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The purpose of this study is to operationalise and measure the effects of negative customer engagement (CE) in conjunction with positive CE. Both valences are explored through affective, cognitive and behaviour dimensions, and, in relation to the antecedent of involvement and outcome of word-of-mouth (WOM). It also explores the moderating influence of service context by examining engagement within a social service versus a social networking site (SNS). Engagement with the dual focal objects of a service brand and a service community are also examined.

Structural equation modelling is used to analyse 625 survey responses.

Involvement is a strong driver of positive CE, and positive CE has a strong effect on WOM. These findings are consistent across the “brand” and “community” object, suggesting positive CE is mutually reinforced by different objects in a relationship. Positive CE is also found to operate consistently across the service types. Involvement is a moderately negative driver of negative CE, and negative CE is a positive driver of WOM. These relationships operate differently across the objects and service types. Involvement has a stronger inverse effect on negative CE for the social service, diverging from assumptions that negative CE is reflective of highly involved customers. Interestingly, negative CE has a stronger effect on WOM in the social service, highlighting the active and vocal nature of customers within this service context.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to quantitatively measure positive and negative valences of engagement concurrently, and examine the moderating effect of dual objects across contrasting service types.

With the advent of increasingly sophisticated AI, the nature of work in the service frontline is changing. The next frontier is to go beyond replacing routine tasks and augmenting service employees with AI. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether service employees augmented with AI-based emotion recognition software are more effective in interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) and whether and how IER impacts their own affective well-being.

For the underlying study, an AI-based emotion recognition software was developed in order to assist service employees in managing customer emotions. A field study based on 2,459 call center service interactions assessed the effectiveness of the AI in augmenting service employees for IER and the immediate downstream consequences for well-being relevant outcomes.

Augmenting service employees with AI significantly improved their IER activities. Employees in the AI (vs control) condition were significantly more effective in regulating customer emotions. IER goal attainment, in turn, mediated the effect on employee affective well-being. Perceived stress related to exposure to the AI augmentation acted as a competing mediator.

Service firms can benefit from state-of-the-art AI technology by focusing on its capacity to augment rather than merely replacing employees. Furthermore, signaling IER goal attainment with the help of technology may provide uplifting consequences for service employee affective well-being.

The present study is among the first to empirically test the introduction of an AI-fueled technology to augment service employees in handling customer emotions. This paper further complements the literature by investigating IER in a real-life setting and by uncovering goal attainment as a new mechanism underlying the effect of IER on the well-being of the sender.

Previous research has found that individuals with social phobia differ from controls in their processing of emotional faces. For instance, people with social phobia show increased attention to briefly presented threatening faces. However, when exposure times are increased, the direction of this attentional bias is more unclear. Studies investigating eye movements have found both increased as well as decreased attention to threatening faces in socially anxious participants. The current study investigated eye movements to emotional faces in eight patients with social phobia and 34 controls. Three different tasks with different exposure durations were used, which allowed for an investigation of the time course of attention. At the early time interval, patients showed a complex pattern of both vigilance and avoidance of threatening faces. At the longest time interval, patients avoided the eyes of sad, disgust, and neutral faces more than controls, whereas there were no group differences for angry faces.

This paper aims to demonstrate that online complainants’ reactions to a company’s service recovery attempts (webcare) can significantly vary across two different types of dissatisfied customers (“vindictives” vs “constructives”), who have dramatically diverging complaint goal orientations.

Online multi-country survey among 812 adult consumers who recently had a dissatisfying brand experience and turned to a marketer-generated social media site to voice an online complaint for achieving their ultimate complaining goals. Scenario-based online experiment for cross-validating the survey findings.

Results suggest that “vindictive complainants” – driven dominantly by brand-adverse motives – are immune to any form of webcare, while “constructive complainants” – interested in restoring the customer-brand relationship – react more sensitively. For the latter, “no-responses” often trigger detrimental brand-related reactions (e.g. unfavorable brand image), whereas “defensive responses” are likely to stimulate post-webcare negative word-of-mouth.

This research identifies the gains and harms of (un-)desired webcare. By doing so, it not only sheds light on the circumstances when marketers have to fear negative effects (e.g. negative word-of-mouth) but also provides insights into the conditions when such effects are unlikely. While the findings of the cross-sectional survey are validated with an online experiment, findings should be interpreted with care as other complaining contexts should be further investigated.

Marketers have to expect a serious “backfiring effect” from an unexpected source, namely, consumers who were initially benevolent toward the involved brand but who received an inappropriate response.

This research is one of the first research studies that enables marketers to identify situations when webcare is likely to backfire on the brand after a service failure.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of consumers’ perceptions of the enjoyment and originality of firm-generated content (FGC) posted on Instagram on affective customer engagement (CE). In addition, an examination is undertaken of affective CE as a driver of customer behaviour.

The paper takes a quantitative approach using a sample of 334 women followers of an eco-friendly restaurant Instagram account. After validation of the measurement scales, the hypotheses were tested through structural equation modelling. Drawing on the stimuli-organism-response framework the authors posit that consumers’ perceptions of the enjoyment and originality of Instagram posts generate affective CE, which, in turn, influences customer behaviour.

The results showed that the perceived enjoyment and perceived originality of Instagram posts generated by an eco-friendly restaurant have a positive influence on affective CE, which, in turn, affects consumers’ recommendation behaviours, intention to follow the restaurant’s advice on Instagram and intention to revisit the restaurant.

This research provides novel insights into how the perceived enjoyment and originality of FGC posted on Instagram increases women’s affective engagement and expands knowledge of how affective CE might increase positive electronic word-of-mouth, intention to follow the restaurant’s advice and repurchase intentions.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar el impacto de las percepciones de los consumidores sobre el disfrute y la originalidad del contenido generado por la empresa (CGE) publicado en Instagram en el engagement afectivo del cliente. Además, se examina el engagement afectivo del cliente como impulsor de su comportamiento.

El artículo adopta un enfoque cuantitativo utilizando una muestra de 334 mujeres seguidoras de la cuenta de Instagram de un restaurante ecológico. Tras la validación de las escalas de medición, las hipótesis se testaron mediante un modelo de ecuaciones estructurales. Basándonos en el marco S-O-R, se postula que las percepciones de los consumidores sobre el disfrute y la originalidad de las publicaciones de Instagram generan un engagement afectivo del cliente que, a su vez, influye en su comportamiento.

Los resultados mostraron que la percepción de disfrute y la percepción de originalidad de las publicaciones de Instagram generadas por un restaurante ecológico tienen una influencia positiva en el engagement afectivo del cliente, que, a su vez, afecta a los comportamientos de recomendación de los consumidores, la intención de seguir los consejos del restaurante en Instagram y la intención de volver a visitar el restaurante.

Esta investigación proporciona una visión novedosa sobre cómo la percepción del disfrute y la originalidad de los CGE publicados en Instagram aumenta el engagement afectivo de las mujeres, y amplía el conocimiento sobre cómo el engagement afectivo de los clientes podría aumentar la comunicación boca-oído electrónica (eCBO) positiva, la intención de seguir los consejos del restaurante y las intenciones de recompra.

本文旨在分析消费者对Instagram上发布的企业生成内容（FGC）的愉悦度和原创性的感知对情感性顾客契合的影响。此外, 本文还对作为顾客行为驱动因素之一的情感性顾客契合进行了研究。

本文采用定量方法, 以一家生态友好餐厅的Instagram账户的334名女性粉丝为研究样本。在验证了测量量表有效性后, 通过结构方程模型对假设进行了检验。基于S-O-R框架, 我们认为消费者对Instagram帖子的愉悦度和原创性的感知会产生情感性的顾客契合, 进而影响顾客行为。

研究结果显示, 消费者对生态友好餐厅在Instagram上所发帖子的愉悦度和原创性的感知对情感性顾客参与有正向影响, 而情感性顾客契合进而影响消费者在Instagram上的推荐行为、采纳餐厅建议的意愿和重访该餐厅的意愿。

这项研究对Instagram上发布的FGC的愉悦度和原创性消费者感知如何增加女性的情感契合提供了新的见解, 并扩展了关于情感性顾客契合如何增加积极的电子口碑、采纳餐厅建议的意愿和再次购买意愿的知识。

Dynamic advertising, including television and online video ads, demands new theory and tools developed to understand attention to moving stimuli. The purpose of this study is to empirically test the predictions of a new dynamic attention theory, Dynamic Human-Centred Communication Systems Theory, versus the predictions of salience theory.

An eye-tracking study used a sample of consumers to measure visual attention to potential areas of interest (AOIs) in a random selection of unfamiliar video ads. An eye-tracking software feature called intelligent bounding boxes (IBBs) was used to track attention to moving AOIs. AOIs were coded for the presence of static salience variables (size, brightness, colour and clutter) and dynamic attention theory dimensions (imminence, motivational relevance, task relevance and stability).

Static salience variables contributed 90% of explained variance in fixation and 57% in fixation duration. However, the data further supported the three-way interaction uniquely predicted by dynamic attention theory: between imminence (central vs peripheral), relevance (motivational or task relevant vs not) and stability (fleeting vs stable). The findings of this study indicate that viewers treat dynamic stimuli like real life, paying less attention to central, relevant and stable AOIs, which are available across time and space in the environment and so do not need to be memorised.

Despite the limitations of small samples of consumers and video ads, the results of this study demonstrate the potential of two relatively recent innovations, which have received limited emphasis in the marketing literature: dynamic attention theory and IBBs.

This study documents what does and does not attract attention to video advertising. What gets attention according to salience theory (e.g. central location) may not always get attention in dynamic advertising because of the effects of relevance and stability. To better understand how to execute video advertising to direct and retain attention to important AOIs, advertisers and advertising researchers are encouraged to use IBBs.

This study makes two original contributions: to marketing theory, by showing how dynamic attention theory can predict attention to video advertising better than salience theory, and to marketing research, showing the utility of tracking visual attention to moving objects in video advertising with IBBs, which appear underutilised in advertising research.

Social media platforms are highly visible platforms, so politicians try to maximize their benefits from their use, especially during election campaigns. On the other side, people express their views and sentiments toward politicians and political issues on social media, thus enabling them to observe their online political behavior. Therefore, this study aims to investigate user reactions on social media during the 2016 US presidential campaign to decide which candidate invoked stronger emotions on social media.

For testing the proposed hypotheses regarding emotional reactions to social media content during the 2016 presidential campaign, regression analysis was used to analyze a data set that consists of Trump’s 996 posts and Clinton’s 1,253 posts on Facebook. The proposed regression models are based on viral (likes, shares, comments) and emotional Facebook reactions (Angry, Haha, Sad, Surprise, Wow) as well as Russell’s valence, arousal, dominance (VAD) circumplex model for valence, arousal and dominance.

The results of regression analysis indicate how Facebook users felt about both presidential candidates. For Clinton’s page, both positive and negative content are equally liked, while Trump’s followers prefer funny and positive emotions. For both candidates, positive and negative content influences the number of comments. Trump’s followers mostly share positive content and the content that makes them angry, while Clinton’s followers share any content that does not make them angry. Based on VAD analysis, less dominant content, with high arousal and more positive emotions, is more liked on Trump’s page, where valence is a significant predictor for commenting and sharing. More positive content is more liked on Clinton’s page, where both positive and negative emotions with low arousal are correlated to commenting and sharing of posts.

Building on an empirical data set from Facebook, this study shows how differently the presidential candidates communicated on social media during the 2016 election campaign. According to the findings, Trump used a hard campaign strategy, while Clinton used a soft strategy.

Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.