoretical framework, which in turn shape middle-range theory within the context of apparel e-commerce fulfillment.

In this theory-driven paper, the authors apply the scientific circle of enquiry, as it demonstrates the role of theorizing with the help of middle-range theory and empirical evidence and as such provides a methodological scaffolding that connects theory formulation and verification. The authors synthesize literature related to customer perceived value (CPV) and satisfaction, followed by abduction focusing on understanding the empirical domain as it occurred in practice from company cases. The presented case studies are based on semi-structured interviews with three Swedish online retailers within the apparel industry. The theory-driven analysis results in suggestions of foundational premises.

Based on the theoretical foundations and empirical generalizations, three propositions are suggested. The premises regarding satisfaction through personalized service applied in the domain of apparel e-commerce fulfillment are: to ensure customer satisfaction requires a value co-creation perspective using data during the pre-purchase phase; to ensure customer satisfaction and retention require added-value perspective during the post-purchase phase of the shopping journey; and to ensure satisfaction and convenience require an added-value perspective at the last mile.

The apparel firms lose a substantial amount of revenue because of poor online customer satisfaction, leading to e-commerce not reaching its full potential. To enhance customer value, online retailers need to find a resort in advanced technologies and analytics to address customer satisfaction, and it is suggested that retailers shift their focus beyond the products and find ways to improve personalized service offerings to gain market advantage, improve fulfillment, drive sales and increase CPV.

To consider personalized services as a source for improving e-commerce fulfillment and CPV, the main contribution of this study is conceptual as it presents a theoretical model developed from general theory, middle-range theory and verified with empirical claims.

Smart tourism (ST) needs the development of smart business. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the future of the smart component of tourism companies, what their perspectives are and what factors can help to accelerate it.

A survey of 133 managers of tourist companies is the basis of the empirical information. The study was a personal survey carried out during FITUR 2019 International Tourism Fair of Madrid. The main element of the study is the future development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and smart tourism (ST) in business.

The results indicate that there is little development at present of the smart business eco-system and that development will continue to be slow in the future. Moreover, this is not a critical issue in the agendas of companies. It was found that tourists pressure tourism through the extensive use of their smartphones, but only at the level of tourism resources. Furthermore, it will be the consolidation of the smart tourism destination that marks the medium and long-term design of smart business.

The limitations concern the problems of a sampling procedure. Firstly, it operates with a database of managers’ opinions; secondly, there are specificities of each company in particular.

The design of the smart tourism destination must incorporate the integration of tourism companies, both with a useful vision of ICTs towards the creation of experiences.

Research on smart business tourism is very scarce compared to smart destination and smart tourists. Also, the data are supported by managers of important tourism companies, as their companies are present at FITUR.

Studying tourist behavior provides the privilege of diverging in the competition between destinations to attract tourists. Previous studies have explored the effects of tourist behavior on brand satisfaction, attachment and loyalty. However, there is a lack of studies that investigated the intuition behind shaping tourist behavior. To address this issue, this study aims to contribute to providing a viewpoint to apply locus of control (LOC) theory in the tourism context. LOC studies how individuals believe in controlling their feelings and judgment toward events.

Given the importance of the growing segmentation of ageing consumers and their increasing interaction with the Internet, digital marketing scholars are becoming more interested in this market. Prior research needs to pay more attention to this market in many contexts of digital marketing. This study aims to provide insights into ageing consumers’ content usage, content typology choices, and online brand advocacy (OBA).

Semi-structured interviews were applied, and 16 consumers from Southern Europe aged 55+ were included. The interviews were transcribed and examined following the principles of content analysis.

According to the research, older consumers display their usage and concerns regarding online content. They have different decision-making processes depending on whether they are purchasing products or services. Likewise, their choices of content typology vary based on the utilitarian or hedonic product category.

This study contributes to the literature by providing insights into this growing segmentation and proposing an OBA framework for older consumers related to content marketing. Finally, the study suggests that older consumers are passive online and active offline brand advocates.

The purpose of the present study is to determine how the cash conversion cycle (CCC) affects the financial performance of manufacturing companies in Bangladesh.

The authors have collected data of 61 Dhaka Stock Exchange (DSE)-listed firms from the 10 distinct manufacturing industries of Bangladesh for 18 years, from 2003 to 2020. The data have been analyzed through the two-steps system generalized method of moment (GMM) regression model, using profitability indicators return on asset (ROA) and earnings per share (EPS) as dependent variables, while CCC has been used as the independent variable, whereas asset turnover (ATO) and financial leverage (LEV) were used as control variables to assess the relationship between the CCC and financial performance.

The findings indicated that CCC has a negative connection with profitability – ROA and EPS, with the connection between CCC and EPS being highly significant. This indicates that reducing the inventory conversion time, reducing the period of receivable collection and making payments to creditors with potential delays might help Bangladeshi manufacturing firms boost their profitability. In addition, the firm-specific characteristics, namely ATO and LEV significantly affect the firm's profitability.

The research was based only on secondary sources and information was scarce. This research was conducted to determine the impact of the CCC on the corporate profitability of the manufacturing sector solely. There might be many other working capital variables that are still unexplored through this study.

The current study's findings are consistent with the traditional rule that minimizing the firm's days of the cash cycle may optimize financial performance. The results of this research have added to the existing body of knowledge on the topic of working capital management (WCM). Future research endeavors can be initiated for assessing the impact of the CCC on the firm's profitability in other industrial sectors or to identify other working capital variables that have much impact on corporate profitability.

This study is an original work of the researchers and adds value to the current literature in the domain of WCM and corporate profitability. The present study is the first one that covers firms in all the manufacturing industries in Bangladesh. The corporate managers, creditors, investors and other concerned stakeholders will be benefited from the findings of the present study.