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This study aims to analyze the ways in which chief executive officers (CEOs) communicate via Twitter and help develop guidelines for effective tweeting strategies that can leverage Twitter in leadership communication.

The authors conduct a large-scale content analysis of more than 65,000 tweets by 338 CEOs.

The authors propose a model that categorizes differences in CEO tweets along six independent dimensions: content professionalism, language professionalism, emotional valence, emotion activation, interactional efforts and information cues. The authors also develop coding schemes and measurement scales for each dimension.

This study provides a multi-dimensional paradigm as well as useful tools for future research on corporate leadership communication on social media.

Although previous research has investigated how performance feedback may affect firms’ strategic actions, their findings has been inconsistent. The relationship between performance feedback and firms’ strategic activities thus appears complex. Moreover, the authors contend that it may vary with the measurement strategies employed (i.e. social or historical feedback, operationalizations of strategic actions or accounting- and market-based performance indicators) and the national contexts.

Therefore, the current article presents a comprehensive meta-analysis of prior research, including 1,637,817 sample observations from 101 studies that span more than 18 countries.

The results indicate that (1) performance that are below or above aspirational levels generally has a positive relationship with firms’ strategic actions; (2) these relationships are contingent on the implementation forms taken by the key variables, such as performance feedback, strategic actions and performance indicators; and (3) the relationships are much stronger in countries where managerial discretion is greater.

The findings contribute to the clarification of long-standing theoretical and empirical debates regarding the relationship between performance feedback and strategic actions, as well as some pertinent directions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how nonprofit service providers can better engage their customers through online communication. It identifies two communication styles and three communication functions, and examines their impact on customer commenting, customer liking and customer sharing.

Similar to Python for Facebook, a software package for the automatic retrieval of web page content was developed specifically for this study to extract data from the microblog Sina Weibo. Following the successful retrieval of 1,500 randomly selected messages from 34 universities in China, a two-level regression was performed using Mplus 7 to examine the association between the proposed relationships.

The findings reveal that messages with a friendly communication style increase both the number of comments and their positive tone; an authoritative style has no effect on customer engagement. The functions associated with message content (spreading information, building community or promoting action) influence customer liking and sharing. Building community tends to engage more customers than spreading information; promoting action often generates the least customer engagement in social media settings.

The study fills an important research gap in the service marketing literature as it pertains to nonprofit service organizations (i.e. universities) by identifying two types of online identities based on the communication style and the messages posted on social media. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between identity type and audience engagement, and to analyze the moderating factors of this relationship.

Drawing on the branded service encounters perspective, the purpose of this study is to investigate how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ brand evaluations.

The research conducted two experiments. The first experiment explored the effect of frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations via corporate hypocrisy. The second experiment explored the moderation effect of employees’ prototypicality and the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among customers.

Experiment 1 indicates that for firms with a green brand image, frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors result in customers’ perception that the firm is hypocritical, thus reducing their brand evaluations. Experiment 2 shows that employee prototypicality and CSR importance to the customer enhance the negative impact of frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations through customers’ perception of corporate hypocrisy.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employees.

This study suggests that firms’ green brand image does not always lead to positive customer response. When frontline employees’ behaviors are inconsistent with firms’ green brand image, it can trigger customers’ perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and thus influence their brand evaluations. Therefore, firms should train frontline service employees to make their behaviors align with the firms’ green brand image.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employee.

This paper aims to demonstrate that corporate philanthropy can be driven from the bottom to the top. In particular, the authors investigate whether employees’ donations influence corporate philanthropy and under what conditions this effect occurs.

The sample consists of Chinese listed firms that disclosed the amount employees donated in response to the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The Heckman two-stage selection model is applied to examine the effect of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy and the conditions under which this effect occurs.

The results show that employees’ donations are positively associated with corporate philanthropy. Furthermore, a higher percentage of females in top management teams can significantly strengthen the effect of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy. When the average age of the top management team members is high, the influence of employees’ donations on corporate philanthropy is stronger.

This is an empirical study that helps to predict corporate philanthropy. Another practical implication is that employees should be recognized as an important element of corporate social responsibility.

The results encourage employees to become drivers of corporate social responsibility.

This study contributes to the corporate social responsibility literature by demonstrating that corporate philanthropy can be driven from the bottom to the top. Moreover, this study integrates signaling theory into the study of corporate social responsibility. Finally, this study identifies two important contingent factors that strengthen the effect of employees on top managers’ decisions about corporate social responsibility.

This study aims to contribute to international doctrine by testing how environmental social governance (ESG) pillars can affect marketing performance in the pharmaceutical industry.

The authors follow a pioneering approach, using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and data from the largest European listed companies belonging to the pharmaceutical industry in 2019. Specifically, the authors contribute to international doctrine by testing how ESG pillars can affect marketing performance by presenting two configurational paths that may help to clarify not only the individual role of the pillars but also how their interrelationships predict marketing performance.

The results identify two different causal configurations that lead to higher marketing performance. These configurations allow us to think more carefully about the role of ESG pillars in the pharmaceutical sector. These results could help managers reflect upon and justify their choice to invest in specific ESG pillars, highlighting the importance of the governance pillar.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to use configurational analysis to investigate combinations of ESG pillars that lead firms to achieve higher levels of marketing performance.

This research aims to investigate effect of consumer creativity on their evaluations of brands. Consumers’ creative participation is often used by online retailers as a promotional tool nowadays. The authors propose that consumer creativity exerts a positive impact on brand attitudes by affecting their attitudes toward the creative activity itself. Furthermore, consumer creativity moderates the effect of consumers’ perceived level of fit on their acceptance of brand extensions, such that creative consumers will show a higher level of acceptance of distant brand extensions.

The authors test their hypotheses in three laboratory experiments. Study 1 examines the effect of consumer creativity on brand evaluations. Study 2 explores the moderating effect of consumer creativity on perceived level of fit on acceptance of brand extensions. Study 3 replicates the authors findings in Studies 1 and 2 using a better representative sample and a different type of creative task.

Study 1 finds that consumer creativity results in a positive attitude toward brand; this effect is mediated by attitude toward the creative activity. Study 2 shows that creativity leads to a greater level of brand acceptance when the brand extension has a low fit with the focal brand. Study 3 further provides evidence of proposed effects using a different type of creative task with a more representative sample.

In the experiments, this study examined three types of online creative marketing communication activities. Future research could examine other types of consumer creative activities so as to enhance the generalizability of the findings.

Our results provide important implications for firms that intend to exploit the promises of online creativity-themed marketing communications. First, because consumers’ attitudes toward the focal brand hinge on their attitudes toward the creative activity, it is important that firms design their creativity-themed activities carefully, so that they are attractive to the users. Second, firms can exploit the creativity edge by launching new brand extensions that target creative consumers. This effect is even more pronounced when the brand extension exhibits a low fit with the focal brand. These guidelines suggest that firms’ investments in online creativity-themed marketing communications can pay off in terms of improved consumers’ attitudes toward the firms’ brands and brand extensions.

This research makes several theoretical contributions. First, the authors explore the important role of creativity in the context of brand attitudes and brand extensions. This study adds to extant consumer creativity literature by documenting the consequences of consumer creativity in terms of positive outcomes for firms. Second, by examining the mediating effect of attitude toward the creativity task, the authors broaden the scope of attitude-toward-the-site and attitude-toward-the-sponsorship-event research to the online marketing communications setting. Third, by showing that consumer creativity can facilitate the acceptance of distant brand extensions, this study also enriches extant brand extension literature.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship of consumers’ engagement on social networking sites (SNSs) and their brand attachment behavior in the presence of a mediator, brand communication. Further, this mediation has been studied with presence of emojis as one of the significant moderator.

Following a descriptive research design, an empirical investigation was carried out by approaching 252 respondents from India to collect data through online survey forms as well as physical questionnaires. The research instrument was developed using a five-point Likert-type scale and items for the constructs in study were taken after literature review. The SPSS 22.0, AMOS 24.0 and Process (Prof A. Hayes) and Daniel Soper’s statistical tool called “Interaction” for moderation graph were employed for data examination and hypothesis analysis.

It was found that brand communication mediated the relationship between consumer engagement on SNSs and brand attachment significantly. The availability of emojis for a company during a conversation or in digital ad campaigns on SNSs acts as a mediating moderator and its impact on consumers’ brand attachment behavior is very strong through brand communication.

The study is original in the sense it provides insights into understanding consumer brand attachment behavior on SNSs.