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Drawing on service logic, the authors investigate how value cocreation leads to evangelical brand-related behaviors (brand defense and brand advocacy). The authors analyze the interplay between value cocreation and customer brand engagement on social media in driving these outcomes. The authors also consider the role of brand love in eliciting evangelical brand-related behaviors.

Respondents recruited through Amazon MTurk were surveyed on social media use in tourism-related decisions. The total useable sample size was 397. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the research model.

Value cocreation and customer brand engagement are drivers of evangelical brand-related behaviors, emphasizing the importance of these two in marketing and how they drive behavioral outcomes.

Service logic highlights the significance of value cocreation which, through customer brand engagement and love, leads to brand defense and advocacy. This explains the mediation in our model, where marketers must undertake efforts to support customer brand engagement and brand love.

Value is created by the user for the user through their experiences over time. Brands are owned by customers, and their defense and advocacy of them must be earned. Marketers facilitate customer value creation by providing the resources to cocreate value and love the brand.

Most studies investigate value cocreation from an in-role and/or extra-role perspective as to how it benefits firms. Through service logic, the authors illustrate how it leads to evangelical brand-related behaviors.

This study aims to investigate how city dependence and city social bonding determine city brand love. In addition, the study examines whether there are different resident segments that exhibit distinct behaviour in relation to city brand formation.

The study is based on primary responses collected from 595 residents from Khulna city in Bangladesh. The research model is tested using partial least square (PLS) structural equation modelling. The resident segments were identified using PLS prediction-oriented segmentation method.

Results show that city dependence (i.e. dependence on urban facilities and services provided by the city) and city social bonding (i.e. social interactions amongst residents in the city) lead to city brand love through city satisfaction and city identification. In addition, the study finds that city social bonding and city satisfaction are important for the relationship-reliant residents, whereas city dependence and city identification are important for the resource-reliant residents.

Future research can investigate the relationship between the length of residence and native vs non-native residents’ influence on city brand love formation.

The city brand managers and planners should adopt a resident-inclusive approach that considers the different needs of the residents to engender city brand love.

The study contributes to city branding literature by empirically investigating the under-researched topic of city brand love by identifying the key constructs and their role in determining city brand love. Further, it shows that the route to city brand love formation is different based on residents’ needs.

Digital self-expression, recently one of the most important research themes, is currently under-researched. In this context, this study aims to propose a parsimonious research model of self-extension tendency, its drivers and its outcomes. The model is tested in the context of social media engagement intentions (liking, sharing and commenting) with focal brands and across individualist versus collectivist cultures.

The model is tested in two individualist cultures (N = 230 and 232) and two collectivist cultures (N = 232 and 237) by conducting surveys in four countries (Australia, USA, Qatar and India). Nike and Ray-Ban are the focal brands studied, with Facebook serving as the targeted social networking site (SNS) platform.

Self-monitoring and self-esteem are found to drive the self-extension tendency across cultures, with stronger effects in the individualist culture than in the collectivist culture. The self-extension tendency has a relatively stronger positive influence on social media engagement intentions in the individualist culture than in the collectivist culture. This tendency is also found to mediate the link between self-monitoring, self-extension and social media engagement intentions across both cultures, albeit in different ways. In collectivist culture, self-monitoring’s influence on the self-extension tendency is moderated by public self-consciousness. The study’s findings have important theoretical and practical implications. In individualist culture, self-monitoring’s influence on the self-extension tendency is moderated by public self-consciousness.

The present findings confirm that the tendency to incorporate the brand into one’s self-concept and to further extend the self is indeed contingent on one’s cultural background. The role of public self-consciousness may vary between individualist and collectivist cultures, something recommended by past research for empirical testing.

Managers can leverage this research model to entice pro-brand social media engagement by nurturing consumers’ digital selves in terms of maneuvering their self-extension tendency and its drivers, namely, self-monitoring and self-esteem. Second, promoting the self-extension tendency and its drivers varies across cultures, with this finding offering practical cultural nuances supporting marketing managers’ decisions.

This is one of the pioneering studies that tests a cross-cultural parsimonious model based on theories of self-extension, self-monitoring and self-esteem, especially within the context of brand engagement intentions on an SNS platform.

This study investigates the role of personal resource (i.e. psychological empowerment) in reducing the negative impact of emotional exhaustion of frontline employees on their engagement. It also examines the moderating effects of ethical climate and transformational leadership in mitigating the negative influence of emotional exhaustion on engagement among frontline service employees (FLEs).

Data were collected from 671 frontline employees from financial services sector. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical regression analysis (HRA) were used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Results show that the impact of emotional exhaustion on employee engagement is greatly affected by psychological empowerment. Transformational leadership moderates the negative effects of emotional exhaustion on psychological empowerment, while ethical climate weakens the negative impact of emotional exhaustion on employee engagement.

Service firms need to provide enough autonomy to emotionally exhausted frontline employees so that they feel valued. The emotionally exhausted employees can be engaged if they are empowered to discharge their job most effectively and a climate is ensured which can keep them motivated toward accomplishing their targets. A fair and just treatment shall boost their morale to perform better and to strengthen their staying intentions.

The novelty of our study lies in examining and fostering engagement among emotionally exhausted FLEs. It shows that job resources at the individual level (i.e. psychological empowerment), team level (i.e. transformational leadership) and organizational level (i.e. ethical climate) can help in encouraging work engagement among emotionally exhausted FLEs.

The increased usage of smartphones has made mobile payment services (MPS) popular among millennials, but it is uncertain if this shift in behavior is temporary due to situational factors like the pandemic or a long-term trend due to technological advances. This study uses the diffusion of innovation (DOI) literature to assess an integrated model including smartphone addiction, technology-related and consumer-related factors that influence consumers' intention to use MPS. It also explores the interplay of situational variables and smartphone addiction in shaping this relationship.

The authors base the conceptual model on the theory of rational addiction and the theory of optimal flow. This model is then empirically validated through data collected from seven hundred users of MPS in India. Research hypotheses are tested using structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis.

The study finds that smartphone addiction has a positive impact on millennials' perceived advantages, compatibility, trialability and observability of MPS but does not significantly affect their perceived complexity or risk. The results also suggest that the relationship between smartphone addiction and MPS is moderated by situational factors. In low-priority situations, smartphone addiction strengthens millennials' perceptions and intentions to use MPS, while in high-priority situations, situational factors overshadow the impact of smartphone addiction.

The findings of the study enable organizations to capitalize on smartphone addiction-driven MPS adoption behavior to sustain long-term usage behavior by appropriately understanding the context/situation which drives MPS adoption.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effects of self-risk perception and health consciousness on the intention to purchase organic food. The study also explored external factors, such as social networking, culture and their impact on attitude, self-risk perception and purchasing organic food.

This study uses a quantitative research method to collect data from New Zealand and Fiji (N = 701). The data analysis used the partial least squares path modeling technique (PLS-PM) to test the proposed model.

The empirical results revealed that self-risk perception positively influenced organic food intention. The results show that the health consciousness level strengthens the relationship between self-risk perception, beliefs, values and purchase intention. The health consciousness level dampens the relationship between social networking and purchase intention.

The findings of this study provide valuable insights into the guidance and promotion of Fijian and New Zealand's organic food industry. This study enables marketers to develop health-related promotional tactics to stimulate organic food sales. It gauges organic food promoters to use social media-oriented consumer networking to spread health awareness swiftly.

This comprehensive study extends the literature by scrutinizing the profundity of self-risk perception and health consciousness in influencing and explaining consumers' purchase intentions. Aside from ample growth in the study of organic food purchase intention, which commonly replicates simple relationships, this study ascertains deeper meaning and new relationships to understand the moderating role of health consciousness levels in organic food studies, expanding the theory of planned behavior.

Social media has become an indispensable part of modern politics. Its rise in the political arena has coincided with the decline in trust toward mainstream media. Today, more than half of the population gets their political news and information through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Social media offers a great marketing opportunity to politicians as they allow them to bypass traditional media and communicate directly with voters, engage citizens during campaign and noncampaign periods, and create a brand image. As social media's influence in politics grows, so has the research devoted to political marketing on social media. It is against this backdrop that this chapter is written, which provides readers with an overview of the academic domain and the current state of literature. The chapter highlights the various research areas that have been explored in the literature and the implications of social media for political marketing strategy, along with the domain's current limitations and possible avenues of further research.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the role of service convenience in the relationship between organizational characteristics (such as brand equity, store ambiance, store layout, customer information and employee responsiveness) on customer engagement behaviors (CEBs), including service improvement, customer cooperation, positive word-of-mouth and customer helping customers. It examines two research models, with service convenience as a separate antecedent of CEBs (model A) and as a mediating variable between organizational characteristics and CEBs (model B).

Using a positivist paradigm, data were collected from 384 respondents representing the existing customers of grocery retailers based in India via a survey instrument. Data were analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling.

Results demonstrate service convenience as a motivational driver of CEBs. Results also show that the organizational characteristics significantly influence service convenience which in turn impacts CEBs.

The findings have important implications for store managers in effective management of customers' time and effort in terms of saving customers' time and effort as well as motivating customers to elicit their engagement behaviors.

The originality of this paper lies in identifying the impact of organizational characteristics in helping customers to save time and effort in their shopping activities and thereby elicit various types of CEBs. The paper also adds to knowledge by examining the role of service convenience in the nexus between organizational characteristics and CEB types.

The purpose of this paper is to test the influence of various content cues and characteristics on the followers’ online expressions of relationship quality. Second, the research aims to understand the moderating effects of content curation.

The sample comprised of 100 posts and 29,000 comments that were sourced from the Facebook pages of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The content was coded using the prior literature. Comments were manually coded using a deductive approach and captured the dimensions of relationship quality. Multiple regression was used to confirm the hypotheses.

Visuals, content popularity, volume of comments and content’s length have a positive effect on voters’ expressions of relationship quality. However, source credibility, argument quality, valence and interactivity did not have an impact. Additionally, content curation negatively moderated the effects of length and interactivity on expressions of relationship quality.

The findings emphasise the use of peripheral cues rather than the central route. Curating interactive and lengthy content should be avoided, however, curation of images and videos is well received.

The research contributes to the literature by understanding the role of marketer-generated content in building online relationships. Additionally, it explores the distinct impacts of created and curated content.