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This article aims to examine political marketing strategies adopted by the politicians operating in base of the pyramid (BOP) areas and their impact on the BOP voters using the tenets of the social influence theory.

The authors resorted to a qualitative phenomenological inquiry for this study. The responses obtained from two qualitative studies were subjected to thematic analysis. Two thematic maps were integrated into a conceptual model.

Study 1 indicates that the politicians operating at the BOP resort to vote-bank segmentation, clientelism, mobilizing opinion leaders, short guerilla war against opposition and communication bombarding. Study 2 has elaborated on how poor voters perceive these strategies and form their opinions towards the party/candidate.

The findings of this study highlight the need for essential policy formulation to protect BOP consumers from deceptive political tactics.

This study develops a model of the effectiveness of voting strategies at the BOP. It also contributes to the literature on social influence theory by indicating how the three social influence processes (compliance, identification and internalization) result in different ways of accepting political influence.

Recent development and democratization of digital technologies call for studying base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) consumers’ interactions with these technologies. This study aims to explore how BOP consumers interact with mobile information and communication technology (mICT) and improve their welfare.

Following an extensive literature review, content analysis of the reviewed articles and reports was conducted to build this article’s conceptual foundation.

This study has conceptualized five mechanisms in which mICT improves the lives of BOP customers through enhanced access and control of resources. In particular, the authors characterize a converging nature of mICT and related applications (social media, internet of things, artificial intelligence and sharing economy) as resources for social change. The authors find a striking contrast between BOP and affluent consumers regarding their motivations and barriers to adopting mICT-based applications. Implications to research, technology design and policymaking are discussed.

The intersection of mICT and BOP is under-researched. With this paper, we tried to address this research gap. Further, this study has brought out several important research questions in each application, serving as a springboard for future researchers.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the triggers of positive electronic word of mouth (eWOM) using real-time Big Data obtained from online retail sites/dedicated review sites.

In this study, real-time Big Data has been used and analysed through support vector machine, to segregate positive and negative eWOM. Thereafter, using natural language processing algorithms, this study has classified the triggers of positive eWOM based on their relative importance across six product categories.

The most important triggers of positive eWOM (like product experience, product type, product characteristics) were similar across different product categories. The second-level antecedents of positive eWOM included the person(s) for whom the product is purchased, the price and the source of the product, packaging and eagerness in patronising a brand.

The findings of this study indicate that the marketers who are active in the digital forum should encourage and incentivise their satisfied consumers to disseminate positive eWOM. Consumers with special interest for any product type (mothers or doctors for baby food) may be incentivised to write positive eWOM about the product’s ingredients/characteristics. Companies can launch the sequels of existing television or online advertisements addressing “for whom the product is purchased”.

This study identified the triggers of the positive eWOM using real-time Big Data extracted from online purchase platforms. This study also contributes to the literature by identifying the levels of triggers that are most, more and moderately important to the customers for writing positive reviews online.

The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the antecedents of electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Thereafter, it examines the impact of eWOM and its antecedents on consumer-based brand equity (CBBE).

A total of 93 research articles on eWOM and CBBE were critically reviewed using the systematic literature review method.

This study has consolidated the antecedents of eWOM from the extant literature. It has identified eight antecedents of eWOM including information or argument quality, loyalty, social relationship, source quality, satisfaction, subjective norms, and information quantity. This study has come out with a conceptual framework, followed by 16 hypotheses addressing the possible relationships between eWOM, its antecedents, and CBBE.

This study pioneers to examine the impact of the antecedents of eWOM on CBBE through an exhaustive review of contemporary literature. It has also explored the possibility of eWOM acting as a mediator between the antecedents of eWOM and CBBE. Therefore, this study unravels a wide array of directions for researchers to examine the relationships between the constructs mentioned above and CBBE.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting decision-making at the BoP and propose a framework of the consumer decision-making process at the base of the pyramid (BoP).

The qualitative research design was adopted to collect primary data. Data collected through the in-depth semi-structured interviews of the 48 BoP consumers in Kolkata and Kharagpur (India) were subjected to grounded theory analysis for theory development.

This study reveals that consumer vulnerability affects the decision-making process and the transaction cost at BoP level. It was observed that the consumers at the BoP make constrained choices due to their vulnerability and try to minimise transaction cost while selecting the retails. The constrained retail choice leads to a limited selection of products and brands.

This study, for the first time, has investigated the decision-making process for BoP consumers in detail. As a pioneering attempt, it sheds light on some new factors including consumer vulnerability and transaction cost that have an impact on the consumer decision-making process.

The purpose of this research is to propose and validate a theoretical framework explaining web-rooming and showrooming as a multi-stage decision-making process. The authors have used consumer purchase decision-making theories to propose a model that identifies showrooming and webrooming as a combination of two decisions, channel choice during information search and channel choice during actual purchase. Further, the authors explored how various antecedents of showrooming and webrooming have differential effects on various stages of a purchase decision-making process and how product type moderates the relationships.

The authors have conducted empirical research, whereby 243 responses were obtained from a cross-sectional survey. The authors have used structural equation modeling and multiple regression analysis to validate our theoretical model.

Webrooming or showrooming is a multi-stage decision-making process for the consumers. First, consumers decide whether to search online or offline and then whether to buy online and offline. Different individual, purchase context-related and channel related factors impact these decisions. Product type governs which variables will be more important than others.

The research looks to enhance the understanding of the consumer's decision-making process during showrooming and webrooming while also helping retailers design and implement appropriate strategies that could affect consumers during information search and actual purchase.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of other customer's opinion on a service firm and its alliance on the evaluation of the airline by the focal customer by integrating qualitative and quantitative user-generated content. The study also explores the relative importance of core and peripheral attributes in consumer evaluations.

A text mining and natural language processing-based approach was followed to extract insights from the qualitative part of 18,457 consumer reviews, which were later analyzed along with the quantitative information obtained from the reviews using linear regression and logistic regression methods.

The authors found that customer satisfaction and recommendation behavior is formed by own and others' opinion about the airline and alliance. The relative importance of the core and peripheral attributes depends on the psychological distance from the evaluation of the attribute.

The theoretical contribution and managerial implications have been discussed in detail.

It helps in review management strategy, service design strategy and the alliance and partnership strategies of the airlines.

This is the first paper that explores the impact attribute-level evaluations found in prior reviews on the future reviews of customers. It also explores the effect of prior reviews in the context of a service business and its alliances.

The tourism literature has focused only on destination branding; nonetheless, measuring the quality of a destination from the tourism point of view has been overlooked, especially in the context of the emerging markets. This paper aims to focus on developing a scale measuring the overall quality of the tourist destinations.

With the help of extensive review of the literature, the study identified the key variables for measuring the quality of tourism destination in emerging markets. Thereafter, to determine the factor structure (purification stage) and assess the stability of the factor structure (validation stage), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has been conducted. A second-order CFA has been conducted to analyse the factor structure stability of the broad dimensions, namely, the quality of service, the quality of destination features and the quality of experience.

This research shows that the quality of tourism can be determined not only by the quality of destination features but also by the quality of service and the quality of experience one perceives from a destination. Together, these three dimensions and their various sub-dimensions form a valid scale to measure the overall quality of a tourist destination.

This study provides marketing managers an idea of the dimensions that affect tourist destination quality. They can now align the dimensions measuring destination quality with the destinations that they are marketing to tourists. This can add to the competitive advantage of any place brand.

This study has developed three distinct measurement scales for quality of experience, quality of destination feature and quality of services and validated the same with adequate data following appropriate scale development procedure. Through empirical research, the authors have integrated these three dimensions as the constructs for measuring the overall quality of tourist destinations. Hence, as a pioneering attempt, the authors have developed a scale to measure the quality of tourist destinations.

Given the increasing dominance of medical tourism on the service economy of some of the developing nations, as a pioneering attempt, this study aims to develop a consumer-based brand equity (CBBE) measurement scale for the medical tourist destinations (city/hospital).

Following the traditional marketing construct development process (qualitative study, purification study and validation study), in the present study, two sets of large and independent samples were assessed to judge the dimensionality of the measure.

A well-validated measurement scale was developed as an amalgamation of four dimensions, namely, awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty and authenticity to assess CBBE of medical destinations.

To reduce the financial and physical risk associated with the purchase of treatment, the customers may rely on “authenticity” of the service providers to select a treatment destination. The outcomes would help medical administrators/managers to focus more on developing “assurance” by increased reliability, responsiveness and tangibles to attract the medical tourists to a large extent.

The study is a pioneering attempt to develop a scale for measuring CBBE for medical tourist destinations. The study aligns with earlier CBBE scales in terms of the first three elements, namely, brand awareness, loyalty and perceived quality. However, based on predictive validity, the study puts forth five interrelated first order attributes, namely, “trust”, “value for money”, “quality of residents”, reliability and soft issues (like friendliness and ease of process) as contributing factors to a so far unexplored dimension, “brand authenticity”.

This research theoretically proposed and empirically validated a Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) scale specifically for Medical Tourism for emerging economies including recent findings from tourism theories such as gravity model and signalling theory, but more specifically accommodating political, cultural, economic, legal and social influences.

In-depth literature reviews from tourism, medical tourism, healthcare and hospitality domains are used to propose the theoretical model. The authors have used the lavaan package in R for the empirical analysis and model verification.

The research included, tested and verified the established latent variables such as “brand awareness”, “brand association”, “perceived quality” and “loyalty”, along with new observed variables for the CBBE scale from the theoretical perspectives of this research. “Infrastructure” has emerged as a new scale construct and “culture” was found to be a moderating variable for “perceived quality” in the CBBE scale, which are novel additions to the literature.

The research contributed to scale refining, latent construct assessment, and fine-tuning of the observed variables for the mentioned theoretical gaps.