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Place identity refers to the combination of physical setting, social interactions, emotions and associated meanings. This research paper aims to broaden knowledge about boutique concepts and to examine the role of advertisement types suited to generate a heightened sense of place for customers. The design and delivery of tangible and intangible components of the boutique service experience are investigated to better understand business-relevant customer outcomes.

An introductory qualitative study explores the key features and managerial relevance of the boutique appeal as a means to communicate personalization and a sense of place. Interviews with managers of a boutique catering service are conducted and thematically analyzed. A quantitative follow-up study examines the effect of the boutique appeal on hotel image, purchase intention and willingness to pay.

A boutique hotel appeal is more attractive to customers (compared to traditional luxury appeals) when it is advertised using visually engaging virtual tours because it augments customers’ sensation of place identity. The mediating psychological mechanism, place identity, represents the essential emotional component evoked by boutique concepts and its positive effect on managerially relevant customer outcomes.

This paper provides insight for the design and management of boutique concepts to better shape and predict consumer responses in various luxury hospitality industries. The process by which customers identify with the location where the service is provided, socialize with staff and attach meaning to these settings evokes a sense of place identity, a critical resource in the process of value co-creation.

Associated with status, excess and wastefulness, the consumption of luxury is perceived as the antithesis to sustainable development. Entrepreneurs create business cases to mediate positive sustainability changes, which transform markets and institutional arrangements. The purpose of this paper is to propose the concept of value-in-impact as an interface concept to integrate perspectives from entrepreneurship, marketing and ecological economics. It provides interdisciplinarily applicable, generalizable concepts to describe social entrepreneurs’ personal motivations to reconfigure market structures to produce sustainability change.

The case of Ecuadorian luxury chocolate manufactory To’ak is described in the context of the three pillars of sustainability, chocolate producers and cacao suppliers. Thematic analysis of the founders’ personal narratives provides insight regarding their motivation to use ostensibly antithetical luxury marketing for rainforest preservation and to foster self-reliant communities.

To’ak pays premium prices to create incentives to community farmers to propagate the rare, DNA-certified cacao exclusive to their products, thereby marginalizing oppressive suppliers. The company’s founders are motivated to excellence in the chocolate industry, having witnessed the loss of the cultural meaning of cacao, rainforest degradation and the dissipation of associated communities. The case study findings illustrate how value-in-impact is interpreted as purposeful configuration of value-in-use and value-in-exchange on luxury markets to produce positive sustainability change.

The notion of value-in-impact describes higher order conceptualizations in business research. It encompasses a holistic understanding of the dynamics within and between societal and natural ecosystems. Its application at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface can lead to improved management and policy decisions.

Biological sex is an important segmenting variable in marketing. Yet its ability to meaningfully distinguish beyond the female/male dichotomy is limited. With traditional gender roles continuously shifting and contemporary fluid conceptualizations of gender altering the consumption mainstream, the diverse and multi-faceted behaviours related to gender elude market segment distinctions that are based on biological sex alone. Thus far, researchers have had only limited success applying the concept of gender identity and gender schema theory to inform marketing research and management. The purpose of this study is to further develop a consumer decision-oriented scale that addresses this gap by providing a more sensitive method of segmentation.

The scale was validated according to common psychological scale development techniques.

Not only does the Consumption Gender Scale predict the behaviours and media preferences of traditional, gender-schematic male and female consumer segments, but it also accounts for the variance in the behaviours of gender-aschematic non-traditional men and women. We demonstrate the scale’s predictive power in two experimental studies and discuss its potential to serve as an intermediary variable that can predict product attitudes and purchase intentions on social media.

The Consumption Gender Scale was based on surveys and experiments conducted in the USA. Future research could examine the suitability of the scale in other cultural contexts.

The Consumption Gender Scale provides a finer taxonomy for organizations to use in segmenting their target market on the basis of consumption-relevant gender rather than biological sex. Consequently, it also provides opportunities for managers to fine-tune their media-planning efforts.

Biological sex as the main segmenting variable has become inadequate because of ongoing shifts in gender roles and changes in associated consumption behaviours. To address the shortcomings of traditional methods, we advocate for and validate a continuous measurement scale.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.