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The positive deviance (PD) focus group is a novel educational intervention that allows participants to discuss their food handling behaviors and decide to try recommended practices modeled by people like themselves. Currently, most food safety education is delivered through reading materials. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of food safety education utilizing three interventions: PD, personal story reading and reading standard material.

A total of 89 pregnant women and 93 people with diabetes received food safety information through one of three intervention methods: PD, reading standard educational material (Standard) and reading material presented in a story format (Story). A survey assessed self-reported risk and food safety knowledge and personal hygiene before and after the interventions. Take-home assignments allowed participants to practice recommendations. Post class interviews and survey assessed knowledge gained and reported behavior change.

Compared to those who merely read educational information, participants in a PD Intervention had higher knowledge scores and adopted more safe handling recommendations. Involvement of the participants and the length of information exposure likely contributed to the significant difference between the interventions. This suggests that food safety education is most effective when delivered in a supportive discussion format. Health education programs for these vulnerable groups should endeavor to deliver safe food handling guidelines through a PD approach.

Previous research demonstrated the effectiveness of PD when delivering nutrition education. This is the first paper that explored the effectiveness of a PD intervention in delivering safe handling recommendations.

This study aims to explore the extent to which internal marketing influences employees’ perceived ability to deliver service quality in the Islamic banking industry in Oman. Additionally, the influence of perceived service quality on perceived customer satisfaction is established.

Data was obtained from retail banking branch employees at the customer front line of Islamic banks in Oman using electronic and person-administered surveys, and 272 responses were deemed suitable for data analysis. The measurement and structural models were measured through structural equation modelling.

The findings show that internal promotion, internal process and internal purpose are enablers of employees’ perceived ability to deliver service quality in the Islamic banking industry of Oman. In addition, service quality was found to have a strong positive influence on perceived customer satisfaction in Islamic banks.

This study demonstrates that internal product, internal price, internal promotion, internal process and internal purpose are influencers of service quality, and the latter has a direct relationship with perceived customer satisfaction in Islamic banking.

The findings can guide the Islamic banking sector in Oman on how internal marketing can foster service quality, ultimately leading to positive perceived customer satisfaction experiences.

The internal marketing mix model is predominately a Western model, which has been tested primarily in mature Western markets. This study reflects on ten internal marketing mix elements, which have been tested for the enablement of service quality and perceived customer satisfaction in Oman.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the potential of an organisational orientation, namely the electronic marketing orientation (EMO) to address implementation issues in business-to-business (B2B) social media implementation. Previous research has demonstrated differences between B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing.

The paper draws on existing B2B marketing, social media and organisational orientation literature, both academic and practitioner. This facilitates the development of a conceptual model and research proposition as a basis of further research into addressing contemporary barriers to B2B social media implementation.

The paper contends that each of the four components of the EMO addresses different implementation issues faced in implementing social media and, more specifically, the unique issues faced by B2B marketers.

The paper is conceptual in nature; however, it provides directions for future empirical research.

The differences in promotional and sales channels and messages required in B2B context are addressed in the research propositions. The paper highlights implementation challenges and how a particular organisational orientation can facilitate the decision-making in dealing with them.

The paper provides a unique theoretical contribution by introducing the EMO conceptual model in a specific context of B2B social media marketing.

David Bawden is professor of information science at City University London, UK. He has a first degree in organic chemistry (Liverpool University) and masters and doctoral degrees in information science (Sheffield University). He worked in research information services in the pharmaceutical industry before joining City University in 1990. His academic interests include the history and philosophy of the information sciences, information-related behaviour, knowledge organisation, scientific information, digital literacy and academic-practitioner research collaboration. He is editor of the Journal of Documentation, the leading European journal of library/information science, and is a member of the board of EUCLID, the European Association for Library and Information Teaching and Research. His interests in individual differences in information behaviour stem from studies of ‘information for creativity’ in the 1980s, and he has a particularly interest in ways of understanding individual attitudes and preferences as a way of improving information provision. His email address is db@soi.city.ac.uk.

This paper aims to increase related knowledge across personal, social and ecological dimensions of sustainability and how it can be applied to support transformative learning.

The paper provides a reflexive case study of the design, content and impact of a course on eco-justice that integrates relational learning with an equity and justice lens. The reflexive case study provides a critical, exploratory self-assessment, including interviews, group discussions and surveys with key stakeholders and course participants.

The results show how relational approaches can support transformative learning for sustainability and provide concrete practices, pathways and recommendations for curricula development that other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.

Sustainability research, practice and education generally focuses on structural or systemic factors of transformation (e.g. technology, governance and policy) without due consideration as to how institutions and systems are shaping and shaped by the transformation of personal agency and subjectivity. This presents a vast untapped and under-studied potential for addressing deep leverage points for change by using a relational approach to link personal, societal and ecological transformations for sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to identify which plant protection practices consumers prefer and why. The authors focused on beneficial insects, genetically modified (GM) plants, synthetic chemical pesticides, biological plant protection, mechanical-physical plant protection as well as biotechnical plant protection. The authors studied the effects of the risk perception and both subjective and objective knowledge on preference.

The authors collected cross-sectional data from n = 1,223 people living in Germany. For this, the authors used an online panel and quoted participation after age, gender, income and region. The authors used multiple regression analyses and also explored moderation effects of knowledge on risk perception to explain participants' preferences.

The most preferred plant protection practice in the study sample was the application of beneficial insects. The authors found evidence that risk perception, as well as objective and subjective knowledge, can have a pivotal direct effect on preferences. Additionally, subjective as well as objective knowledge typically moderated the effect of risk perception, depending on the plant protection practice in focus. Overall, the authors found that levels of subjective and objective knowledge of plant protection practices were rather low among German participants.

While studies on consumer preferences for GM or organic food are abundant, preferences regarding other types of common plant protection practices are hardly investigated. To tackle this research gap, the authors focused on six different and common plant protection practices and compare results.

The increased digital interactions in the B2B industry have enhanced the importance of customer engagement as a measure of firm performance. This study aims to map and analyze temporal and spatial journeys for customer engagement in B2B markets from a bibliometric perspective.

The extant literature on customer engagement research in the B2B context was analyzed using bibliometric analysis. The citation analysis, keyword analysis, cluster analysis, three-field plot and bibliographic coupling were used to map the intellectual structure of customer engagement in B2B markets.

The research on customer engagement in the B2B context was studied more in western countries. The analysis suggests that customer engagement in B2B markets will take centre stage in the coming times as digital channels make it easier to track critical metrics besides other key factors. Issues like digital transformation, the use of artificial intelligence for virtual engagement, personalization, innovation and salesforce management by leveraging technology would be critical for improved B2B customer engagement.

The study provides a comprehensive reference to scholars working in this domain.

The study makes a pioneering effort to comprehensively analyze the vast corpus of literature on customer engagement in B2B markets for business insights.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the development and progression of the International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing and include comments on its future direction.

The paper takes the approach of an essay format.

The journal has published key papers in pharmaceutical and healthcare research and continues to develop an interdisciplinary character with contributions from scholarly and practice‐oriented sources.

The paper provides a contemporary appraisal of the status and positioning of the journal.

This paper aims to move beyond previous investigations juxtaposing the performance of global versus domestic brands, where domestic is referred to as “localness” in the literature, conceptualizing and developing two measures of “within-country brand or product localness.” In doing so, it uses objective localness measures, rather than consumer perceptions of brand localness, as have been primarily used previously. Then, by leveraging established theory on brand authenticity and corollary literatures on brand identity and country-of-origin effects, this research develops and empirically tests key hypotheses about how these within-country, more geographically local products or brands (referred to as simply “localness” hereafter, for brevity), influence sales outcomes through increasing perceptions of brand and product authenticity.

Two empirical studies using different archival data sets are conducted to test the hypotheses. Study 1 focuses on new product sales from 2002 to 2011 for 31 categories of consumer packaged goods US product launches initiated in 2002–2005, whereas Study 2 investigates online consumer review and retail sales data in the US craft beer industry from 2001 to 2011. Localness is operationalized as two different objective measures: in Study 1, local distribution is measured, and in Study 2, firm headquarters denotes the geographic bounds of localness. These two measures are motivated by prior consumer perceptual studies of Locavores (consumers who strongly prefer local products), which identify that local systems of production and/or distribution are the key signals of localness. Using two measures allows the localness construct to be tested for the potential firm-side boundaries of its scope and provides two empirical measures that future researchers can leverage.

Brand (or product) localness gives performance advantages over national brands in the form of increased sales across both studies. The second study, focused on craft beer, dives more deeply into the theoretical mechanism (localness operates through increased perceptions of brand authenticity) and shows that while brand authenticity directly translates into higher sales, as anticipated, localness fully mediates this relationship. When coupled with supporting marketing tactics (high price and/or product variety), the link between localness and brand authenticity grows stronger. Local brands with low prices and/or limited product variety are deemed inauthentic by consumers, so it is important for brand managers to use marketing tactics that reinforce brand authenticity to support localness as a strategy.

Future research could extend this inquiry in a number of ways. These include combining both empirical measures of localness into a single empirical inquiry, investigating additional product categories and further integrating aspects of strategy such as market positioning and innovation strategy. Newer data could also reveal how these phenomena are continuing to evolve.

Based on this study, managers can benefit by leveraging localness as a key brand or product attribute to achieve a sales advantage, but they must do so by using marketing tactics consistent with an authentic brand positioning. Efforts to expand a brand’s geographic reach over time should likely be conducted very locally at first, before extending to regional markets and then to a global footprint. It is also posited that retail store managers can benefit from allocating some shelf space to local brand and product offerings.

This paper conceptualizes and measures localness in new ways compared to the previous literatures. It develops objective measures of within-country localness instead of using consumer perceptions of localness and/or considering domestic brands as being “local” compared to global brands; builds key linkages between concepts of localness, authenticity and sales performance; and uncovers when and how within-country localness is a key brand or product attribute associated with increased sales success.