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The implementation of value management (VM) principles in stealth construction projects is explored comprehensively in the chapter. It elucidated how VM positively influences various facets of construction, including environmental protection, health and safety, project delivery duration, economy, and aesthetics. Applying VM techniques, such as proactive risk management, resource optimisation, and stakeholder collaboration, is essential for achieving project objectives while ensuring sustainability, efficiency, and stakeholder satisfaction. Furthermore, the chapter emphasises VM’s benefits, challenges, and relevance across all stages of the construction lifecycle, from pre-construction planning to post-construction evaluation, underscoring its integral role in driving continuous improvement and innovation in the construction industry. Overall, the discourse emphasises the importance of VM in optimising outcomes and maximising value in stealth construction projects.

As internet dividends are gradually disappearing, loyalty programs have become the panacea for monetizing traffic, attracting new customers and retaining existing customers. Improving their effectiveness has thus become key to enterprises’ market competitiveness. However, member customers’ hedonic adaptation to this relationship strategy undermines its effectiveness. Based on the hedonic adaptation theory, this study aims to analyze the process of member customers' hedonic adaptation to preferential treatment in loyalty programs and explore the boundary conditions of alleviating this effect.

This study surveyed 271 member customers in China and tested the hypothesized relationships using structural equation modeling and multigroup analysis.

Preferential treatment suffers from hedonic adaptation to member customer engagement and customer gratitude, and customer tenure is a key condition for these effects. Customer gratitude is an intermediary mechanism that explains the hedonic adaptation effect of preferential treatment to member customers engagement. In addition, the structural characteristics of loyalty programs form the boundary condition that alleviates hedonic adaptation. The authors found that high-tier and -payment strategies are more likely to mitigate hedonic adaptation of preferential treatment to customer gratitude.

This study elucidates the factors that influence the effectiveness of preferential treatment and provides constructive insights into customer relationship management and for improving enterprise performance.

The research paper examines the impact of perceived social media marketing activities (SMMAs) (interaction, entertainment, customization, trendiness and word of mouth (WOM)) on customer loyalty (CL) toward e-commerce providers. The study also explores the mediating role of customer relationship quality (CRQ) (commitment, trust and satisfaction) on the relationship between perceived SMMAs and CL.

The study is based on the S-O-R model, which states that characteristics of the environment (stimulus) arouse a cognitive state (organism) that results in positive or negative behavior (response). The present study proposes the characteristics of the e-commerce environment as stimuli (S), the inner state of customers as an organism (O) and consumer behavior as the response (R). This study investigated the responses of 487 social media users through structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results offer three crucial findings. First, the study validated that perceived SMMA comprises five dimensions (interaction, entertainment, customization, trendiness and WOM) in the Indian e-commerce context. Second, perceived SMMA significantly influences CRQ (commitment, trust and satisfaction). Third, CRQ significantly mediates the relationship between perceived SMMA and CL.

The study attempts to understand the effect of perceived SMMA on CL via CRQ in an e-commerce context, especially in an emerging economy like India. The present study argues that the SMMA of e-commerce is likely to be reflected in CL when the consumers experience CRQ through commitment, trust and satisfaction. Thus exploring the mediating role of CRQ is the authors' contribution.

This study aims to explore the extent to which customer orientation and creative benefits offered by a firm may weaken rather than strengthen customer engagement. In doing so, it sheds new light on how customer orientation and creative benefits may facilitate rather than hinder engagement by customers.

A field study provides a test of the proposed effects in a hedonic consumption setting with 1,703 customers of an online dating service. Furthermore, an experimental study with 277 executives in a functional consumption setting (new mobile app) helps affirm the robustness of the field study findings.

This research theorizes and examines how communal relationship norms between customers and a firm, along with customers’ psychological empowerment, mediate the effect of customer orientation and creative benefits on customer engagement. A provocative finding of the study is that communal relationship norms help boost, whereas psychological empowerment reduces, the effects of both customer orientation and creative benefits on customer engagement.

The research examines different relationship norms and how they can become integral to customer–company relationships; this perspective helps reveal the underlying dynamics. It contributes to the literature on customer engagement by theorizing and demonstrating the link between customer orientation and customer engagement, two central constructs in the marketing literature. It theorizes and demonstrates that providing creative benefits brings about a direct competitive advantage for the product itself, and acts as a significant variable that explains the company−customer relationship.

The findings highlight the advantages and challenges associated with encouraging customer engagement. First, they suggest that companies emphasize their customer orientation and creative benefits. Second, managers should try to minimize the possible process of raising customers’ psychological empowerment while maximizing the impact of communal relationship norms.

This study identifies psychological empowerment as a key reason customer-oriented companies that provide creative benefits still struggle to engage their customers. It also suggests viable tactics to overcome barriers to enhanced customer engagement, such as by minimizing the effects of customers’ psychological empowerment while maximizing the impact of their perceived communal relationship norms.

Drawing on the social presence theory, this study aims to explore how supplier–customer social media interactions influence supplier observers’ trust in the customers and what mechanisms contribute to variation in trust experience.

A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese suppliers using WeChat for business-to-business interactions. Data were analyzed in three steps: open coding, axial coding and selective coding.

Findings reveal that varied trust is based not only on the categories of social presence of interaction – whether social presence is embedded in informative interactions – but also on the perceived selectivity in social presence. Observer suppliers who experience selectivity during social and affective interactions create a perception of hidden information and an unhealthy relationship atmosphere, and report a sense of emotional vulnerability, thus eroding cognitive and affective trust.

The findings contribute new understandings to social presence theory by exploring the social presence of interactions in a supplier–supplier–customer triad and offer valuable insights into business-to-business social media literature by adopting a suppliers’ viewpoint to unpack the mechanisms of how social presence of interaction positively and negatively influences suppliers’ trust and behavioral responses.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to previous research on customer relationships by quantitatively examining differences in the monetary benefits obtained by consumers using social and commercial relationships to make purchases from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Customer transaction and relationship data from an SME in the USA is used to quantitatively assess the value of different marketplace relationships in an entrepreneurial context. Tobit regression is used to empirically model and test the impact of specific relationship characteristics on customer discounts.

Customers using social connections to make purchases obtain significantly larger discounts than customers using commercial connections; customers using direct connections attain significantly larger discounts than consumers using indirect connections (referrals). Interestingly, when examined by connection type, direct and indirect connections do not produce significant differences for social connections, yet they yield notable differences for commercial connections. The findings provide valuable insights to entrepreneurs for understanding and managing customer relationships.

This study empirically demonstrates that social relationships can be both prevalent and influential in the marketplace. The methodology used to quantitatively assess the monetary value associated with different methods of engaging with SMEs allows objective comparisons among different types of customer relationships. Quantification also allows important relationship characteristics to be empirically examined, including how the relationships compare to one another and to nonpersonal marketing activities. Ultimately, these novel contributions generate important insights to help marketers and entrepreneurs better understand customer relationships.

This study aims to explore the global issues of impulse buying, compulsive purchasing and materialism. It examines how materialism relates to self-esteem and the tendencies for impulsive and compulsive buying. In addition, the study delves into the impact of religiosity on self-esteem and materialistic values in an Islamic country.

Enumerators visited universities, distributing 415 questionnaires and receiving 397 in return. Due to the unavailability of a sample frame for the target population, the study used nonprobability sampling for statistical analysis, which included assessments of normality, reliability, validity and bootstrapping for the structural model, the researchers used Smart PLS.

The study confirmed 13 hypotheses while rejecting four. The unsupported hypotheses are: (i) materialism negatively impacts impulsive purchasing behavior, (ii) impulsive purchasing does not mediate the relationship between materialism and compulsive purchasing, (iii) materialism does not mediate the relationship between religiosity and impulsive purchasing and (iv) in an Islamic country, neither materialism nor impulsive purchasing significantly mediates the relationship between religiosity and compulsive purchasing.

This study was conducted in a city within a developing Islamic nation, focusing on college students. It suggests that future research could include more cities, a diverse population segments and multicultural perspectives. The research primarily examined the direct relationships between religiosity and factors such as self-esteem, materialism and impulsive purchasing. Future studies could explore religiosity as a mediating factor. This study highlights that materialism (M), impulsive buying (IB) and compulsive buying (CB) are not only closely interconnected but also adversely affect individual, family and societal well-being, raising global concerns. While occasional impulsive behavior is common among individuals in Islamic nations, repeated indulgences in the same behavior could lead to an obsession with excessive purchasing.

This study holds significant implications for consumers and retailers. Excessive and unnecessary spending can increase financial burden and adversely affect family welfare. Often, families and acquaintances inadvertently teach children to engage in extreme purchasing behaviors. To combat this, families and religious leaders should educate individuals about the detrimental effects of impulsive and compulsive purchasing. In addition, colleges and other institutions should organize seminars and workshops to address these issues. Retailers, whose sales largely depend on impulsive and compulsive consumers, should employ interpersonal influencers and brand advocates to connect with this customer segment effectively.

This study examined the relationship between religiosity, materialism, self-esteem and impulsive and compulsive purchasing behaviors. This study thoroughly tested 17 hypotheses, encompassing direct, mediating and multimediating relationships. The findings reveal that materialism’s impact on impulsive behavior is negligible compared to previous research, corroborating the findings presented in the cited literature.

Different age groups display different shopping patterns in terms of how and where consumers buy products. During times of crisis, such behavioural differences become even more striking yet remain under-researched with respect to elderly consumers. This paper investigates the impact of age on retail-related behavioural changes and behavioural stability of elderly shoppers (in comparison to younger consumers) during a crisis.

The authors surveyed 643 Austrian consumers to assess the impact of perceived threat on behavioural change and the moderating effect of age groups. Based on findings from this survey, they subsequently conducted 51 semi-structured interviews to understand the causes of behavioural change and behavioural stability during a crisis.

Elderly shoppers display more stable shopping behaviour during a crisis compared to younger consumers, which is influenced by perceived threat related to the crisis. Such findings indicate that elderly shoppers reinforce their learnt and embedded shopping patterns. The causes of change and stability in behaviour include environmental and inter-personal factors.

Through the lens of social cognitive theory, protection motivation theory and dual process theory, this research contributes to an improved understanding of changes in shopping behaviour of elderly consumers, its antecedents and consequences during a time of crisis. The authors reveal reasons that lead to behavioural stability, hence the absence of change, in terms of shopping during a crisis. They further outline implications for retailers that might wish to better respond to shopping behaviours of the elderly.

This study aims to assess the essential elements of internal organisational capability that influence the cybersecurity effectiveness of a construction firm. An extended McKinsey 7S model is used to analyse the relationship between a construction firm's cybersecurity effectiveness and nine internal capability elements: shared values, strategy, structure, systems, staff, style, skills, relationships with third parties and regulatory compliance.

Based on a quantitative research strategy, this study collected data through a cross-sectional survey of professionals working in the construction sector in the United Kingdom (UK). The collected data was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistical methods.

The findings underlined systems, regulatory compliance, staff and third-party relationships as the most significant elements of internal organisational capability influencing a construction firm's cybersecurity effectiveness, organised in order of importance.

Future research possibilities are proposed including the extension of the proposed diagnostic model to consider additional external factors, examining it under varying industrial relationship conditions and developing a dynamic framework that helps improve cybersecurity capability levels while overseeing execution outcomes to ensure success.

The extended McKinsey 7S model can be used as a diagnostic tool to assess the organisation's internal capabilities and evaluate the effectiveness of implemented changes. This can provide specific ways for construction firms to enhance their cybersecurity effectiveness.

This study contributes to the field of cybersecurity in the construction industry by empirically assessing the effectiveness of cybersecurity in UK construction firms using an extended McKinsey 7S model. The study highlights the importance of two additional elements, third-party relationships and construction firm regulatory compliance, which were overlooked in the original McKinsey 7S model. By utilising this model, the study develops a concise research model of essential elements of internal organisational capability that influence cybersecurity effectiveness in construction firms.