Search results

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between food sponsorships and gender stereotypes, focusing on how patriarchal beliefs influence consumers’ purchase intentions in sports.

The research comprised two studies. In Study 1, n = 161 participants participated via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Study 2 involved n = 250 participants who completed a cross-sectional and self-administered survey.

Study 1 indicated an apparent gender-based categorization of certain foods and beverages: beer and red meat were predominantly perceived as masculine, while yogurt, salads, and wine were seen as feminine. Further, brands like Budweiser and Red Bull were mainly seen as masculine, while Chobani and Smoothie King were perceived as feminine. Moreover, findings indicate that foods, especially those rich in protein or linked to BBQ and spicy tastes, are considered more masculine by men than women in sports settings. Further, Study 2 findings unveiled a significant relationship between patriarchal beliefs and both attitudes (ß = 0.327, p < 0.01) and subjective norms (ß = 0.525, p < 0.01) towards masculine brands.

The two studies’ results underscore the profound impact of gender stereotypes shaping sports fans’ perceptions of food items and the brands sponsoring them. This inquiry significantly augments the current understanding of the nuanced interrelation between the paradigms of social role theory and the theory of planned behavior, particularly within the ambit of sports-related sponsorship by food and beverage brands and its consequent influence on consumer purchasing inclinations.

This paper aims to deepen the knowledge of consumer wellness by conceptualizing this construct in an everyday retail setting, specifically a health food store. With wellness seeking being a central theme in the positioning strategy of many food retail stores, this study aims to investigate the development of an everyday wellness pursuit in a retail setting, identify its underlying dimensions in a health food store setting and establish the key managerial drivers that nurture it in such context, from the consumer standpoint.

The research design uses a qualitative approach. In-depth interviews with 20 customers of six multibranch health food retailers were carried out.

The findings show the holistic and multidimensional nature of wellness in an everyday consumption setting and highlight the development of physical, emotional, intellectual, social and spiritual consumer wellness in this context. They also bring to light how, in an everyday activity such as a health food retail store visit, retailers can co-create and nurture consumer wellness through their product assortment, store environment and employees’ orientation toward customer wellness.

The main contribution of this study lies in the conceptualization of the retail wellnesscape, defined as a retail space that consumers choose to visit in their daily lives that contribute to their holistic wellness journey. This paper emphasizes both the importance and the feasibility of cultivating consumer wellness on an everyday basis, for both consumers and retailers, while it has traditionally been associated with more occasional and out of the ordinary settings such as wellness tourism.

This paper aims to introduce the experience-dominant (Ex-D) logic model, which synthesizes the creation, perceptions and outcomes of Ex-D logic. It is designed to offer valuable insights for strategic managerial applications and future research directions.

Employing a qualitative approach by using eight selected product launch events from reviewed 100 event videos and 55 in-depth interviews with industrial managers to develop an Ex-D logic model, and data were coded and analysed via NVivo.

Results show that the firm’s Ex-D logic is operationalized as the mentalizing of the three types of customer needs (service competence, hedonic excitations and meaning making), the materializing of three types of customer experiences and customer journeys (service experience, hedonic experience and brand experience) and the moderating of three types of customer values (service values, hedonic values and brand values).

This study has implications for adding new insights into existing theory on dominant logic and customer experience management and also offers actionable recommendations for managerial applications.

This study sheds light on the importance of Ex-D logic from a strategic point of view and provides an organic view of the firm. It distinguishes firm perspective from customer perspective, firm experience from customer experience and firm journey from consumer journey.

This study addresses how algorithmic recommendations and their affordances shape everyday information practices among young people.

Thematic interviews were conducted with 20 Finnish young people aged 15–16 years. The material was analysed using qualitative content analysis, with a focus on everyday information practices involving online platforms.

The key finding of the study is that the current affordances of algorithmic recommendations enable users to engage in more passive practices instead of active search and evaluation practices. Two major themes emerged from the analysis: enabling not searching, inviting high trust, which highlights the how the affordances of algorithmic recommendations enable the delegation of search to a recommender system and, at the same time, invite trust in the system, and constraining finding, discouraging diversity, which focuses on the constraining degree of affordances and breakdowns associated with algorithmic recommendations.

This study contributes new knowledge regarding the ways in which algorithmic recommendations shape the information practices in young people's everyday lives specifically addressing the constraining nature of affordances.

Although trade volumes in e-retailing have increased significantly in recent years, logistics service failures are inevitable, especially at the delivery stage. Therefore, it is essential to provide customers with effective recovery strategies to increase their satisfaction and repurchase intentions. There is a lack of empirical evidence on whether the response time or the discount offered in compensation is more crucial for customers. Therefore, this study aims to determine whether the response time or the discount offered for high and low criticality failures has a greater impact on customer satisfaction levels and repurchase intentions for female and male customers.

A scenario-based experimental design method has been adopted to collect data, and 697 participants aged 18 and 58 years have been reached. The research utilized a between-subjects design, incorporating three factors: gender (female vs male), criticality (high vs low) and compensation (7 days: 10% discount, 10 days: 20% discount and 14 days: 30% discount). Six scenarios depicting the failure of an online retailer were created, and factorial univariate ANOVA was conducted to test the hypotheses.

The study's results show that in terms of customer satisfaction, female customers attach more importance to the response time in the case of high criticality and the amount of discount offered in the case of low criticality. On the other hand, male customers give more importance to the response time in terms of customer satisfaction when they experience a high or low criticality failure. In the case of low criticality, response time is more important for male customers to increase their repurchase intentions, while the amount of the discount is more important for female customers.

The study demonstrates the relative importance of the response time and discount amount according to the criticality level of failures and to guide business managers in terms of the recovery strategies they will implement. It focuses on gender differences and determine whether the response time or discount amount is more important for male and female customers in high or low-criticality situations.

This paper aims to explore practice innovation and organizational resiliency during exogenous service ecosystem disruptions. This inquiry focuses on the extreme disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which required service firms to recodify long-established service scripts, adapt digital and physical material elements of the service encounter and ultimately reconfigure a system of practices. The specific context is forced practice innovation in Starbucks servicescape (kiosks and coffeehouses). Starbucks is best known for its custom beverages and third-place strategy. Their strict adherence to a complex service script and unique ordering practices altered during pandemic stay-home disease prevention mandates.

Thematic coding consistent with prior research on practice innovation and diffusion and a grounded theory methodology was conducted. Data were triangulated and analyzed within and across a variety of sources. These include field notes from direct observation, interviews, focus groups, firm-authored collateral in the form of marketing communications and third-party authored secondary sources such as news, social media, blogs and forums.

Data reveal how practice innovation occurs through the reconfiguration of a system of practices, which support organizational resiliency and can force brand evolution, in prolonged exogenous service ecosystem disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic required service industries to adapt and recodify service scripts and alter physical and digital elements of service encounters. While the pandemic affected all firms in the sector, we argue that Starbucks' established scripts and third-place strategies, which characterized the brand experience, were particularly vulnerable. We find that practice innovation occurs through the reconfiguration of practice elements – competences, meanings and materiality – and restructures the service encounter. Practice codification, transposition, adaptation and stabilization support organizational resiliency and brand evolution. We find that Starbucks' brand experience emphasis on the third place is reconceptualized from an in-person community-based retailscape to a platform-based strategy necessitating script recodification and practice adaptation. Our analysis of Starbucks' kiosks and coffeehouses illuminates how a distinctly branded service encounter is constituted by a system of practices that can be reconfigured and diffused anew in the face of disruption.

The conceptualization of practice innovation as systems reconfiguration establishes a novel approach to understanding innovation in service ecosystems. The COVID-19 pandemic is a unique context to study a sector-wide exogenous extended service disruption. We focus on a firm with an elaborate pre-pandemic service script and commitment to a third-place brand experience guiding its system of practices. We reveal unique insights on practice innovation within service ecosystems during exogenous prolonged disruptions in which brands evolve through the recodification of service scripts and sustained reconfiguration of systems of practice.

Trade-offs that involve secular values of money and sacred human values are often seen as taboo. This paper aims to examine how consumers avoid making taboo trade-offs with anthropomorphized products, by choosing options that ensure the well-being of the humanized products, even at a financial cost to themselves.

The authors conducted five experiments, across different marketplace contexts (i.e. repairing, buying and selling), to test the broad generalizability of the extent to which consumers are willing to incur a financial cost due to concern for the well-being of anthropomorphized products.

The results reveal that consumers are willing to accept financially inferior options to protect the humanness endowed upon anthropomorphized products. The effect is mediated by consumers’ concern for the treatment of the anthropomorphized product. The effect is moderated by consumers’ trait empathy level, such that those low in empathy are willing to sacrifice human value for the sake of greater financial gain.

Future research could examine, in the context of anthropomorphized products, if there are types of human values that are less inviolable, leading consumers to be more willing to trade them off for monetary gains.

The findings have direct implications for second-hand markets. For potential buyers of anthropomorphized products, they should signal concern for the product; for sellers, anthropomorphizing their products can reduce haggling behavior. From a sustainability perspective, consumers may be more motivated to repair or recycle their products if it is framed as “infusing new life” into their products.

This work highlights a novel effect of anthropomorphism: when marketplace decisions are involved, anthropomorphizing a product can introduce a tension between secular monetary values and sacred human values. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first to show that consumers are willing to incur a monetary loss to protect the humanness of anthropomorphized product, driven by their concern for the proper treatment of such humanized products.

The rising occurrence of digitally driven public consumer complaints has made it necessary for enterprises to obtain consumer forgiveness. However, existing research has provided little understanding regarding how to obtain consumer forgiveness effectively. Thus, the present study examined how brand avatars can improve consumer forgiveness in the context of public apology.

This study tested the mechanism of a brand avatar on consumer forgiveness using three studies. Specifically, we explored the direct and mediating effect of empathy toward a brand (Study 1); we identified the moderating mediating effect of humorous responses (Study 2) and product type (Study 3). Data for these studies were collected on Credamo. We analyzed the data using SPSS (26.0) for the primary analysis and PROCESS (3.5) for the mediating and moderating mediating analysis.

The results indicate that brand avatars enhance consumer forgiveness. Moreover, empathy toward a brand plays a mediating role in the effect of brand avatars on consumer forgiveness. Additionally, when a humorous response is present, a brand avatar can enhance customer forgiveness through empathy toward that brand. Compared to utilitarian products, hedonic products can also increase the impact of a brand avatar on empathy toward the brand, thus enhancing consumers' forgiveness.

From the perspective of emotion, this study explored the impact of brand avatars on consumer forgiveness via empathy toward a brand. It augments the research on brand avatars and consumer forgiveness. The study also verified the moderating mediating effect of humor response and product type while expanding the brand avatar research boundary.

Art-infusion has become a common practice among brands across the globe. This is because marketers leverage the uniqueness and prestige of arts to earn superior profits. Hence, this research aims to understand and measure consumers' willingness to pay (WTP) for art-infused products.

A questionnaire was designed based on conjoint analysis and was responded to by 470 respondents from India. The estimation of preference functions in conjoint analysis was intended to use orthogonal arrays to measure WTP.

The study reveals consumers' utility and WTP for different art-infused products. The results indicated that consumers have the highest WTP for products that have artwork dominated by the visual elements of colour, shapes and space.

The paper presents valuable findings for marketers to develop their product design and earn superior profits.

This is the first study in the domain of the art infusion phenomenon that measures WTP for non-luxury art-infused products. Also, this is the first study to measure WTP for different kinds of art forms.