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This study investigates the dual roles of emotion and cognition in shaping customer experiences within the hospitality sector, examining their distinct impacts on the formation of customer loyalty.

Employing a sequential exploratory mixed-method design, this research integrates qualitative interviews with eighteen hospitality managers and a quantitative survey involving 595 customers to develop and validate a new instrument measuring affective and cognitive experiential states for general hospitality consumers.

The study's results reveal that emotional experiences strongly correlate with affective loyalty, while cognitive experiences significantly influence cognitive loyalty. The study contributes to the existing literature by introducing a robust instrument that effectively captures the experiential dimensions, offering insights into customer loyalty formation.

The reliance on retrospective self-reporting in the quantitative phase may introduce recall bias, potentially limiting the precision of the findings. Future research should seek to mitigate this by employing real-time data capture methods.

The newly developed measurement tool presents a practical solution for industry professionals aiming to enhance customer experience management by focusing on both affective and cognitive aspects, thus facilitating targeted strategies to cultivate customer loyalty. The implications for service design suggest that both emotional and cognitive elements must be considered to optimize customer experiences and drive loyalty.

This work advances the theoretical understanding of customer experience by distinguishing between its affective and cognitive dimensions and their respective contributions to loyalty. It offers a validated empirical tool, setting a foundation for future investigations.

Despite the increasing popularity of women-owned businesses in the marketplace, relatively few studies in the hospitality literature have focused on these businesses. Hence, this study aims to examine the impact of femvertising and purplewashing on consumers’ willingness to pay a premium at women-owned restaurants, as well as the role of feminist self-identification and psychological closeness underlying these associated effects. The study aims to provide insights into women-owned restaurant marketing strategies and to highlight the importance of authentic brand activism in consumer behavior in the restaurant industry.

Building on Construal Level Theory, this paper conducts two online experiments with 486 US participants who have dined at or ordered takeout from a restaurant. The studies aim to investigate consumers’ opinions about brand activism strategies (i.e. femvertising and purplewashing) in restaurants.

The results of two experimental studies indicate that a femvertising strategy increases consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for a women-owned restaurant compared to a non-women-owned restaurant. Moreover, consumers who identify more strongly as feminists are more likely to pay more for women-owned restaurants when purplewashing is absent (vs present). Additionally, psychological closeness serves as an underlying mechanism that explains these effects.

This study provides clear and actionable recommendations to help business stakeholders, owners and managers to market and advertise women-owned restaurants. For example, women-owned restaurant practitioners should feature women empowerment messaging in their advertisements to attract more consumers. However, they should avoid using purplewashing and other inauthentic brand activism practices in advertisements.

This research contributes to the hospitality literature on women entrepreneurship by exploring the effective marketing strategies of women-owned restaurants and investigating how to advertise women-owned businesses in the hospitality field. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is also the very first study to explore the role of femvertising and purplewashing in consumers’ food-related decision-making.