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This research advances current knowledge about art infusion, which is the ability of art to favorably influence the assessment of consumer products. In particular, the research aims to investigate the effectiveness of artworks that evoke their creators’ most recognizable style in luxury advertising.

The research encompasses three studies – two conducted online and one in a real consumption situation. The first study explores the effect that a recognizable vs non-recognizable painter’s style has on consumers’ judgments about luxury products. The second and third studies explore the moderating roles of desire to signal status and desire for distinction, respectively, which are relevant to advertisers interested in targeting these individual differences.

Advertisements that incorporate artworks that evoke a painter’s most recognizable style enhance the advertised products’ perceived luxuriousness. Consumers with a higher desire to signal status exhibit greater purchasing intention in response to recognizable artworks. By contrast, consumers with a higher desire for distinction exhibit greater purchasing intention when the painter’s style in the featured artwork is less recognizable.

The results provide marketers with suggestions on how to select and incorporate visual artworks into luxury brand communication: they could focus on recognizable vs non-recognizable artworks based on whether their main goal is to communicate status or distinctiveness.

This research offers novel insights into the practical value of art infusion by showing when and for whom the beneficial effects of pairing art with luxury products are more likely to occur.

The purpose of this paper is aimed to examine natives' Fervid Attachment to religious rites, as a part of cultural heritage, in its extrinsic (sense of belonging, rituality) and intrinsic (intimate bond, emotionality) characteristics, by shedding light on how leveraging on these characteristics could be emphasized to promote sustainable local development.

Based on the principles of an ethnographic research approach based on observational methods, this paper analyzes the rites of Holy Week in Taranto, a city located in the Southern Italy, by capturing individuals' behavior according the concept of Fervid Attachment.

Results show that tourism destinations preserving their traditions and religious rites as part of their cultural heritage can satisfy tourists' spirituality needs and, by promoting the interaction with the local population (natives) in terms of relationship between them and tourists, supporting local communities' development. Moreover their Fervid Attachment in terms of sense of belonging, rituality, intimate bond and emotionality could be empathized to promote sustainable local development.

Our results provide suggestions on how local policymakers and tourism marketers could leverage natives' attachment to religious rites to boost religious tourism.

This paper shows from a new perspective based on the concept of natives' Fervid Attachment how local people are relevant in promoting a tourism destination.

This research investigates the effectiveness of the four health claims that the European Union (EU) authorized for extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) in terms of perceived text clarity, text interestingness, message credibility and information diagnosticity, along with the claims' effect on product attractiveness and consumers' purchase intention.

An experimental study with 185 participants investigated consumer response to the four claims. A one-way MANOVA analyzed differences in the aforementioned variables, while a sequential mediation model assessed the relationship among perceived text clarity of the EVOO health claims, information diagnosticity, product attractiveness and purchase intention.

The four EU-authorized health claims differ in terms of perceived text clarity, message credibility, information diagnosticity and product attractiveness. Specifically, the health claim on EVOO polyphenols scored lower than the other three health claims on the aforementioned dependent variables. Importantly, clearer health claims are perceived as more useful and may increase product attractiveness and consumers' purchase intention.

The research sheds light on the effectiveness of EVOO health claims. Since the use of such health claims is not a common practice in the EVOO market, a deeper understanding of consumers' perception and attitude toward them could inspire better guidelines and suggestions for claim usage and improvement.

This study investigates consumers' willingness to adopt genetically modified foods (GM) and the role of innovation and behavioral determinants.

A new integrated model that expands the Health Belief Model (HBM) into the Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) was developed and examined. A total of 241 consumers were selected from the capital of Iran, Tehran, through a multistage random sampling. The data were analyzed using SEM-PLS modeling.

The extended HBM model was able to predict about 84% of the variance changes in consumers' willingness to adopt GM foods. The effects of net benefit and perceived compatibility on the willingness were also significant. In addition, the mediating effect of compatibility on the relationship between net benefit/self-efficacy and willingness to adopt GM foods was also significant.

This study contributes to the literature by developing the HBM into the IDT to assess consumers' willingness to adopt GM foods.

This study adds to the research on disgust by proposing a theoretical framework encompassing contamination-based, moral and structural disgust dimensions. The study empirically assesses the impact of these three dimensions on consumers’ purchase intentions for different product categories.

The study investigates consumer reaction to disgusting stimuli related to attractiveness, expertise and trustworthiness products by means of closed-ended questionnaires administered to three consumer samples.

Contamination-based disgust reduces the intention to purchase expertise products. Similarly, structural disgust reduces the intention to purchase trustworthiness products. Moral disgust seems to have a positive effect on the intention to purchase attractiveness products.

Marketing strategies for expertise and trustworthiness products should emphasize their pureness and capacity to match consumer expectations, respectively. Ad hoc strategies centered on moral disgust could be designed for attractiveness products.

This study proposes a new conceptualization of consumer disgust and shows that the identified disgust dimensions have different effects on consumer intention to purchase attractiveness, expertise and trustworthiness products.

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on place marketing by focusing on the concept of strategic needs, i.e. the set of strategic priorities that a place could achieve in a medium- to long-term horizon to improve its development.

The research examines the strategic needs of four local territorial systems (LTSs), i.e. clusters of municipalities that share social, economic and spatial similarities, located in a southern Italian province, through an analysis of their competitive positioning over three temporal instants.

For each LTS, the analysis identified a number of development goals that local policymakers could pursue and the strategies most suitable to achieve the said goals.

This paper proposes a new methodological approach to set the development goals of local areas based on the simultaneous assessment of their attractiveness and competitive capacity.

The present study examines the dimensions that are meaningful to define the perceived authenticity of online-only brands (OOBs) (i.e. retail brands that trade exclusively online) from a consumer's perspective. Past frameworks of perceived authenticity exist in the branding literature but consistently focus on contexts beyond e-commerce settings like OOBs.

We employed a mixed-method research design, consisting of quasi-qualitative and quantitative studies with online customers, to establish the dimensions meaningful for the perceived authenticity of OOBs. Our work has theory testing and building components.

We identify five dimensions that are meaningful to define consumers' perceived authenticity of OOBs. They are “honesty”, “connection”, “continuity”, “craftsmanship” and “accessibility”. Representing by multiple factors, “craftsmanship” serves as the most meaningful dimension followed by “accessibility”. Often being considered incompatible with perceived authenticity, we find accessibility particularly relevant to the context of OOBs. It describes the “convenient” and “affordable” aspects of OOBs, which typically serve as unique selling propositions.

Our work confirms the utility of established dimensions to define consumers' perceived authenticity of OOBs. This highlights that consumers hold some consistent authenticity image between non-online and online brands. Our work also reveals the accessibility dimension being neglected by the branding literature, suggesting a more up-to-date perspective is needed when studying consumers' perceived authenticity of OOBs.

This paper investigates why and when messages regarding unsustainable luxury products lead to negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) through a focus on the role of guilt, need to warn others and consumers' cultural orientation.

Three experiments test whether messages describing unsustainable versus sustainable luxury manufacturing processes elicit guilt and a need to warn others and whether and how the need to warn others affects consumers' NWOM depending on their cultural orientation.

Consumers experience guilt in response to messages emphasizing the unsustainable (vs sustainable) nature of luxury products. In turn, guilt triggers a need to warn other consumers, which leads to NWOM about the luxury company. Furthermore, the results suggest that two dimensions of Hofstede's model of national culture – namely individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity – moderate the effect of the need to warn others on NWOM.

Luxury managers should design appropriate strategies to cope with consumers' different reactions to information regarding luxury brands' unsustainability. Managers should be aware that the risk of NWOM diffusion may be higher in countries characterized by a collectivistic and feminine orientation rather than an individualistic and masculine orientation.

Consumer reaction to unsustainable luxury, especially across different cultural groups, is a neglected area of investigation. This work contributes to this novel area of research by investigating NWOM stemming from unsustainable luxury manufacturing practices in different cultural contexts.

Character coding systems such as ASCII and EBCDIC are unable to deal with the worldwide range of characters and so possible solutions, such as ISO 10646 and Unicode, involving 16‐bit codes have been suggested. The paper examines how libraries deal with multi‐lingual character sets and describes work being undertaken on the definition of a basic European character set as part of the National Bibliographies on CD‐ROM project being funded as part of the Commission of the European Communities Action Plan for Libraries.

This paper aims to assess the extent to which the perceived images and personalities of places mirror their prevalent production orientations, or “vocations”. It also investigates the factors that shape the expectations and desires of residents, tourists, local firms and export markets, as well as these users’ overall place experience.

In all, 600 questionnaires containing both closed-ended and open-ended questions were administered in four local territorial systems (LTSs) of a Southern Italian province. Data were analyzed by using both quantitative and qualitative techniques.

Results showed that place image mirrors the respective productive orientation for only one of the examined LTSs. Meanwhile, for all four LTSs, place image was congruent with place personality.

The generalizability of the results is limited, as the research focused on LTSs located in a specific geographical area.

The paper provides suggestions regarding the formulation of marketing policies aimed at improving the willingness of residents, tourists, local firms and export markets to use the products/services/resources of the studied LTSs. Communication and branding strategies that leverage the personality traits of the examined LTSs are also illustrated in the paper.

By examining the coherence among place image, personality, and prevalent vocation, this research addresses a neglected area of investigation. This study is one of the few that provides empirical evidence of misperceptions of the actual production orientation of places.