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The purpose of this paper is to investigate “how” and “when” the stereotypes of competence and warmth, that are evoked by a foreign company’s country-of-origin (COO), affect blame attributions and/or attitudes toward a company’s products when a company is involved in a product-harm crisis.

Study 1 (n=883) analyzes the psychological mechanisms through which perceived COO competence and warmth differently affect blame attributions and evaluative responses. Study 2 (n=1,640) replicates Study 1’s findings, and it also investigates how consumer ethnocentrism, animosity toward a country, and product category characteristics moderate the hypothesized COO’s effects.

COO competence leads to more favorable attitudes toward the involved company’s products. This effect increases when the company sells high-involvement or utilitarian products. COO warmth leads to more favorable attitudes toward the involved company’s products directly as well as indirectly by diminishing blame attributions. These effects increase when consumers are highly ethnocentric, or the animosity toward a foreign country is high.

This paper frames the investigation of COO stereotypes in a new theoretical and empirical setting, specifically, a product-harm crisis. It demonstrates that consumers differently evaluate a potential wrongdoing company and its harmful products in a product-harm crisis based on their perceptions of a company’s COO competence and warmth. Finally, it defines the moderating effects of individual, consumer-country-related and product characteristics on the hypothesized COO effects.

This paper aims to analyse the antecedents of brand love in online network-based communities and to develop an integrative conceptual model in which social-interactive engagement influences brand love via the mediating effects of social identity.

A survey was conducted on the Facebook fan pages of 20 leading international brands. A total of 387 responses were collected from consumers living primarily in Europe and the USA. Structural equation modelling was performed to test the hypothesised linkages.

The results confirmed that the positive influence of social-interactive engagement on brand love is mediated by the psychological effects related to how members perceive their self-concept based on belonging to the social group of the brand fan page.

This study considered Facebook, the favourite social network used by customers to connect with brands. Future research is invited to consider other social media to increase the external validity of the model.

To strengthen the emotional bond with a brand in online network-based communities, managers should stimulate consumers’ social identity by leveraging on the experiences which influence social-interactive engagement.

This study is the first to investigate the effects of social-interactive engagement on social identity to enhance the understanding of brand love’s antecedents in specific online social environments.

This paper aims to address the green purchasing gap by: exploring environmentally conscious consumers’ mental representation of the barriers responsible for the green purchasing gap; assessing which barriers are perceived as the most relevant in hampering the purchase of green products for environmentally conscious consumers; and investigating the relationships among these barriers. Although consumers are increasingly concerned about environmental deterioration, the current market share of green products remains fairly low.

An introspective qualitative study is conducted; 51 environmentally conscious consumers showing a green purchasing gap are interviewed, and the data are analysed with a cognitive mapping technique (Decision Explorer software) and Freeman’ structural indices (UCINET software).

Higher price and scarce availability of green products are the main barriers to green purchasing. However, consumers’ perceptions of price and availability may vary by changing other barriers (e.g. green products displacement inside the store and in-store communication).

This work reconstructs the decisional premises of environmentally conscious consumers’ choices to not purchase green products, identifies the most relevant barriers to green purchasing behaviour and the relationships between these barriers. With this knowledge, marketers of green products can focus on the most important barriers so that interventions in these barriers may change environmentally conscious consumers’ perceptions of other related barriers.

The COVID-19 outbreak has been rapidly spreading around the world for more than a year. However, few studies have explored the connection between the perceived severity of COVID-19 and purchase intention of the health-related products, for example, organic food. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) framework, this study examines the influencing mechanism of perceived severity of COVID-19 on purchase intention of organic food.

To evaluate the proposed model, an online survey was utilized to collect 1,104 valid questionnaires from China.

The findings suggest that (1) the perceived severity of COVID-19 has a significant positive impact on purchasing intention; (2) health consciousness acts as a mediating role between perceived severity of COVID-19 and purchasing intention and (3) perceived inconvenience negatively moderates the connection between perceived severity and purchase intention.

The findings of this paper provide new insights into the positive effects of COVID-19 and pave the way for governments and enterprises to promote the purchase behaviour of organic food.