Search results

This study aims to examine the influence of homophily in an online community and the effect of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) consensus on young consumers’ attitudes.

This study implemented an experimental research design using a two (low/high homophily) × two (low/high eWOM consensus) mixed factorial design. This study explores young consumers’ changes in brand attitude after encountering negative eWOM.

The results indicate that a high consensus of negative eWOM among online community members leads to significant changes in attitude, while a low consensus of negative eWOM does not produce such an effect. Negative eWOM from either high or low homophilous sources produces significant changes in attitude. There are significant attitude changes when a strong consensus of negative eWOM is received from a source with a high level of homophily.

Service failures in offline service settings lead to the dissemination of negative eWOM on social media. To handle and prevent social media crises, researchers should understand online crises antecedents relating to information characteristics i.e. eWOM consensus and characteristics of online community members to evaluate the crises impact. Brands should monitor tone and dialogue of online community member on social media to remedy and diminish any damage done to their brand image from negative eWOM.

This study contributes to the application of social network theory by understanding the role of nodes on negative eWOM effect in social media.

This study aims to examine the effects of likeability of service agents on perceived justice and reconciliation and retaliation as consequences of service failures, taking into consideration the conflict resolution styles that is showing empathy and issuing an apology.

An online survey was administered to 630 residents in the United States. The participants were US residents, had experienced a service failure in the prior six months and had complained either in person or by phone call.

It was found that likeability had a positive effect on both reconciliation and retaliation. Given the likeability of the service agent, interactional justice mitigated retaliation, whereas distributive justice enhanced reconciliation. Furthermore, when a service agent displays a high level of empathy and apology, the positive effect of likeability on distributive justice is intensified.

This study extends the current knowledge concerning the effects of likeability in service recovery by offering a comprehensive framework and practical implications for managers to restore business relationships following a service failure.

This study aims to explore how student recruitment practitioners at regional Australian universities strategise student recruitment efforts in Thailand. There is scarce research addressing regional universities, with prior studies focusing on metropolitan universities. Similarly, most prior studies have focused on high-volume markets, with little research exploring emerging markets such as Thailand.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with student recruitment practitioners from regional universities that were responsible for recruiting Thai students. Thematic analysis was conducted to identify key themes.

Regional universities lack strategic ambidexterity in their approach to recruiting international students. They viewed Thailand as requiring longer term investment and were unwilling to dedicate their limited resources towards developing this market at the expense of other markets that would yield enrolments to contribute towards short-term targets.

Implications are provided with relevance to the student recruitment practitioner, with strategic ambidexterity discussed.

The paper fills a gap in the research by exploring international student recruitment and contextualising both regional universities and Thailand as a recruitment market. This study provides useful considerations that may be relevant to other emerging markets.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of empathy and apology in service recovery, and more specifically, establish how these factors promote positive service outcomes, typified by reconciliation and mitigate negative occurrences, characterised by customer retaliation and avoidance.

This study used an online panel to collect data from 213 US residents, who were asked to recall a service failure episode they experienced within the past six months, write briefly about it and answer a questionnaire measuring constructs of interest in relation to their previous experience. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the quantitative data.

Both service employee empathy and apology were found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between service failure severity and reconciliation, retaliation and avoidance.

The combination of empathy and apology as moderators into a single framework represents a unique contribution of this research. Furthermore, outcome variables of reconciliation, retaliation and avoidance are utlilized to measure relationship outcomes following service failure. This study highlights the need for managers to design hiring and training policies to promote empathy and the use of sincere apologies throughout customer interactions.

This research explores how playful TikTok video content influences customers’ attitudes towards travel destinations and their intention to share. It examines the role of mental imagery in shaping these responses and investigates how perceived novelty moderates the relationship between playfulness and mental imagery.

We conducted a scenario-based online survey using an actual video from a real Chinese influencer, with 701 tourists participating. In the second study, we used an experimental research design and created a video specifically for the experiment, where we manipulated the playfulness of the content, involving 402 participants.

The results show that the playfulness of TikTok videos enhances mental imagery, which mediates the positive effect on customers’ attitudes and sharing intentions. Novelty further strengthens the impact of playfulness on mental imagery, highlighting the importance of both factors in destination marketing.

Data were collected in mainland China, where the travel short video content was shared by the blogger. Future research should validate these findings with travellers from different countries and destinations, expanding the understanding of consumer engagement on social media for destination marketing.

This research has significant implications for creating destination marketing strategies on TikTok. Marketing managers and influencers should prioritise crafting playful video content while considering the unique appeal and novelty of the travel destination. This approach is crucial for fostering active customer engagement online.

This research advances our understanding of how playfulness and novelty in TikTok videos influence mental imagery, impacting consumer attitudes and behaviour. It contributes to destination marketing by highlighting the mediating role of mental imagery and the moderating effect of novelty in shaping customer responses and sharing intentions.

Frontline employees frequently experience tension at work. Based on paradox theory, this study investigates why and when tension can result in positive performance outcomes and for whom tension can enhance creativity.

We employed a time-lagged survey design to collect data in two waves with a four-week interval between waves. The questionnaire was distributed to frontline employees (i.e. doctors and nurses) serving in one public hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. The final sample included 216 front-line employees.

The study found that tension can promote employee performance through creativity. Employees with high paradox mindset levels especially tend to be more creative when experiencing tension. However, our findings did not support the idea that frontline employees who have been psychologically empowered tend to turn creative ideas into real practices and result in better employee performance.

The study advanced knowledge of the effect tension has on employee performance by investigating the mechanism through which experiencing tension can ultimately promote employee performance.

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.

Recent literature on customer engagement has introduced the concept of “actor engagement,” which serves as the foundation for this study. The study aims to investigate the formation of engagement and engagement's impact on the performance of sharing economy platforms in an international context.

The study analyses unstructured data from 145,434 service providers and 1,703,266 customers on Airbnb across seven countries (USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, China and Singapore). Machine learning techniques are used to measure actor engagement, and the research model is tested using structural equation modelling (SEM).

The findings suggest that actor engagement, encompassing the reciprocal relationship between customer engagement and service provider engagement, has a significant impact on platform performance. The moderator analysis highlights the role of cultural differences in the relationship between customer engagement and service provider engagement and between actor engagement and platform performance. Specifically, the study reveals that actor engagement exhibits a more pronounced impact on platform performance in Western countries (such as the USA, Australia and the UK), compared to Eastern countries (such as China and Singapore).

The analysis of the conceptual model is based on the utilisation of behavioural data obtained from the Airbnb website. Due to the nature of the available data, proxies are employed as measures for variables such as platform performance.

This research is amongst the first to provide empirical evidence for actor engagement formation and the function's role in platform performance in the sharing economy. The global nature of Airbnb as a platform facilitates the investigation of country-level factors, specifically cultural values, across seven diverse countries and highlight differences from business to customer (B2C) business models.

Corporate apologies, relative to other responses to well-publicized past transgressions, have distinct implications, sparking a rich tradition of apology research. But in addition, each apology is unique, such that it becomes critical to address individual content (what), spokesperson (who), timing (when) and delivery (how) elements. This paper aims to clarify how people evaluate key apology elements (individually and collectively) and the associated trade-off between short-term risks (e.g. business costs) and long-term benefits (e.g. relational assets), in light of key contingency factors that represent the level of the transgression-related threat to the firm.

An in-depth conceptual review, analysis and synthesis of corporate apology theories, research, business practices and case examples underlie the development of a conceptual framework that features 6 key tenets and 16 formal, testable propositions.

The holistic apology framework details how and why different corporate apology elements individually and collectively influence firm performance, in the presence of key transgression-related factors. The outlined tenets and propositions, in turn, provide clear guidelines for how to design and implement effective corporate apology strategies in response to publicized transgressions, as well as a platform for academics to advance research in this domain.

This paper contributes to apology theories by proposing 6 key tenets and 16 formal, testable propositions, incorporating apology mechanisms, contingencies and strategies (i.e. corporate apology typology), thus providing a more comprehensive view of corporate apologies in the marketing discipline.

This paper introduces 6 official tenets and 16 associated propositions that collectively (and interactively) serve as strategic guidelines for managers and opportunities for academics to advance research in this domain.

The proposed conceptual framework offers a novel, holistic understanding of the fundamental components of a corporate apology.