Search results

This study aims to investigate the effects of smart tourism technology experience (STTE) on tourist satisfaction and happiness in Bordeaux, with a focus on understanding the mediating role of self-gratification. By examining these relationships, the study seeks to provide insights into how smart tourism technologies can enhance tourist experiences.

The study uses partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze data collected from 380 tourists who visited Bordeaux. The measurement model assesses reliability and validity, while the structural model evaluates the proposed hypotheses and the mediation effects of self-gratification.

The results confirm that STTE positively impacts tourist satisfaction, with accessibility, informativeness and personalization significantly enhancing tourist satisfaction, while interactivity does not. Tourist satisfaction, in turn, positively affects tourist happiness. Furthermore, self-gratification partially mediates the relationship between tourist satisfaction and happiness, highlighting its importance in the smart tourism context.

This research extends the understanding of STTE by demonstrating its effects on tourist satisfaction and happiness. It introduces the mediating role of self-gratification, providing a novel perspective on how personalized smart tourism experiences contribute to overall tourist happiness.

A vast array of communication and behavioural theories and models has long assisted the communication management industry in its quest for excellence. While relying upon and discussing many of these theories in relation to website communication, this paper explores the development of theoretical platforms which are unique to the website mode of communication. It asserts that investigating new and varied theoretical paradigms can assist the communication management industry in analysing, extending and optimising its efforts in cyberspace. This paper explores the potential of a generic, theoretical approach to desired behavioural response via the website. It provides a modular definition of desired behavioural response to websites. This definition comprises six potential positive outputs and has been called “positive response action”. The paper proves, via comparative analysis, that positive response action parallels established communication goals and objectives. This paper also explores the concept of any one website belonging to one of three sender motivated categories: individual, strategic stakeholder communication and non‐strategic stakeholder communication. Traditional communication and behavioural response theories are analysed in relation to positive response action as are the essential cognitive needs of a website visitor. These needs are contextualised in a critical path “user gratification” format in relation to the achievement of the goal of positive response action. Excellence in effective website communication has become a priority for the public relations profession worldwide. While exploring this quest for excellence and its relation to theoretical dynamics, this paper reinforces the universally accepted requirement of accurate audience definition in order to achieve communication success and behavioural response.

While previous research underscored self-presentation desire as an important motivator of digital item purchase, user needs for digital items may become increasingly inner-focused with the maturation of virtual communities (VCs). The purpose of this paper is to posit that self-discrepancy and self-gratification are key to explaining user purchase of digital items.

A survey of 310 users of a social media-based VC well supports the hypotheses.

The tenet of this study is that individuals purchase digital items in VCs not only for self-presentation purpose per se, but more importantly for reasons of more inner-focused, such as due to their self-discrepancy that motivates them to purchase digital items to enhance self-esteem, and also for self-gratification. Furthermore, self-discrepancy arising from comparing ones’ current self against how they perceive others expect them to ideally be (i.e. self-other discrepancy) increases their self-presentation desire.

Overall the findings enrich the current view that individuals purchase digital items mainly to present themselves to others (Kim et al., 2012), thus affording a more complete understanding of this behavior that has both important research and practical implications.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the theory of consumption values by investigating the influence of aesthetic, conditional, convenience, monetary, epistemic, self-gratification, and social value on customer pre-adoption choice behavior to use mobile financial services.

Data were collected using an online survey questionnaire resulting in 524 total responses from registered users of M-PESA mobile financial services in Kenya, ultimately resulting in a usable sample of 384 responses. Partial least squares was used to evaluate the research model and associated hypotheses.

Aesthetic, conditional, convenience, monetary, epistemic, and self-gratification value are positive determinants of customer pre-adoption choice behavior to use M-PESA mobile financial services, but not social value.

Survey participants were limited to customers of M-PESA mobile financial services in Kenya. The study findings present important implications for managers and academic researchers in the mobile financial services market.

This is one of the first empirical studies to investigate customer pre-adoption choice behavior to use M-PESA mobile financial services from the perspective of customer perceived value.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the dimensionality of the consumer perceived value (CPV) concept, development of a CPV scale and its measurement in the Indian healthcare sector.

The data on consumer perceived value are gathered from 515 inpatients. The scale development is performed through exploratory factor analysis, reliability and validity analysis, and confirmatory analysis.

CPV scale in healthcare sector is a multidimensional scale represented by 27 items spread over six dimensions that are significant for consumer value measurement. The dimensions include acquisition value (AV), transaction value (TV), efficiency value (EV), aesthetic value (ESV), social interaction value (SI) and self gratification value (SG).

The study is theoretically limited to value and its antecedents. Research work on relationship of consumer perceived value with service quality, customer relationship management, internal marketing orientation, external marketing orientation and financial performance need to be pursued further for richer insight into the inter‐related service marketing concepts. The study is limited to indoor patients only and the perceptions of employees and other stakeholders are important to understand their overall affect on CPV.

The study has unique value to the healthcare literature, both from theoretical and managerial perspectives. The study produced a standardized scale of consumer perceived value which can be used in both public and private healthcare sectors. It incorporates valuation of functional and affective aspects, and provides overall quantification of the value perceived by Indian healthcare consumers.

This paper aims to measure customer-based brand equity in the context of hotels, and to develop and empirically validate a new scale, named guest-based hotel equity (GBHE), by incorporating the customer perceived value of hotels as a multidimensional construct in addition to its traditional dimensions (i.e. brand awareness and brand image).

A structured and self-administered survey was used, targeting 348 hotel guests who were surveyed about their experience with the last hotel they had stayed in during the previous year. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the research constructs dimensions, unidimensionality, convergent and discriminant validity and composite reliability.

The empirical findings indicate that GBHE is a multidimensional construct with nine dimensions, namely, hotel awareness, hotel overall image and seven dimensions of customer perceived value (i.e. the values of price, quality, self-gratification, aesthetics, prestige, transaction and hedonism). The new scale is found to have excellent psychometric properties; it has demonstrated its predictive power on behavioral intentions.

Although the authors believe that the sample size was reasonable and adequate for conducting CFA analysis, a bigger sample would be better and might increase the robustness of the proposed scale. In addition, to avoid the retrieval failure problem, hotel guests should be surveyed just after their stay in the hotel or not long afterwards. Further, the hotel classification or hotel star rating was not considered in developing and validating the GBHE scale.

The findings of this study provide hotel managers with a new tool to use in assessing the experiential value of the hotel brand equity, other than conventional hotel awareness and brand image. Further, using the multidimensional construct of perceived value provides hotel managers with more insights into what aspects of hotel brand equity they should focus on to influence the behavioral intentions of their guests.

The originality of this research is highlighted in several points. First, it develops and empirically validates a new scale to measure customer-based brand equity in the hotel context, that is, GBHE. Second, it incorporates the customer perceived value of hotels not as a unidimensional construct that is concerned only with cost, but as a multi-dimensional construct which includes in the GBHE scale dimensions that are both cognitive (i.e. of price and quality) and affective (i.e. of self-gratification, aesthetics, prestige, transaction and hedonism) in addition to its traditional dimensions (i.e. brand awareness and brand image). Third, it assesses the predictive power and relative importance of the GBHE dimensions for behavioral intentions (i.e. loyalty to hotels). Finally, no research has been done so far on the brand equity of hotels in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), although it is considered a fertile soil for tourism in the Arabian region.

Impulsive buyers are a dream segment for retailers and marketers. Stimulants in the retail environment and cognitive aspects evoke a sudden urge the acquisition of products spontaneously. This paper aims to examine key cognitive aspects of impulsive buying behaviour and purchase regret in an online context.

An online survey was conducted to collect the data of 317 online consumers with the help of a convenience sampling technique. The structural equation modelling technique was carried out to establish the validity and reliability of measures and examine the proposed relational paths.

The study results suggest that cognitive aspects recede impulsive buying, resulting in purchase regret. The empirical findings on the impulsive buying behaviour and purchase regret to yield several important implications, including developing marketing strategies and policies to evoke the intentions for impulsive buying behaviour, consumer innovation and balancing the feelings of regret.

The study also provides some significant contributions to the literature on online impulse buying and its related paradigms.

This study mainly attempted to determine the precursors of online impulse buying and purchase regret from the perspective of hedonic and experiential consumption motivation and consumer innovation. Getting reflections from cognitive dissonance theory and the post purchase evaluation, a theoretical model was developed and empirically tested for impulsive online buyers.

Collaborative filtering based recommender systems (CF–RS) are widely used to recommend products based on consumers' preference similarity. Recommendations by CF–RS merely provide suggestions as “people who bought this also bought this” while, consumers are unaware about the source of these recommendations. By amalgamating CF–RS with consumers' social network information, e-commerce sites can offer recommendation from social networks of consumers. These social network embedded systems are known as social recommender systems (SRS). The extant literature has researched on the algorithms and implementation of these systems; however, SRS have not been understood from consumers' psychological perspective. This study aims to qualitatively explore consumers' motives to accept SRS in e-commerce websites.

This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews of frequent online shoppers. SRS are currently not very widespread in the Indian e-commerce space; hence, a vignette was shown to respondents before they responded to the questions. Inductive qualitative content analysis method was used to analyse these interviews.

Three main themes (social-gratification, self-gratification and information-gratification) emerged from the analysis. Out of these, social-gratification acts as an enabler, while self-gratification along with some elements of information-gratification act as inhibitors towards acceptance of social recommendations. Based on these gratifications, we present a conceptual model on consumer's acceptance of social recommendations.

This study is an initial attempt to qualitatively understand consumers' attitudes and acceptance of social recommendations on e-commerce websites, which in itself is a fairly new phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the dimensions of a shopper consumption experience at the mall level, in relation to previous research on customer-perceived value. It aims to identify the customer-perceived value constructs of shopping malls (MALLVAL) and develop items for measuring these constructs, empirically validate the scale, carry out an initial investigation of the relationship, if any, among the MALLVAL dimensions, and discuss useful managerial implications based on the exploratory analysis of the statistical relationships between the various MALLVAL dimensions.

The constructs were tested and validated by means of a multidimensional procedure on a sample of 368 mall shoppers in the UAE. Amos 19 was used for this purpose.

The study revealed eight dimensions of MALLVAL: first, hedonic value; second, self-gratification value; third, utilitarian value; fourth, epistemic value; fifth, social interaction value; sixth, spatial convenience value; seventh, transaction value; and eighth, time convenience value.

Although the current sample is big and diverse enough and the findings may be representative, the authors urge other researchers to replicate the study and get replies from different countries and in particular to use the measures developed in this study to test their robustness.

Recognition of the importance of the different dimensions of MALLVAL should encourage mall developers and managers to develop mall attributes and shopping environments that provide the different values that compose MALLVAL.

This study makes a number of contributions to the research on customer-perceived value in the mall context in an Arabian environment by developing and validating a multidimensional scale that consists of more different constructs than hedonic and utilitarian values alone.

Shopping motivations are considered the primary stimuli for shoppers in the prepurchase stage of the customer journey. This study contributes to the understanding of how cultural factors affect shopping motivation. This study aims to understand the effect of cultural factors on shopping motivations in Eastern culture with Islam religion.

This study is based on the approach of phenomenology, and multiple methods were performed to interpret the phenomenon of shopping motivations. To this aim, 16 observations and 18 in-depth interviews were performed for data collection, and after that, data interpretation was done.

In this study, the motivations fall into product-related and hedonic motivations which are related to shopper psychology, while environmental motivations are culturally dependent. The influence of cultural factors on the individual concept of shopping motivations was identified in this study. Nine subthemes including product selection, product quality, functional, in-store service, convenience, store environment, value shopping, self-gratifications and role-playing were identified in the categories of product-related, environmental and hedonic motivations.

In non-Western countries, the store environment profoundly influences shoppers’ experience. This study clearly illustrates relationships between theory and practice in grocery shopping motivations in a non-Western context. Retailers who are active in eastern Islamic countries should pay attention to the fact that cultural and contextual factors play a significant impact on the shopping motivation and behavior of these shoppers.

In this study, shopping motivations are not fixed in different societies, and cultural and contextual factors play a significant impact in this regard. In other words, shopping motivations are fluid, and cultural factors play a significant role in their formation. This study makes two important contributions: First, cultural motivations are prominent among Muslim shoppers. Among these motivations, shopping environment motivations, including relationships with others and cleanliness, and staff behavior are very significant. These motivations are highly influenced by the culture of the context and we discover which motivations are not related to psychology alone and that the context has a significant influence on their formation. Second, hedonic motivations are also highlighted in the purchase of utilitarian products. In addition to direct effects, such as Islamic regulations on halal foods, Muslims’ religious tenets also have significant indirect effects on their behaviors and motivations.