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To examine whether the country of origin (COO) effect actually exists in an e-commerce context, the authors intend to contribute to the ongoing debate by measuring the COO effect through a series of connected studies.

Drawing on cue utilization theory, the authors emphasize the urge to investigate the COO effect in multiple cue settings in order to reveal a more realistic picture of its actual effect size. In contrast to most prior research, which often does not analyze COO using methodological plurality and neglects important contextual factors, the authors employed a four-staged research design in an attempt to trigger and measure the COO’s implicit effect size in today’s pervasive context of online shopping. The importance of brands (inhering the COO) is decompositionally calculated relative to other extrinsic cues by applying a Hierarchical Bayes estimation, with the COO impact being extracted subsequently.

The results deepen concerns that the COO effect actually does not exist, particularly in the more contemporary context of online shopping. Specifically, preferences for previously favored German products faded when controlling for brand attitude for both high-involvement (p = 0.003) and low-involvement products (p = 0.024).

The study focused on consumers of Generation Y, as they represent one of the most important segments in online shopping. Findings might be replicated for other consumer generations. The study focused on Chinese consumers, as the Chinese e-commerce market represents the world’s largest one. Future studies might investigate other markets.

As brands, rather than a COO effect, impacted consumer preferences, companies selling their products to Chinese consumers online need to establish a reputation for quality early on. Chinese companies should emphasize their COO to make use of the ethnocentrism detected. Companies profit from the Best-Worst Scaling investigation revealing which product categories Chinese consumers most preferably buy online from German companies.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to capture the importance of COO in the contemporary context of ubiquitous online shopping. Moreover, a more realistic and less biased way of measuring the importance of COO is enabled by building upon three pre-connected studies. The findings allow to develop a generalization for both high- and low-involvement products.

This study addresses the information asymmetry issue in e-commerce, particularly prevalent in the clothing industry, leading to high product returns and environmental harm. The research aims to fill gaps in the existing literature by holistically examining multiple information cues and considering intercultural differences, utilizing signaling theory.

An Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint experiment involving German (n = 332) and Chinese (n = 331) respondents from Generation Y is conducted. This cross-cultural comparison explores consumer preferences for sustainable clothing and analyses factors influencing their choices, including price, shipping costs, sustainability labels and online customer reviews.

German online shoppers exhibit a stronger preference for sustainable clothing compared to their Chinese counterparts, with notable differences in the emphasis placed on various factors. Chinese respondents prioritize monetary aspects (e.g. price and shipping costs), while Germans attach greater importance to sustainability labels and online customer reviews.

This research contributes to the existing literature by providing a comprehensive analysis of information cues in e-commerce, considering cultural variations. The findings shed light on the distinct preferences of German and Chinese respondents from Generation Y, offering valuable insights for businesses aiming to address information asymmetry and enhance environmental sustainability in online clothing retail.

This paper aims to investigate how product positioning affects the influence of product gender on consumers’ product evaluations.

Using experimental designs, this research investigates how hedonic versus functional consumption goals affect consumers’ choice between feminine and masculine products (Study 1) and how positioning products as either hedonic or functional influences consumers’ evaluations of feminine and masculine products (Studies 2 and 3).

When pursuing hedonic consumption goals, consumers are more likely to choose feminine (vs masculine) products, whereas when pursuing functional consumption goals, consumers are more likely to choose masculine (vs feminine) products. Further, consumers evaluate feminine products more favorably when the products are hedonically (vs functionally) positioned, whereas they evaluate masculine products more favorably when the products are functionally (vs hedonically) positioned. Perceptions of product credibility mediate this effect.

Connecting theories of gender identity, product positioning and congruity, this study extends previous literature by demonstrating that the effects of product gender are context-dependent.

Many companies use visual design cues (e.g. shape, color) to promote their products’ gender. The findings of this study suggest that companies promoting their products as feminine should highlight the products’ hedonic benefits, whereas companies promoting their products as masculine should highlight the products’ functional benefits.

Applying a conceptual congruity approach, this research is the first to demonstrate that the effects of product gender on consumers’ product evaluations depend on the product’s positioning.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the mediating effect of fan-page followers’ engagement activities and moderating role of followers’ demographic profile and trust level on their purchase intention.

This study utilised the customer engagement behaviour and consumer involvement theory as a foundation to explore the impact of variables. Structural equation modelling was utilised to test the model with the data collected from 307 Facebook fan pages’ followers of five Malaysian companies.

It was shown that following fan pages will influence fan page engagement, which in turn affects purchase intention and social media connectedness. Further analysis indicated that the impact of “follow” and “engagement” on purchase intention differs between genders, ages, level of trust and income.

The study serves as a basic fundamental guideline for academics and researchers to interpret the concept of following fan pages and engagement actions and its effects on purchase intention and social media connectivity, as well as opening a vast area of unexplored researches on the subject of social media.

The research provides information for business-to-consumer companies in utilising fan page based on user categories.

This study proposes the application of an empirically tested framework to the fan-page follow actions. The authors argue that this framework can provide a useful foundation for future social commerce research. The results would help academics be aware of fan page and its user’s engagement actions, which will provide a new avenue of research.

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 benefits and problems associated with firm-generated content (FGC) as a key driver of sponsorship effectiveness demand more research attention. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to consider the effect of content marketing on sponsorship-response favorability in the South African energy drink market.

It is theorized that in an FGC environment, sponsor factors, sponsorship factors and event factors drive sponsorship favorability. This notion is tested using a structural equations model among 18- to 35-year-olds.

The results show acceptable model fit and confirm the usefulness of understanding the effects of content marketing on sponsorship favorability. The authors also offer directions for future research.

The results suggest that FGC which is well-designed, packaged and presented can enhance the views of individuals regarding a sponsor – even if the brand operates in a background position as opposed to the conventional foreground position common in promotional material.

The current study considers content marketing in contexts that have largely been avoided so far, or have only featured on a very limited scale in the literature. This study was conducted in an emerging market, business-to-consumer and sponsorship context for the application of a content marketing strategy.

Customers often want to learn about a product/service, and companies can benefit from such a learning desire. While prior research has shed light on firm-beneficial outcomes of customer learning and explored the motivational factors of business partners’ learning behavior, less is known about the critical antecedents of individual customers’ learning behavior. This study aims to explore the key drivers of individual customers’ learning desires and identified customers with a stronger learning desire.

This research used both a lab experiment (Study 1, N = 148) and surveys (Study 2, N = 553; Study 3, N = 703) across different participant populations and product contexts.

This study indicated that both involvement and knowledge-sharing intention drove customer learning desire. Customer expertise further strengthened these main effects. Moreover, a stronger learning desire led to greater customer satisfaction.

This study identified key factors involved in customer learning desire and its potential benefits for companies. Additional research to investigate customer learning in specific environments and forms and regarding specific brands is warranted.

This study emphasizes the importance of supporting customer learning and encourages businesses to manage customer learning proactively. It also provides suggestions for effective learning support for targeted customer groups.

This study contributes to the customer learning literature by exploring key influencing factors of individual customers’ learning desires, based on self-determination theory. It also identified the role of customer expertise in shaping customers’ learning processes. Moreover, this study examined customer learning as a novel way to enhance customer satisfaction.

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.

Brand fan pages on social networks have become very popular online services. However, empirical research on fan pages is still in its infancy. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of fan pages on the customer‐brand relationship and what motivates users to participate.

For this a framework was developed based on classical concepts of use and gratification theory, customer engagement, and involvement theory. The model is tested using a multi‐step approach of qualitative and quantitative methods.

The paper can show a significant influence from online service usage behavior on the fan page on the customer‐brand relationship. Furthermore, the paper identifies different values such as functional and hedonic content as drivers of fan‐page participation.

The results are limited by the used data set, which is not representative for all industries and is cross‐sectional. Further research could build up a database over a longitudinal time frame in different industries. The results are interesting for theory and practice. They confirm the positive effect of integration and engagement in general and show that fan pages are more than just tools to connect brand fans. They are also instruments for gaining new fans.

The present study is the first study that not only shows the effect of fan pages on customer behavior, but also analyses the motives for participation and the crucial constructs to manage them successfully.

Since the beginning of the 2000s, investors have more frequently invested into professional football clubs, thereby radically changing the industry landscape. This review's purpose is to analyze and synthesize the state of research to understand motives, roles and implications of football club investors, and to provide recommendations for further research.

The paper presents an integrative literature review by identifying relevant English articles based on the search terms investor, owner, investment, ownership, shareholder and stakeholder in combination with soccer or football. Around 2,431 articles were reviewed. A total of 129 relevant articles was analyzed and synthesized within eight subject areas.

Investors in professional club football is a young research stream with a clear European focus. Investor motives and roles are diverse and implications are multidimensional. Investors mostly aim for indirect returns rather than pure profit- or win-maximization.

Football clubs comprise an own investment class for which the identified, unique specifics must be considered to develop a financially successful investment model. Thorough academic research of investors' inherent characteristics, investor-club pairings and the pillars of long-term strategies for successful investor-club liaisons are avenues of future research. Furthermore, the results illustrate the need for research outside of Europe.

The paper is the first systematic, integrative review of existing literature in the domain of equity investments into professional club football. The findings genuinely show that, depending on the investor type and ownership structure, investors have a wide impact in professional club football.