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The purpose of this paper is to identify how consumer engagement practices shape the dynamics of a soccer club virtual brand community.

A netnographic approach was employed. Using a Python script, more than 7,000 tweets about São Paulo FC soccer club on Twitter were collected and analyzed using the Virtual Brand Community Engagement Practices typology.

The dynamics of engagement relies on two types of practices: those that comprise the actions of tweeting, retweeting, replying to, mentioning and liking messages from and about the São Paulo FC soccer club profile and those derived from the proposition of Hollebeek et al. (2017). Given the dynamics of Twitter, some practices have performed differently than the original proposal, resulting in a slight adaptation of the framework.

Given the length and the netnographic nature of this study, its findings should be considered exploratory. Future studies can build upon the ideas presented here by researching different contexts and focal objects of engagement.

This paper provides the refinement of social media strategies and content development to make them more efficient and to establish a relevant communication channel with audiences. This knowledge can contribute to a better understanding of goals and metrics.

This paper is based on the behavioral nature of engagement in virtual brand communities, which is an increasing topic of interest. To date, few studies have examined online engagement using a practice approach specifically in the sports marketing context.

The purpose of this paper is to identify how a city as a brand discursively conceives and articulates relevant meanings in order to build its identity.

The study follows a discursive semiotic approach using content from the Visit.Rio website and posts from its Facebook page.

It was possible to organize the values and meanings that structure the Rio de Janeiro brand in the semiotic square. Narrative schemes that concretize the value proposition guided mainly by contemplation and experimentation situations were identified. The discursive construction of the Rio de Janeiro brand is primarily marked by the relation between nature and culture, where contrasting meanings are explored by the City Hall managers.

This study is limited to the analysis of the enunciator (Rio de Janeiro brand managers) in their process of creating and articulating the city’s meanings. Future research could investigate the enunciate (public) perspective.

Managers should consider the discursive approach since it provides a more holistic perspective on the brand-building process. The findings may contribute to the understanding, selection and articulation of the correct meanings that should be communicated to the public in order to make the city a relevant and desirable place to visit.

This paper is based on the concept of a brand as a set of discourses grounded by meanings that are culturally conceived, which, thus, presents itself as a different approach from the traditional one, especially in research on place branding.

Based on the conceptual model of consumer engagement in a virtual brand community, this study aims to investigate this phenomenon and gauges the validity of the model’s assumptions in the context of a Facebook fan page.

The interactions between L’Oréal Paris Brazil and the members of its virtual community were collected for three months using a netnographic approach. The data of these interactions were evaluated using content analysis techniques.

The dimensions, processes and sub-processes of the conceptual model of consumer engagement, as proposed in the literature, were confirmed. Furthermore, the results reinforce the perspective that simple participation or involvement does not presume engagement, which reflects a complex psychological state dependent on the context and requiring previous and subsequent processes to manifest.

The findings were based on an examination of a high-end beauty product brand’s Facebook page. Nevertheless, these findings are not necessarily limited to high-end context consumers. Larger scale research (i.e. involving wider product categories) could endorse the underlying theoretical model of engagement.

The study contributes to understanding the dynamics of how brands build relationships with consumers through social media and confirms the dynamics of the engagement concept and its role as a tool to increase brand value and competitive advantage.

This study contributes to the field by bridging the knowledge gap concerning consumer engagement in a social media context with practical and empirical evidence.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework that highlights transhumanism’s ideals of achieving superintelligence, super longevity and super well-being through human enhancement technologies (HET) and their relations with services marketing principles.

Framed by the transformative service research (TSR), this conceptual work articulates the 7Ps of the marketing mix with four macro-factors that create tensions at both the marketplace and consumer levels.

HET has potential for doing good but also tremendous bad; greater attention is needed from services marketing researchers especially in one proprietary research area: bioethics.

The authors contribute to the growing work on TSR investigating how the interplay between service providers and consumers affects the well-being of both. Additionally, the authors call for novel interdisciplinary work in transhuman services research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first papers in services marketing research to explore the promises and perils of transhumanism ideals and human enhancement technologies.

This research investigates and conceptualizes non-dyadic human–robot interactions (HRI).

The authors conducted a netnographic study of the Facebook group called “iRobot – Roomba,” an online brand community dedicated to Roomba vacuums. Their data analysis employed an abductive approach, which extended the grounded theory method.

Dyadic portrayals of human–robot interactions can be expanded to consider other actants that are relevant to the consumption experiences of consumer robots. Not only humans but also nonhumans, such as an online brand community, have a meaningful role to play in shaping interactions between humans and robots.

The present study moves theoretical discussions on HRI from the individual level grounded in a purely psychological approach to a more collective and sociocultural approach.

If managers do not have a proper assessment of human–robot interactions that considers different actants and their role in the socio-technical arrangement, they will find it more challenging to design and suggest new consumption experiences.

Unlike most previous marketing and consumer research on human–robot interactions, we show that different actants exert agency in different ways, at different times and with different socio-technical arrangements.

Based on Landowski’s sociosemiotics theory, this paper aims to propose an alternative outlining of online brand communities’ social dynamics, not for their collective behaviors but for their discursive interactions.

Data were collected during a three-year netnographic immersion into a Disney-related Facebook group and authors’ trips to Walt Disney World.

The findings point to four styles of discursive interactions that shape an online brand community’s social dynamic. On the one hand, utterances based on the guiding and following styles of discursive interactions inform desired behaviors, which subsequently become tacitly routinized. On the other hand, utterances based on the adapting and venturing styles of discursive interactions mark random and unusual communicational situations.

This work expands current theoretical discussions on online brand communities by unveiling an unexplored linguistic dimension of them.

Wicked problems require collaborative innovation approaches. Understanding the problem from the users' perspective is essential. Based on a complex and ill-defined case, the purpose of the current paper is to identify some critical success factors in defining the “right problem” to be addressed.

An empirical research study was carried out in a low-density municipality (case study). Extensive data were collected from official databases, individual semi-structured interviews and a focus group involving citizens, local authorities, civil servants and other relevant stakeholders.

As defined by the central government, the problem to be addressed by the research team was to identify which justice services should be made available locally to a small- and low-density community. The problem was initially formulated using top-down reasoning. In-depth contact with citizens and key local players revealed that the lack of justice services was not “the issue” for that community. Mobility constraints and the shortage of economic opportunities had a considerable impact on the lack of demand for justice services. By using a bottom-up perspective, it was possible to reframe the problem to be addressed and suggest a new concept to be tested at later stages.

The approach followed called attention to the importance of listening to citizens and local organisations with a profound knowledge of the territory to effectively identify and circumscribe a local problem in the justice field.

The paper highlights the limitations of traditional rational problem-solving approaches and contributes to expanding the voice-of-the-customer principle showing how it can lead to a substantially new definition of the problem to be addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the best way to create value in Portugal through quality and innovation and also to check what needs to be improved.

A questionnaire was applied to population of 152 companies, with the research and development (R&D) management certified by Portuguese Standard NP 4457. The final sample was 66 companies, which correspond to 45 percent of the population. Statistical analysis of the data collected was performed using IBM SPSS Statistical Software.

The authors highlighted the main reasons/motivations that led companies to implement the NP 4457, which were, among others, competitive advantage and creating value. The systematization of information and the generation and management of ideas were highlighted as the main advantages. The lack of methodologies for innovation management and knowledge management was the difficulty experienced in the implementation of NP 4457. Portugal needs to increase patent registration and it also needs to know how to take advantage of the investment made in R&D, in order to decrease the unit cost of knowledge. Portuguese engineering should be more about product design than production processes. The involvement of top management must be greater.

This investigation contributes to the innovation and quality body of knowledge, since it explores the complementarity between the two concepts as sources of value creation. This case study is one of the first Portuguese empirical research works about value creation through quality and innovation in Portugal. It also allows to know in detail the Portuguese business reality in terms of innovation management.

This paper aims to critically analyze the engineering education focused on sustainability in supply chain management, in courses offered by Brazilian higher education institutions.

Topics related to sustainable supply chain management were listed from the literature and used as a framework to gather professors’ opinions on how well these topics are covered in engineering courses offered in Brazil. Data analysis was performed via frequency analysis and comparative ordering using the Fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution technique.

It was possible to evidence that most of the topics are superficially presented within other subjects and that there are few associated practical activities that enable greater learning. Comparatively, issues related to ISO standards (related to quality and environmental management systems) and compliance with environmental laws, regulations and standards were highlighted. Additionally, it was possible to verify that there is a need for further study on issues related to energy efficiency, worker training and corporate governance.

No similar study was found in the literature. The findings presented in this paper can contribute to the improvement of engineering education in Brazil and other countries.

The authors aim to verify the indicators that influence the efficiency reported by Brazilian listed financial companies.

The sample consists of companies in the financial segment that have shares traded in B3, comprising nine institutions from 2000 to 2018 were selected. The authors adopted the regression model with unbalanced panel data to analyze the data. The dependent is the efficiency, which the authors calculated using Hurst Exponent. As independent variables, we used the sector-specific indicators: earnings management, banking resilience, management efficiency, and profitability. The authors controlled the models by size and type of control.

The findings indicate that the efficiency of financial companies' securities is affected by aspects related to management, resilience, and efficiency in administration. The lower the earnings management, the greater the banking resilience, the efficiency in the management of resources, and the efficiency of stock prices of these companies. These results show that efficiency is affected by intrinsic factors of the entities, corroborating the hypothesis that markets adapt, among others, to institutional factors.

Many users of financial institutions understand whether their stock prices reflect the information provided by accounting. The findings are original because they provide evidence that institutional factors affect the efficiency of companies in the Brazilian financial segment.