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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.

This study aims to investigate the promoting effects of the quantity and quality of online review user-generated photos (UGPs) on perceived review usefulness. The research further tests the hindering effect of human facial presence in review photos on review usefulness.

Based on review samples of restaurants in a tourist destination Las Vegas, this study used an integrated method combining a machine learning algorithm and econometric modeling.

Results indicate that the number of UGPs depicting a restaurant’s food, drink, menu and physical environment has positive impacts on perceived review usefulness. The quality of online review UGPs can also enhance perceived review usefulness, whereas facial presence in these UGPs hinders perceived review usefulness.

Findings suggest that practitioners can implement certain tactics to potentially improve consumers’ willingness to share more UGPs and UGPs with higher quality. Review websites could develop image-processing algorithms for identifying and presenting UGPs containing core attributes in prominent positions on the site.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to present a comprehensive analytical framework investigating the enhancing or hindering roles of review photo quantity, photo quality and facial presence in online review UGPs on review usefulness. Using the heuristic-systematic model as a theoretical foundation, this study verifies the additivity effect and attenuation effect of UGPs’ visual elements on judgements of online review usefulness. Furthermore, it extends scalable image data analysis by adopting a deep transfer learning algorithm in hospitality and tourism.