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This study aims to investigate the impact of customer perceptions of Augmented Reality (AR) attributes such as augmentation, interactivity and vividness on attitudes towards AR mobile apps, virtual product and behavioural intentions. Also, the mediation role of customer engagement in the effect of perceptions of AR attributes on attitudes and behavioural intentions is examined using the Theory of Interactive Media Effects.

The study used a cross-sectional design. A total of 456 valid data were collected from the Millennials and Generation Z cohorts using purposive sampling. The conceptual framework was assessed using Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and Partial Least Squares-Multi Group Analysis (PLS-MGA).

The research revealed that customer perceptions of AR features such as augmentation, interactivity and vividness significantly influenced customer engagement, leading to favourable attitudes towards both the AR mobile app and the Virtual product as well as behavioural intentions. Furthermore, the study substantiates the role of customer engagement as a mediator in the relationship between customer perceptions of AR attributes and both attitudinal and behavioural outcomes.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first attempt to investigate the significance of perceived augmentation as an antecedent to customer engagement and the mediating role of customer engagement on the influence of perceptions of AR attributes on attitudinal and behavioural intention.

Despite wide acknowledgment in research of the benefits of customer engagement to firms, the customer engagement process and how it leads to positive marketing outcomes remains underexplored. Extending existing research, this paper aims to develop and test a conceptual model that outlines the effect of passive and active customer behavioral engagement on customer loyalty and the role of customer involvement in the process, as both an antecedent and a moderator.

Data collected from 362 millennials in Johannesburg, South Africa through a scenario-based experiment was submitted to a partial least square structural equation modeling and moderated-mediation analyses after examining the manipulation effectiveness of the experimental scenarios. The unit of analyses is hotel patrons.

The findings include customer involvement is a significant predictor of passive and active customer behavioral engagement both of which consequently influence customer loyalty; customer involvement moderates the effect of passive engagement on active engagement; and not only is passive engagement indirectly related to customer loyalty through active engagement, the indirect relationship is the strongest at the highest level of customer involvement.

The current study provides notable insights into the relationship between customer involvement, customer behavioral engagement and customer loyalty. However, there is need for further studies to validate our model across different brand categories and different social media platforms as well as in offline settings with a more diverse sample because the scope of this study is limited to millennials that use Facebook brand communities.

This study contributes to the customer engagement literature by rationalizing and demonstrating the importance of customer involvement as a precursor of the behavioral engagement process (comprising the passive and the active components) and loyalty among hotel patrons.

This paper aims to explore the concept of “actor engagement” within the context of the sharing economy, a novel and dynamic business model. Specifically, it investigates the formation of actor engagement and its relationship with value creation within this business model.

Drawing on Storbacka et al. (2016)actor engagement framework and service-dominant logic service ecosystem model, unstructured data (text and images) from the Airbnb platform in seven countries and text- and image-mining techniques such as machine learning are used to measure the research variables and test the model by PLS-SEM.

The results indicate that affective engagement has a more significant impact on behavioural engagement than cognitive engagement for multidimensional actor engagement. Service providers’ engagement – directly, and through customer engagement – influences value creation for service providers (i.e. performance). Moreover, national-level moderator (i.e. economic, competitiveness, technology, social and political factors) plays a significant moderating role in our model.

This study encourages future research to explore how actor engagement leads to value creation for all actors on the different sharing economy platforms.

The findings provide practical insights for service providers to engage their customers and platform managers, especially in an international context, on managing their relationships with both customers and service providers in different countries.

This study advances the current literature on actor engagement and its role in value creation by providing a better understanding of the role of the national context in this process through unstructured data analysis.

Meal ordering apps (MOAs) have transformed the customers' dining habits, particularly during mobility restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the theoretical cover of the extended stimulus–organism–response (SOR) model, this paper attempts to explore the critical antecedents and outcomes of customer MOA engagement which predict the continuous purchase intentions using these apps. A multigroup analysis is conducted to investigate the difference between the hypothesized relationships between the Chinese and Indonesian consumers.

A mixed-method approach, including a systematic literature review, an open-ended essay (qualitative) with 139 MOA users and an online survey (quantitative) with 1,207 MOA users in total, was used for hypotheses testing.

The structural equation model results revealed that customer MOA experience factors such as mobile online reviews (MR), food quality (FQ), restaurant reputation (RR), service quality and system quality (SyQ) are the absolute positive factors that influence customer MOA cognitive, affective and behavioral engagement, which in turn affect continuous purchase intentions. The multigroup analysis results reveal that Chinese customers prioritized MR and FQ for customer MOA engagement (cognitive, affective and behavioral). Comparatively, Indonesian customers placed most importance on RR and SyQ.

Considering a market-specific setting and based on the extended SOR framework, this study is one of the first to take a comprehensive look at the critical antecedents and outcome of multidimensional customer MOA engagement in the developing countries’ (China and Indonesia) online to offline meal delivery context. Further, this study investigates the customer continuous purchase intentions as an outcome of MOA engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings also reveal the differences in consumer behavior across the two developing but culturally diverse countries samples during the pandemic.

Customer engagement is of critical interest to both academics and practitioners. Extant literature focusses primarily on customer engagement with a single focal object, usually brands; this study takes another view to consider customer engagement with multiple focal objects (service provider and context). In addition to testing the relationship of the individual dimensions of engagement with the service provider and engagement with the context, this research elaborates on their drivers, with a particular focus on distinct engagement platforms. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A survey captures customer engagement with a service provider and a context in a higher education setting, with 251 responses collected across first- and third-year marketing courses in an Australian, mid-sized university.

Engagement with the service provider can drive engagement with the context. In turn, engagement with the service provider can be stimulated through the use of engagement platforms that enable customer-to-service provider interactions. The results show limited effects of customer-to-customer engagement platforms on engagement with the context though. The results are consistent across gender and student grade levels; some differences arise between international and domestic students.

This unique study broadens understanding of customer engagement with various focal objects and also details the flow of effects, from engagement with a service provider to engagement with the context. This research builds on conceptual discussions of engagement platforms and empirically examines their ability to facilitate affective, cognitive and behavioural engagement.

Drawing upon protection motivation theory and service-dominant-logic, the authors develop a model, which examines the influence of perceived psychological risk and social media involvement (SMI) on customer-brand-engagement (CBE), brand co-creation and behavioral intention during COVID-19 outbreak in the tourism context. The current research also explores the mediating effect of CBE, and moderating role of tourism-based threat/coping appraisal in the proposed associations.

To investigate such issues, the authors deploy a sample of 320 tourism consumers by adopting partial least squares-structural equation modeling or (PLS-SEM).

PLS-SEM findings revealed that SMI positively impacts tourism-CBE. Secondly, results revealed the customer brand engagement's significant-positive effect on brand co-creation and behavioral intent. Third, results showed the social media's and psychological risk's indirect impact on co-creation and behavioral intent, as mediated through customer brand engagement. Fourth, results exposed a significant/negative moderating effect of threat appraisal and significant/positive moderating role of coping appraisal in projected relationships.

Given the study's focus on pandemic-based SMI, CBE and co-creation, the authors contribute to the existing tourism marketing literature, which also generates plentiful avenues for further research, as delineated.

This research facilitates tourism brand managers to better understand the drivers of CBE and paves the way for managers to develop CBE and threat/coping strategies during pandemic.

Despite the increasing understanding of social media, CBE and co-creation in tourism, limited remains identified regarding the association of these, and associated, factors during pandemic, as thereby explored in the current research.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the factors which influence value co-creation intention through customer engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper studies the online modest fashion small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt as a Muslim country.

This paper is based on the social cognitive theory (SCT) and the literature to develop a theoretical framework of the factors influencing customers’ value co-creation intention on social media. The framework is then tested quantitatively through structural equation modelling based on partial least squares method (SEM-PLS) approach using the SmartPLS software.

The empirical analysis supported the SCT through the following conclusions: first, regarding the subject factors, self-efficacy has a positive significant effect on all dimensions of customer engagement and outcome expectation has a positive significant effect on cognitive customer engagement. Concerning the environmental factors, community experience has a positive significant effect on affective and behavioural customer engagement, whereas content quality has a positive significant effect on affective customer engagement. Second, customer engagement is a significant mediator through the dimensions of affective and behavioural customer engagement.

The findings of this study can help online modest fashion SMEs better comprehend the factors which influence the customers’ engagement for value co-creation intention whether it is subject factors or environmental factors. Therefore, they can better operate online and encourage customers to contribute to the development of new products and services and hence achieve a competitive advantage and survive in times of COVID-19.

Most of the existing studies focused on the value co-creation behaviour and output. However, there is limited research focusing on what contributes to the customers’ engagement for value co-creation intention, especially for online modest fashion and Muslim countries. Therefore, this study attempts to examine and bridge this research gap.

Adopting a self-congruence theory (SCT) and service dominant logic (SDL)-informed perspectives; we develop a model that investigates the interface between social media involvement (SMI), self-brand congruence (SBC), customer-brand engagement (CBE), brand co-creation behavior (BCB), brand interactivity and behavioral intentions (BIN) with luxury service hotel–brands.

We test a sample of hotel-customers to probe this matter using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results revealed that SBC and SMI positively impact CBE and BCB and behavioral intentions. The findings also exposed SMI’s and SBC’s indirect effect on customers' BCB and behavioral intentions, mediated through CBE. Finally, the results explored the moderating role of brand interactivity to enhance our model’s explanatory power.

We focus on SMI, CBE and BCB. This study contributes to the existing marketing and hospitality management research and spawns rich opportunities for further studies.

The study article assists marketers in comprehending the CBE-based antecedents and consequences and facilitates their increasing CBE, BCB and behavioral intentions.

While the growing insight into social media, customer engagement and co-creation within the service industries, little remains accredited concerning the link of these and related variables in the luxury hotel-brand context.

This study aims to examine the influence of gameful experience (GAMEX) on customer brand engagement in the context of e-tailing. Drawing on the self-determination and social learning theories, the authors have developed a comprehensive model incorporating cognitive, emotional and behavioral factors leading to brand advocacy and re-visit intention for the retail website.

The data for this study were obtained from 715 customers across various e-tailing websites. This research uses both quantitative method (partial least squares structural equation modeling − PLS-SEM) and qualitative method (fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis − fsQCA) to investigate the relationship between GAMEX and customer brand engagement in the e-tailing context, with a focus on the long-term outcomes of brand advocacy and re-visit intention.

The PLS-SEM results indicate a significant impact of GAMEX on customer brand engagement. In addition, the findings reveal the moderating role of fear of missing out, internet self-efficacy and technoeustress in the association among GAMEX, customer brand engagement, brand advocacy and re-visit intention. The findings from fsQCA support the results obtained from PLS-SEM and reveal four configurations for brand advocacy and five configurations for re-visit intentions.

This research evaluates the impact of GAMEX on customer brand engagement using a mixed-method approach involving qualitative and quantitative procedures. This study offers valuable insights into the design of gamified marketing activities and current practices for fostering greater engagement.

Travel companies are increasingly hosting online communities to extend their initiatives of customer relationship management and gain additional insight into their business. While the benefits to companies from hosting online communities are clear, another closely related issue has not been given comparative attention: Why do customers engage voluntarily in online travel communities? The purpose of this paper is to answer the question by developing and testing a conceptual model that exploring the influence of socialization interactions on customer engagement with the community.

Hypotheses were tested by applying structural equation modeling based on survey data collected from an online travel community (n=665).

The results supported the research hypotheses and demonstrated that socialization interactions (i.e. information and social exchange) in the online travel community are important catalysts for customer engagement.

The contribution of this study is twofold. First, from a theoretical perspective, it offers new insights into the conceptualization of customer engagement and its antecedents in the context of the online travel community. Second, from a pragmatic perspective, the conceptual model derived from this research aids practitioners in stimulating customer engagement from the perspective of socialization interactions.