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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.

This study aims to develop a new general framework of the challenges for decision making in groups. Unlike most research focused on individual consumption, this study takes a broader perspective on joint consumption.

The conceptual framework and the developed research questions are based on an extensive literature review.

This research identifies five major challenges for group decisions: allocation of responsibilities, preference prediction, preference aggregation, conflicts and mutual influences. For each challenge, this study summarizes existing findings and highlights important areas for continued investigation, related to a marketing-oriented understanding of consumers. This article concludes with implications for both managers and researchers.

The identified key determinants of group decisions aggregate findings from multidisciplinary literature and can help marketing researchers and managers understand the relevant but underresearched issues of decision making in groups. Furthermore, this study includes relevant moderators, such as individual and group characteristics, and reveals problematic research gaps. In turn, it offers questions and ideas for additional research.

This paper aims to contribute to the marketing literature and practice by examining the effect of product placements on the host brand. The declining effectiveness of traditional advertising has prompted increasing interest in strategies for placing products in media programming. Most existing research adopt the perspective of the brands embedded in media products, with limited attention to the impact that product placement has on the media product that serves as a host brand for the embedded brands. The authors investigate this effect in the context of motion pictures and develop a theory-driven conceptual model.

The authors test their hypotheses with two experiments in which randomly assigned participants view one of seven versions of a custom-made, seven-minute short film that differ in their level of placement prominence.

The results from a mediation analysis indicate that, after controlling for audiences’ general attitudes toward the embedded brand, greater placement prominence heightens consumers’ reactance to persuasion attempts and negatively affects their evaluations of the host brand. A post hoc experiment confirms that even very low levels of placement prominence can worsen host brand evaluations.

This research is among the first to investigate the effects of product placement from a host brand perspective. It issues a warning to producers of entertainment content: a product placement strategy may generate additional earnings, but it also can lower audiences’ evaluations of the focal entertainment product.

The general aim of this paper is to shift the interest in two particular stakeholders, the entrepreneur and the company itself, from a vision based on a company perceived as a stock package towards an aesthetic perception of its creation. It intends to link creative entrepreneurship and creativity in the arts. Emanating from the phenomenological thought of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty on artistic vision, this research intends to read the motivations of a creator by a calling, that amounts to a counter‐gift to the beauty of the world. This motivation to create can be articulated in two non‐financial impulses: to dis‐cover and to correct. A sketch portrait of a French entrepreneur is depicted to illustrate the urge to create a small business. A stakeholder understanding is suggested, taking into account schutzian multiple orders of reality.

En vue de cerner le sujet de ma communication, j'aimerais d'abord caractériser l'analyse touristique régionale. Celle‐ci découle de la notion d'espace, notion encore peu familière aux économistes. En revanche, ce qu'André Piatier appelle «l'étude touristique spatiale» a fait l'objet de nombreux travaux qui, pour la plupart, se réclamaient de la méthode empirique. En effet, quoi de plus logique, pour augmenter les subventions en faveur d'un syndicat d'initiative ou d'un organisme analogue, que de faire l'inventaire de l'équipement touristique local ou régional et de prouver, par a + b, que tout le monde en dépend: l'étranger ne fait pas seulement vivre l'hôtelier, le restaurateur, le chemin de fer, le chauffeur de taxi et le garagiste, mais il assure également l'existence du boucher, du boulanger, de l'épicier, du fleuriste, de l'ébéniste, de l'entrepreneur en bâtiment, jusqu'au marchand de tabac et de journaux, bref de toute la population active de l'endroit. La force persuasive de telles études supplée heureusement au manque de renseignements statistiques précis.

Prior work underscores the important role of customer advocacy for brands. The purpose of this study is to explore the critical role customers can play as brand heroes. The authors developed and validated a measurement scale composed of properties that are derived from distinct brand hero motivational mechanisms.

The authors conducted one exploratory pilot, using semi-structured interviews, with industry and academic experts, and employed three main studies across varying brands and market settings.

This study explores and empirically demonstrates how the brand hero scale (BHS) is related to, yet distinct from, existing scales of opinion leaders, market mavens, attachment and customer advocacy. The six-item BHS demonstrates convergent, discriminant, nomological and predictive validity across several different brand contexts.

This research extends the extant body of work by identifying and defining brand heroes, developing and validating a parsimonious BHS, and demonstrating how its predictive validity extends both to a range of key advocacy and loyalty customer behaviors.

The study provides provocative insights for marketing researchers and brand managers and ascertains the important role heroes may play for brands in terms of strong customer advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

Building on the theory of meaning, this study shows that identifying and working with brand heroes is of great managerial importance and offers critical avenues for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influences of smallholder farmers’ motivations, opportunities and abilities on their satisfactions of non-certified organic farming practices in Southern China based on the motivation–opportunity–ability (MOA) model.

The sample covers 314 smallholders from Nanning region in Southern China who have engaged in non-certified organic farming. Judgmental and convenient sampling are applied to collect data. Data analysis consists of confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling and mediation test.

The results show opportunity as dominant impact factor of smallholder farmers’ satisfaction followed by motivation and ability. Also, their commitment to further non-certified organic farming is positively influenced by their satisfactory level. Mediation test reveals that satisfaction partially mediates the relationships between motivation, ability and commitment.

First, due to the limited sample size in a single region, the findings cannot represent even Southern Chinese farmers as an entirety. Second, the study only limited itself in the scope of the MOA model.

Apart from providing updated empirical results for existing studies, this study also highlights the importance of farmer association, supporting scheme as well as the relevant training for the smallholder farmers to size the opportunities, promote their motivations and strengthen their abilities.

As little attention has been given to small-scale farmer who are involved in organic farming practice in China, this paper presents findings based on the MOA framework.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze this phenomenon and identify its determinants using data from Brazilian higher education institutions.

Based on a data set comprehending 2,230 university students from 70 different institutions across the country, the authors develop five Probit models to assess impacts related to individual traits and systemic conditions on five dependent dimensions: entrepreneurial activity, potential entrepreneurs, high-impact entrepreneurship, serial entrepreneurship and innovation-driven entrepreneurship.

The lack of significance in many of the variables included in estimations suggests that student entrepreneurship seems to be a rather random phenomenon in Brazil.

Findings pose challenges for student entrepreneurship, as targets for intervention are not clear.

Over the past decades, universities have been receiving an increasing demand to go beyond their role of producing science and technology to explore its knowledge potential to produce novel commercial applications. However, while there is a growing interest in ways to foster scientific academic entrepreneurship, universities also serve as a positive environment for student entrepreneurship training, knowledge sharing, testing ideas and learning. So far, the importance of student entrepreneurship has received far less attention than it likely deserves.

Despite the fact that in recent years performance management and measurement (PMM) techniques and tools have attracted much research interest and that many scholars claim that implementing PMM yields many advantages, there is only a limited number of rigorous, systematic, scientific analysis of empirical studies into the benefits actually experienced by organizations in practice after introducing PMM. In addition little is known about specific reasons for organizations to start using PMM, and about the various relationships, if any, between the advantages, disadvantages and reasons for PMM use. This paper seeks to address these issues.

This article identifies the advantages, disadvantages and reasons for use of SPM which organizations have experienced in practice, based on an extensive literature research and interviews at 17 prominent Dutch organizations.

The study found four main advantages, two main disadvantages and two main reasons for use.

The main limitation is that the number of participating organizations and interviewees could be higher.

The practical implication of this research is that implementing and using PMM yields specific benefits for an organization and that management now knows which advantages are to be expected.

This research shows that management needs to make the advantages of PMM explicit before the PMM implementation starts and keep stressing these advantages during and after implementation. This will heighten commitment of organizational members for PMM and increase a successful use of PMM.

This article reports a wide range of complementary or antinomic insights into the multi‐layered globalizing process, in an attempt to understand its causes and significance. Different perceptions and assessments of its far‐reaching consequences all over the world are picked out. The ambiguity of the high‐technology revolution with potential transition from material to time values is contrasted with the self‐destructive bases of self‐interest policies, and the flagrant defeat of the modern economy among those excluded from planetary society. While on the surface it seems to be only a change of relations between the finance sphere and the “real economy”, the more comprehensive and penetrating cognition of recent occurrences reveals a questioning of human values. New forms of social relationships will need to be imagined to define what human worth is.