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This paper aims to investigate how consumers perceive the value of luxury brands and the antecedents to these perceptions, including consumer knowledge, reference group influence and accessibility. Prior studies focused less on the salience of consumer knowledge and sources of luxury information, in addition to their accessibility to luxury. Hence, a more nuanced luxury conceptualization is needed to reflect luxury’s conceptual fluidity, consumers’ different lived experiences, accessibility levels and persistent retail marketing changes.

In a survey involving 475 US respondents, five hypotheses were tested and analyzed with structural equations modeling, examining the relationships among knowledge and accessibility of luxury brands, as well as reference group influence and its impact on consumer value perceptions of luxury brands and consumer behaviors.

Significant relationships were found for all five hypotheses and demonstrated that knowledge, reference group influence and accessibility have strong relationships with consumers’ personal value perceptions of luxury brands and behavioral measures, including purchase intentions, willingness to recommend to a friend and willingness to pay a price premium.

This conceptualization recognizes that consumers must have luxury brand awareness prior to reference group influence, developing individual luxury value perceptions and entering the buying process. This research contributes to the literature by highlighting consumers’ views of the luxury category, which induce perceptions and potential outcomes. It also expands the understanding of consumer’s accessibility to luxury products, which impacts purchase intentions. While it was conducted in the USA, it yields broader consumer perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the role of closeness and the relationships between social media influencers and their followers, and, more specifically, how social media influencers can effectively manage their human brands.

Two studies were conducted to explore social media influencers. Qualitative content analysis and modeling with path analysis were used to analyze the data.

Results found attractiveness and likeability to positively predict attitudes toward the influencer, word-of-mouth and purchase intentions, whereas similarity only predicted word-of-mouth from the follower. Closeness served as a moderator but had different effects. Closeness positively moderated the effect of attractiveness on purchase intentions; however, it had a negative effect with similarity on purchase intentions. Moreover, closeness moderated the effect of likeability on attitude toward the influencer.

This study was limited by the student sample as well as the students’ self-identification of a social media influencer. Future research should include experimental design manipulating well-known/followed or fictional social media influencers on different social media.

This paper explores the characteristics of social media influencers as well as the potential outcomes associated with influencers on social media. The implications for marketers and advertisers include a better understanding of how consumers engage with influencers on social media.

The role of closeness is identified as a moderator of consumers’ behaviors toward social media influencers.

Social media enables consumers to regularly express themselves in a variety of ways. Selfie-postings are the new tool for self-presentation, particularly among millennials. The purpose of this paper is to identify the motivations associated with selfie-postings among female millennials.

The exploratory study consisted of 15 in-depth interviews with women who were 19-30 years of age. The analysis of data was facilitated by an iterative constant comparison method between data, emerging concepts and extant literature.

Textual analysis reveals impression management to be pivotal in understanding the consumer selfie-posting process. Other sub-themes include happiness and physical appearance. In addition, self-esteem was revealed as a motivator and an outcome.

The study was limited to females who were 19-30 years of age. Future research should include males and a wider age group and focus on empirical testing of the identified themes.

This research sheds light on the motivation and outcomes associated with selfie-postings. Implications for marketers and advertisers include a better understanding of how to engage consumers to post content in the form of selfies with brands and products.

This paper fulfils an identified need to explore the growing trend of selfie-postings and contributes to academic literature in consumer behavior by identifying the motivations of selfie-postings.

Managing farm waste is a fundamental problem for farmers with economic, environmental and social impacts throughout the supply chain. Little research has explored innovative product solutions. This paper examines gleaning to reduce farm waste and proposes a resource-based Gleaning Innovation Framework which can lead to differentiated consumer products.

A multi-method approach, including descriptive company reviews, practitioner interviews and consumer surveys, evaluated how different participants in the food supply chain view the farm waste problem and the innovation of products through gleaning.

This research found that practitioners and consumers are cognizant and invested in reducing farm waste, with gleaning as a plausible solution. Future research includes gathering perspectives from retailers and other supply chain members, which may further develop the conceptualization of the gleaning innovation process.

Uniquely, the authors propose the Gleaning Innovation Framework that provides a platform for innovation across the supply chain to reduce farm waste. The research contributes to the farm waste debate with evidence that gleaning can assist the reduction of farm waste through product innovation. Developing innovations to reduce farm waste in sustainable and environmentally friendly ways would not only benefit the supply chain platform but also society.

Social media platforms are changing the way consumers and celebrities engage. This research aims to better understand how and why consumers use social media to engage with celebrities, and identify the potential antecedents and outcomes, which may result from these online connections.

Both qualitative (two focus groups) and quantitative (survey) methods were used to explore consumer engagement with celebrities on social media. A structural model from the survey data was developed and analyzed.

Textual analysis of the focus groups revealed that consumers follow celebrities on social media to obtain career and personal information about the celebrity. Further, authenticity and emotional attachment were identified as favorable aspects of following celebrities on social media. An empirical study confirmed that the constructs of authenticity and emotional attachment positively influence the outcomes of word-of-mouth and purchase likelihood.

The study was limited by the self-identification of a favorite celebrity and social media site. Future research should include empirical testing of specific celebrities featured on a specific social media site and the development of the constructs identified in the focus groups.

This research sheds light on the antecedents and outcomes associated with consumer–celebrity engagement on social media. The implications for marketers and advertisers include a better understanding of how celebrities transform themselves and engage with consumers on social media.

This paper fulfills an identified need to study authenticity and emotional attachment as they relate to celebrities and consumers’ engagements on social media.

Computer‐based fax‐on‐demand systems will answer the phone and guide a caller through voice menu selections. The caller identifies the information desired by pressing the numbers on the touchtone keypad of the phone. The fax‐on‐demand system then delivers the information to the caller through either a one‐call or two‐call/call‐back method. Fax‐on‐demand is often confused with two other forms of fax messaging—fax broadcasting and fax mail. Fax broadcasting is the sending of one document to many locations; fax mail is similar to voice mail except fax messages instead of voice messages are delivered to one or more specified mail boxes. In contrast, fax‐on‐demand can better be characterized as a response application that allows individual callers to use touchtone telephones to access a database and other information, which can then be delivered to the caller's fax machine.

This study aims to examine the effect of opinion leadership on individuals’ susceptibility to social influence, which eventually affects their adoption behavior and assess how these relationships vary with gender in new product adoption.

Data were collected based on a survey of young consumers regarding the adoption of new consumer electronics. The hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling and multiple sample analyses.

The study finds that opinion leaders are more sensitive to influence from others when the mechanism of status competition is at work. Although consumers who are more susceptible to normative influence tend to adopt new products later than others, those who are more susceptible to status competition are more likely to adopt earlier. The results also provide evidence for gender differences. Female leaders are more susceptible to status competition, whereas male leaders are less sensitive to informational influence. The effects of susceptibility to normative influence and status competition on adoption behavior are stronger for female than for male consumers.

The overall structural model predicts an interesting relationship between individual influence and susceptibility, as well as the effects of these factors on adoption behavior. This study also provides deeper insights into the dynamics of the social influence mechanisms at work for each gender in new product adoption.

This study aims to examine the role of social media influencers (SMI) in millennial behavioural intentions towards Islamic banks, from the perspective of both bank clients and non-clients.

Of the 484 Indonesian millennials in the sample, 278 were clients and 206 non-clients of Islamic banks. Factor analysis was used to examine the SMI dimension in the Islamic banking context. This study then used the partial least square to evaluate the proposed model and test the relationships between SMI, bank image, trust and behavioural intention.

Three SMI dimensions were confirmed, i.e. expertise, celebrity and similarity. For bank clients, the findings show that SMI has a significant influence on behavioural intention and reinforces bank image and trust. For non-clients, SMI does not have a significant impact on behavioural intentions but significantly strengthens bank image and trust.

Islamic bank managers can take benefit of this study findings by learning to foster the behavioural intentions of their millennial clients and non-clients using SMIs. Further, choosing the right SMIs for their Islamic bank is an important activity, and if they want to make a positive impact on existing and potential millennial clients, they need to choose popular millennials who are knowledgeable about the Islamic value compliance of Islamic banking services.

This study is an early study to explore SMI’s role in influencing the behavioural intentions of millennials towards Islamic banks.

A review of the 3rd International Conference on Interlending and Document Supply at the National Library of Hungary in Budapest from 29 March to 1 April, 1993, and of the concurrent UNESCO workshop on East‐West information transfer. Developments in networking will move interlending and document supply from their present peripheral position in library services to centre stage, although the charges are part of a long‐established and continuing process, rather than a dramatic departure from past practice. Outlines the reasons why electronic information will continue to become more competitive than traditionally published sources and discusses some of the consequences of change. In the process of change Eastern Europe is well placed to benefit from Western development and, already, shows signs of making more substantial progress. Makes suggestions for individual and institutional actions.

This paper aims to outline the role of brands as relationship builders and to offer a better understanding of the recent developments and key literature in the area of consumer–brand relationships.

This paper is an editorial based mainly on a literature review on consumer–brand relationships. It uses the sentiment range and passion intensity to position various brand relationship constructs. This work follows the same bibliometric-analysis approach used by Fetscherin and Heinrich (2014) and looked for publications in the Web of Science on brand relationships, with reference to Fournier’s (1998) seminal work and data collected for the period between January 2010 and November 2018.

First, this work presents the key consumer–brand relationship terms and positions the work on brand love, brand like, brand hate, brand dislike and brand indifference. In addition, the bibliometric analysis offers a number of insights into the current state of the academic research in the area of consumer–brand relationships, including a clear indication that the research on consumer–brand relationships is increasing.

This work and the whole special issue together help in the understanding of brands as relationship builders, clearly explaining the continuum from strong positive or negative relationships with brands to no relationship with brands and the current state of research in the area.