Volume 21, Issue 1

With the spread of crypto assets, Non-Fungible Token (NFT) technology has become more and more discussed on social media platforms. The idea of uniqueness is in the background of the NFT technology used to make digital assets tradable and registerable. This study investigates the effect of consumers’ social media interaction and the need for uniqueness on NFT purchase intention. The research data was collected from 488 consumers who follow NFT purchasing sites. The results highlight the critical role of the need for uniqueness to leverage the NFT purchase intention. Analyzes were made with SPSS and AMOS statistical package programs. The validity and reliability of the scales used were tested and found to have acceptable values. The study tested possible cause-and-effect relationships between all variables using structural equation modeling. According to the findings, social media interaction, creative choice, unpopular choice, and similarity avoidance positively and significantly affected purchasing intention.

The current study investigated how sport fans and those of popular athletic footwear brands Nike and Adidas perceived and behaved toward their favorite and relevant rival brands. First, sport fans were compared with fans of athletic footwear brands to determine if differences were present in their favorite and rival brand perceptions. Sport fans reported higher identity toward their favorite brand, and more derogation toward a rival team than fans of the Nike and Adidas athletic footwear brands. Analysis also revealed that identifying as a fan of both sport and athletic footwear was associated with more positive attitudes directed at the favored footwear brand, while fans of Nike and Adidas did not differ in how they viewed their favorite and rival athletic footwear brands. Discussion and implications for researchers and marketing professionals is included, along with avenues for future research.

The evolution of quality expectations over time is an important driver of customer satisfaction and retention. This study investigated the dynamic properties of customers’ quality expectation updating from an analytical perspective and provides new evidence on the psychological correlates of the discrepancies between expectations and experiences in the realm of consumer decision making. In doing so, we focus on the dynamics of expectation formation by adopting a nonlinear complex systems approach based on well-established behavioral theories. Using stability analysis, we find analytical results which are supported empirically by an experiment that there is considerable heterogeneity in how consumers calibrate their quality expectations. Specifically, we demonstrate analytically that in some cases individuals will converge to a specific quality expectation (reach a stable fixed point), while in other cases their expectations will oscillate between a small number of points periodically. This is remarkable because the existence of the latter is not due to changes in quality performance but merely accrue endogenously and depend on individuals’ disconfirmation functions. To our knowledge, this is the first time in the marketing literature that the corresponding gaps between quality expectations and quality provided are analyzed in the long run. Our analytical and empirical findings also suggest that being more responsive to a person’s expectations can increase the portion of those individuals that are able to better calibrate. Finally, we also demonstrate that calibration ability is associated with how thoughtful or impulsive information is used to update one’s expectation. A more deliberative processing style, which includes using a wider range of information, seems to be related to fewer unrealistic expectations and better calibrations, while a more impulsive processing style is related to more unrealistic expectations. In addition to providing a better understanding of dynamic expectation formation, these results can pave the way for interventions that foster more accurate quality expectations. From a managerial perspective, our findings imply that communicating quality perceptions are only to a certain extent under managerial control. To recognize this, firms are advised to segment customers based on their information processing style and to customize their marketing actions accordingly.

The purpose of this article is to analyze higher educational institutions’ contents in terms of post variables and engagement volume based on categorical classification of theme to understand which factors affect the overall engagement. The sample included 29,814 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts from the top 10 largest and global higher education institutions by community size as of January 1, 2021. The platform’s publically available dashboard metrics were used to analyze the engagement. A negative binomial regression model was used to estimate the impact of selected variables on engagement. Instagram has the highest potential for engagement growth and also dominates the other platforms for engagement per post. Twitter has been observed as the most preferred platform by volume of activity and also the least efficient of all. Facebook has the highest volume of engagement and second-highest efficiency. There is a huge gap between the publisher’s activity priority and engagement pattern across the selected platforms. The findings highlight the importance of developing a systematic procedure for analyzing content engagement potential and designing post strategies for each platform. This study contributes to the literature by designing a framework to analyze post efficiency as per content category for any given platform based on public level data. This adds up to the ability of the competitors with social media to analyze their position in terms of engagement and helps in estimation. These enhancements resulted in a framework with more explanatory power while projecting post efficiency.

Fans’ relationship with media product franchises is strongly based on the symbolic value and sense of belonging that nurtures their consumer practices, a fact that indicates the love relationship with these brands. Entertainment brands increasingly resort to paratexts in order to expand their relationship with fans. Thus, the aim of the current research is to investigate how the paratextualization of franchise productions by the entertainment industry is used to trigger love towards their brands. In order to do so, it applied the Foucauldian Discourse Analysis to news reports and information published on websites of three of the most successful brands in the entertainment industry, namely: Star Wars, Wizarding World and Game of Thrones. Based on the results, these brands promote both the value and the continuity of the aforementioned sagas as means to develop an affective brand for their fans.

Expanding expenditures and emphasis on sustainable marketing necessitate additional research to comprehend how to effectively influence sustainable attitudes and behaviour, particularly in the under-researched realms of social media. The role of social media in creating and building attitudes towards sustainable purchasing is vastly underexplored. Based on social learning theory and the theory of planned behaviour, the present study has been endeavoured to investigate the factors that influence consumers’ sustainable purchase attitudes and intentions. With the data sets obtained from three hundred 50 respondents, structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed using AMOS 22.0. From the study findings, it is observed that social media usage, social influence, drive for environmental responsibility, and perceived trust in social media are the major antecedents of consumers’ sustainable purchasing attitudes, which in turn influence their sustainable purchase intentions. It is pertinent for prominent stakeholders, including governments and regulatory agencies, to employ the findings of this study while designing campaigns to encourage individuals to practise sustainable buying behaviour. Fostering sustainable buying behaviour could help mitigate the negative consequences of impulsive purchasing on human beings and the environment. Thus, deciphering the function of social media in promoting sustainable purchasing attitudes makes the current research novel and valuable.

Social marketing is all about creating, communicating, and delivering value to selected target markets; this value benefits society via the solution of major issues such as public health, safety, the environment, etc. Sadly, it seems that political mismanagement has created long-lasting or permanent ecological damage, a major public issue. Ecological environment issues impact future generations and humankind’s quality of life. This study aims to answer a crucial question: What do the political players due to help solve this problem? According to The CIS Model 1 , a government, a political party, or a politician not only need to create a political product (idea/proposal) but also needs to inform people about the product and support it. Given that The CIS Model is new, no studies were found to examine how a government can use The CIS Model as a strategy to advance Global Warming solutions for the benefit of the young generation (Generation Z). A sample of 205 adults aged 18–25 (Generation Z) from the USA, Europe, Asia, and Africa participated in the current study. According to the results of this study, the more a government uses The CIS Strategy to package global warming products, the higher Generation Z’s satisfaction (SFC), and the higher Generation Z’s loyalty to the government (LYT). The current study provides managerial implications and directions for future research.

In marketing, authority figures are often used to convince the audience: think of the doctor in the white coat or the professor recommending a product. Some of these techniques can be translated to the world of email marketing, which sparked our interest to see if recipients are more eager to open an email when it is send by the CEO of a company. For this project, we collaborated with a digital marketing company and run two randomized field experiments: examining if a small change in the email design – adding CEO to the sender line – has an effect on performance. Our results indicate that organizations can use authority figures to improve the performance of their email campaigns. However, there might be important differences between target groups, suggesting that specific audiences are more easily seduced by job titles than others.

Journal rankings convey important information to researchers and influence processes related to promotion, remuneration, research funding, and resource allocation in academe. The present research uses direct responses from an international sample of 203 active marketing scholars in a web-based survey to endogenously rank 138 marketing journals by quality, awareness, and importance. We employ regression estimation with nested random journal-within-tier effects to comprehensively rank the marketing journals into four ordered tiers (A–D), and then in turn, subdivide journals in each tier, into “upper,” “middle,” and “lower” groups (e.g. Tier A: A+, A and A−). Our methodology, Active Scholar Assessment (ASA), produces an independent ranking of marketing journals that aggregates individual expert opinion regarding journals by researchers from 68 countries. Subsequently, we compare our ASA-developed marketing journal rankings and categories with prominent citation-based ranking systems (Scimago, Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports, Association of Business Schools, and the Australian Business Deans Council) to demonstrate that the opinions of active scholars are comparatively more stable and capture additional information (that is not reflected by computations based solely on citations), and provide useful strategic information and direction to scholars.

The several benefits of e-payment for consumers, businesses, and economies make decreasing or ideally eliminating the use of cash an important concern of governments and policymakers. In several emerging countries, there is substantial evidence that using bank cards for payment in retail Point-Of-Sale is still less popular than cash, especially for small-value purchases. Attitudinal factors are amongst the major understudied motives of bank card payment behavior. Little is known about the effects of perceived benefits of bank card use on trust and the subsequent outputs of this trust. Building on the Technology Acceptance Model and the Theory of Planned Behavior, this research proposes and empirically tests a model explaining the roles of perceived benefits and security in affecting consumer trust and the consequent effect of trust on consumers’ attitudes toward bank card payment. This attitude is supposed to build continued usage of bank cards for in-store payment. Respondents were approached in real conditions where the experience of payment in retail Point-Of-Sale occurs. A questionnaire was administered face-to-face with respondents surveyed before they left several small retail stores such as grocery stores, convenience stores, and minimarkets in Southeast Tunisia. The PLS-SEM results show that consumers have built up trust because of their perceived benefits and security of bank card payments. Trust has a positive effect on consumers’ attitudes toward bank cards. The positive attitude persuades consumers to use bank cards for payment purposes at Point-Of-Sale. The findings help inform the research community by elucidating the nature of the relationships between perceived benefits, perceived security, trust, attitude, and continued payment with bank cards in retail Point-Of-Sale. Governments, financial service providers, and businesses need to focus on developing valuable perceived benefits of using bank cards to increase trust, positive attitude, penetration, and continued customers’ usage of bank cards. This will benefit local and national economies by winning greater market share from cash. The Tunisian context is examined in this research. However, the results might be applied to many other in-developing countries.

Considering the advancement of technology, companies need to update their knowledge regarding consumer behavior and try to adapt to these changes to stay profitable. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relative importance of market segmentation categories when assessing consumers’ online buying behavior. The data were collected through a standard AHP questionnaire from 71 individuals who lived in North Cyprus and have online shopping experience. The results were analyzed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology by Expert Choice software. Findings demonstrated that age, gender, and marital status are the most critical factors in determining online consumer behavior. However, group influence, adaptability, and brand loyalty were found to be the least important factors that can stimulate consumers to shop online. Managers are encouraged to target their consumers based on the essential categories since running marketing campaigns and advertising costs money and time. They can also benefit from the results of this study and apply more target-oriented segmentation strategies to enhance their companies’ performance. This paper provides a pioneering instrument to assess the relative importance of market segmentation categories in online market.

Customer citizenship behaviors (CCBs) allow firms to boost their performance and competitiveness, but little is known about the impact of customer perceived justice (CPJ) in frontline service encounters on different key dimensions of target-based CCBs. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response framework and theories of equity and social exchange, the present investigation developed an integrative framework to explore how CPJ influences target-based CCBs in the after-sales service field. Using survey data collected from 368 smartphone customers in China, structural equation modeling via AMOS v. 24 was employed to empirically examine the hypotheses. The findings revealed that CPJ positively impacted the behavior to help other customers and provide feedback to the company. Customer trust and affective commitment mediated the links between CPJ and target-based CCBs, respectively. The findings hold theoretical and practical implications for strategically managing CPJ and target-based CCBs in frontline service encounters.

The creation of a consideration set, which constitutes a cluster of brands that a consumer contemplates buying from, plays a vital role in purchasing behavior. An understanding of its composition aids in the development of effective marketing strategies. However, existing research does not sufficiently explore brand convergence in the consideration set across consumers (BCCS). This study explored variations in BCCS according to whether the purchase is intended for self-use or as a gift, as well as the nature of the product (utilitarian or hedonic). A questionnaire survey involving 1219 participants provided data for empirical analysis. The findings revealed a higher BCCS for purchases made for self with respect to utilitarian products such as ballpoint pens, whereas hedonic products such as chocolates showed a higher BCCS when purchased for others than for self. These findings offer new insights into the underexplored area of BCCS; they suggest that desired assortment size should be tailored according to purchase intent and the nature of the targeted product (utilitarian or hedonic).