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This study investigates the brand selfies that have the capability to help brands thrive through crises. The brand selfies spark a self-inferential process that makes customers feel connected to the brand and makes them biased toward a specific brand during an uncertain situation.

A total of 166 questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modelling (Smart PLS) and a niche group of young millennials from Thailand was selected based on their luxury items usage, frequency of visits to leisure spas and hotels, expensive car showrooms, branded jewelry stores and luxury watch shops.

The study highlights the emergence of brand selfies during the crisis and the priority given by customers as compared to brand-generated content or promotional campaigns. The results indicated a positive influence of brand selfies on brand preferences directly and through the mediation of brand signature.

It is fascinating for brands that customers voluntarily include their products in their carefully crafted and staged selfies that deliver their image and massages as social signifiers during a chaotic situation.

The research classifies the impacts of brand selfies in the luxury, leisure and tourism market of Thailand and its assistance in thriving through crises. The study is one of the rare studies that present brand selfies as a hassle-free promotional tool for brand signature and a game-changing strategy to deal with crises.

Selfie is a popular self-expression platform to visually communicate and represent individual thoughts, beliefs, and creativity. However, not much has been investigated about selifie's pedagogical impact when used as an educational tool. Therefore, the authors seek to explore students' perceptions, emotions, and behaviour of using selfies for a classroom activity.

A triangulated qualitative approach using thematic, sentiment, and selfie visual analysis was used to investigate selfie perception, behaviour and creativity on 203 undergraduates. Sentiment analyses (SAs) were conducted using Azure Machine Learning and International Business Machines (IBM) Tone Analyzer (TA) to validate the thematic analysis outcomes, whilst the visual analysis reflected cues of behaviour and creativity portrayed.

Respondents indicated positive experiences and reflected selfies as an engaging, effortless, and practical activity that improves classroom dynamics. Emotions such as joy with analytical and confident tones were observed in their responses, further validating these outcomes. Subsequently, the visual cue analysis indicated overall positive emotions reflecting openness towards the experience, yet also reflected gender-based clique tendency with modest use of popular selfie gestures such as the “peace sign” and “chin shelf”. Furthermore, respondents also preferred to mainly manipulate text colours, frames, and colour blocks as a form of creative output.

The study's findings contribute to the limited studies of using selfies for teaching and learning by offering insights using thematic analysis, SA and visual cue analysis to reflect perception, emotions, and behaviour.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0608/

There are many profound links between fashion and tourism. This chapter provides a critical reflection, mainly from a philosophical, historical, and linguistic perspective, on the dynamic relationship and parallel evolution between these two sectors. It explains how their interconnectedness form and mirror contemporary society. This chapter classifies the connections between the two, starting with the person, her body, and the relationship the latter has with fashion and tourism, and with the contemporary society at large. Four layers of such connections are exemplified. It also discusses a selfie, as a symbolic (digital) communication object and a complex phenomenon facilitated by changing technological affordances and societal functions as an excellent case of the complex relationships between fashion and tourism.

As one of the most cutting-edge technologies in the digital age, facial enhancement technology (FET) has greatly enhanced consumer online shopping experience and brought new e-commerce opportunities for cosmetics retailers. The purpose of this paper is to extend the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model in the context of FET. In addition to the concepts from the original model, the new FET-UTAUT model features (low) body esteem, social media addiction and FET adoption.

A purposive sampling of FET users in China via an online questionnaire yields 473 respondents. To analyze the data, this research uses the structural equation modeling method via statistical package for the social sciences and analysis of a moment structures software. A two-step approach, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, was used to test the hypotheses and generate the findings.

Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions and (low) body esteem have positive relationships with FET adoption. FET adoption has a positive relationship with online purchase intention of branded color cosmetics, and the empirical evidence for the moderating role of social media addiction in the relationship between FET adoption and online purchase intention is inconclusive.

This research extends the traditional UTAUT model by proposing a novel FET-UTAUT model that incorporates additional key concepts such as body esteem, FET adoption and social media addiction. Managerial implications of this research are provided for FET designers and branded color cosmetic retailers.

This paper aims to demonstrate how Alayah, a 16-year-old African American girl, leverages multiple expressive modes for intersectional self-representation as speculative design. Here, speculative design refers to a multimodal composition (i.e. digital collage) which leverages multiple expressive modes for intersectional self-celebration in possible futures.

Informed by intersectional multimodal literacy frameworks and analyses, this paper addresses the question, “How does Alayah represent her college and career futures in her speculative multimodal design? To address this question, the author analyzed Alayah's digital collage using an intersectional multimodal analysis template complemented by a thematic analysis of her interview data and the narrated explanation of her collage.

In a speculative design composed of 15 images and words, Alayah agentively determined and critically celebrated her intersectional college and career futures through four interrelated themes: Black girl affirmation; Collegiate success; “Sweet” work; and Black livingness.

By centering Black girls’ speculative multimodal designs in college and career curricula, ELA educators (re)imagine college and career pedagogies to critically celebrate Black adolescent girls as intelligent, empowered and literate young women worthy of the futures that they desire.

The proliferation of digital communication on social media provides new opportunities for businesses to take advantage of Internet memes to boost customer engagement. Academic literature on digital communications mostly focuses on popular forms such as selfies, branded posts, and branded emoticons. Less attention has been paid to brand memes and their implications for brand management. Based on the cue utilization theory, this research aims to investigate the informational cues of brand memes foster brand partnerships.

The structural equation modeling and importance-performance matrix analysis were used to empirically validate the research hypotheses with 595 respondents to an online survey.

Three informational cues of brand memes (i.e. comprehensibility, novelty, and meme-brand congruity) stimulated consumers' attitudes, which in turn impacted consumer-brand relationships. Another brand meme informational cue, sarcasm, negatively moderated the relationships between the three informational cues and consumer-brand relationships.

Our findings indicate that a brand can engage consumers in conversations on social media and foster long-term consumer-brand relationships through brand memes.

The chapter discusses an articulation detected in the Ursula School between the discipline/indiscipline logic (Rodrigues, 2007) and the contemporary cultural tone in which to be is to be perceived, be seen (Türcke, 2010), experienced by Brazilian adolescents. The pursuit of being seen/perceived was persistent in the statements of the students who participated in the research. An ethnographic perspective guided the methodology of the research. The text aims to describe articulations present in the Ursula School, the empirical locus of the investigation. The empirical data of the paper are presented through ethnographic discussions. The ethnography found students eager to be seen/perceived by their peers and/or school professionals. It reinforces the pleasure/power spirals (Foucault, 2012) contained in disciplining, being disciplined, or being undisciplined. At the same time, it highlights a game between seeing and being seen (Bhabha, 2004). Nevertheless, students’ behavior was ambivalent, as some ethnographic data show. The articulations described in the chapter enable us to discuss how adolescents have recently experienced school. As well as this chapter allows sociological considerations about a school that remains a pivotal institution in the lives of adolescents, but is traversed by externals logics, mainly derived from industrialized cultural elements. The Türcke (2010) assertion will be explored through a new question. Be is to be perceived and seen by who, and in which context?

Facilitated by image retouch tools, social media influencers can digitally enhance their self-image in product recommendation posts. This paper proposes that image enhancement may serve as a cue for the audience to assess the authenticity of the influencer (“true to oneself”), which further affects the influencer's product recommendation effectiveness (i.e. attitudes toward the post and recommended product).

Experiment 1 examines the effect of image enhancement on consumers' perceived influencer authenticity and product recommendation effectiveness. Experiment 2 considers the moderating role of post type, examining the effects in informational versus storytelling posts.

Consumers perceived an influencer to be more authentic when the image is not enhanced; in turn, consumers reported more favorable attitudes toward the post and the recommended product upon reading the post. The effects are moderated by post type: the effect of image enhancement (through perceived influencer authenticity) exists in posts using an informational message format but is attenuated for those using a storytelling message format.

This research enriches the literature on authenticity cues by documenting a novel visual cue and contributes to influencer marketing by identifying a nuanced interactive effect between image enhancement and post type on recommendation effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how automation in the ever-changing technological landscape is increasing integrated into, and has become a significant presence in, our personal lives.

Through post qualitative inquiry, the authors provide a contemplation of automation and its effect on creativity, as a contemporary expression of dis/locations, the simulacrum, performative work and a toxic digital presence in socio-cultural-technical spaces.

The authors discuss how we behave, contribute, explore, interact and communicate within and across automated digital platforms, has salience for understanding and questioning the ways that dominant discourses in the contemporary construction and enactment of subjectivity, creativity and agency are being modulated by the machine.

This paper offers a nuanced consideration of creativity, by considering the way creativity is being performed and situated within the effects of automation and its role in dis/locations, performative work and its potential as a the simulacrum in socio-cultural-technical spaces.