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The role of customers has moved from reactive to proactive, and they require more control over digital touchpoints. The quest for authenticity is their response to the dark side of interactive marketing – forms of faking, manipulation and exploitation. Authenticity becomes a key topic in interactive marketing as it reflects how customers assess digital touchpoints. However, there is a lack of comprehensive knowledge of authenticity in the interactive environment.

This article consolidates the authenticity studies in various digital touchpoints using the entity-referent correspondence framework. This research employs bibliometric analysis and thematic analysis of 103 articles in the last 15 years.

Five research clusters are identified: (1) human, (2) brand-generated content, (3) user-generated content, (4) branded platforms and (5) new technologies-based touchpoints (artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality). Most interactive marketing studies focus on human and content authenticity, and new technologies-based touchpoints lack comprehensive conceptualization. The review synthesizes the types of authenticity used in each touchpoint and highlights the importance of true-to-creator-self and true-to-customer-self in customer evaluation. We further propose a research framework with four antecedent groups and outcomes.

Our research supports managers by highlighting the type of authenticity prioritized in each touchpoint's development.

To answer the call from interactive marketing researchers, this research highlights the distinct definitions of authenticity at various digital touchpoints rather than looking at the overall brand. Trends, gaps and future research agenda of the authenticity concept in technology adoption and customer behavior are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the stock market response to dividend announcements in high growth emerging markets of Gulf countries.

The sample includes 1,092 dividend announcements from 299 listed firms over the period 2010-2015.

In the environment where there is an absence of capital gain and income tax, the authors find some evidence for the stock price reaction that partly supports the signaling hypothesis. The findings show that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) market is inefficient because of the leakage information before the announcement in bad news, and the delay of share price adjustment in good news. In addition, the authors report significant trading volume (TV) reaction in all the three announcements clusters, where dividends increase, decrease, and are constant, lending support to the hypothesis that the dividend change announcements have an impact on the TV response due to different investors’ preferences.

This is the first empirical paper on market reaction in share price and TV around dividend announcement using data for the majority of GCC countries.

The team voice (TV) concept has been largely understudied, with different definitions and understandings among prior research creating confusion for readers and future researchers. This study proposes a unified definition and connotation of TV that captures TV's collective meaning and highlights TV's vital role in Eastern contexts.

This study applied the constructivist grounded theory (CGT) methodology to collect and analyze qualitative data from Vietnam software companies. A total of 32 software development managers and employees were interviewed regarding TV behavior of the managers and employees.

The findings emphasize that TV should not be understood as team members' average or aggregate voice. Rather, TV should be understood as the shared voice of team members toward higher management, other teams or individuals in the organization in an attempt to challenge/change the status quo [team collective voice (TCV)]. The findings also reveal the characteristics of TCV (purpose, voicing and consensus mechanisms), TCV's different types and important roles in the context of an Eastern country operating under weak institutions.

This exploratory study was able to clarify different connotations of employee voice at the team level, which helps raise awareness among scholars on the collective nature of TV and guides successive researchers away from inconsistent understandings of the term. The study also reveals certain institutional conditions that foster this type of voice and suggests the employee voice concept should not be examined independently from the concept's institutional context. The proposed typology contributes comprehensively to this conceptual work of TCV as the topology reveals the concept's multidimensionality and aids future research on measurement construction.

Unlike Joss Whedon's cult series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Angel (1999–2004) and Firefly (2002–2003), Dollhouse (2009–2010) is largely considered to be both a critical and commercial failure. Dollhouse is often dismissed as Whedon's worst television series, with critics citing their discomfort and disgust in watching hero Echo's (Eliza Dushku) repeated exploitation. Unlike other popular acclaimed TV series featuring a female action hero like Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), Alias (2002–2006) and Nikita (2010–2013), the hero of Dollhouse is not empowered from the series' outset, but rather she slowly comes to her power and agency due to various traumatic and violent experiences. This chapter argues that Dollhouse stages a reworking of the cinematic female action hero figure by delaying empowerment and forcing the audience to linger in the hero's lack of agency. Dollhouse enables an unpacking of the female action hero popularised in films like Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), The Fifth Element (1997) and the Alien franchise (1979, 1986, 1992, 1997). By exposing the mechanics of hero-creation, Dollhouse forces viewers to consider how heroes are made and who is exploited in the process. As such, this chapter considers Dollhouse as an intervention into the female action hero film and television cycle through an analysis of how the series adheres to and subverts the tropes of the cycle.

The introduction of new communicative ethics in political communication has imposed new procedures and values in politics. The close interrelation of media and politics has many facets and effects on the way politics is exercised and on how it is perceived by the citizens. This chapter investigates how new methods of political communication have been introduced and internalised in Greek politics. By taking into account critical political events and in particular elections and relevant studies, the ‘Greek media democracy’ is divided into six periods covering a time span from 1981 to the present. The division and analysis underline the milestones and transition paths in Greek politics towards new communicative and political ethics. The rationale of our research is commensurate with many comparative studies which emphasise the importance of the context in the adaptation of the ‘Americanized’ political communication model. This chapter reflects how the specific sociopolitical context of the country has interfered, defined and shaped the adaptation of ‘imported’ methods in political communication and how these methods have resulted in significant changes and shifts in Greek media democracy and Greek politics in general.

Aims to view two key issues, the importance of country‐of‐origin (COO) and perceptions of individual brands across different segments of consumers, and whether price cutting helps overcome negative perceptions.

Uses conjoint methods to investigate whether low prices can be used to overcome negative images for TVs among Vietnamese consumers.

The results show that price cuts by the Korean brands do little to attract customers away from the higher perceived quality Japanese brands. Perceived quality differentials are too large to gain most customers who buy Japanese brands at any realistic level of price cuts.

While most non‐Japanese Asian brands have not yet built strongly positive brand images, there are now some, such as Acer, which are making quite good progress, so there are some examples to examine. Future research should focus on which tactics a brand with negative COO image could use to build a stronger association with quality.

This paper examines the design and evaluation of a TV on Demand (TVoD) system, consisting of a globally accessible storage architecture where all TV content broadcast over a period of time is made available for streaming. The proposed architecture consists of idle Internet Service Provider (ISP) servers that can be rented and released dynamically as the client load dictates. This paper examines issues of resource management and content placement within this Video Content Distribution Network (VCDN). The existing placement algorithm is computationally expensive and in some cases, infeasible to execute within any reasonable length of time. This work proposes a number of new placement heuristics each of which attempts intelligently to reduce the search space so that only the best proxies are considered for replica placement. An extensive evaluation of these placement algorithms is carried out to identify a good placement algorithm without being computationally expensive.

This paper aims to investigate the relative influence of advertising and word of mouth (WOM) for new season TV programmes, both new and returning.

The study’s longitudinal research design tracks individuals before and after possible exposure to advertising and/or positive WOM (PWOM) to model the effects of both paid versus earned media on behaviour.

This study provides contrary evidence to previous research that suggests that WOM has more influence on consumers than advertising. By controlling for viewers’ benchmark probabilities of viewing the TV programme, the effect of receiving PWOM becomes insignificant, whereas the effect of TV advertising remains unchanged. Because WOM is commonly exchanged between people with shared interests, it reaches an audience that is already highly disposed to view the TV programme.

The findings implicate that we need to reinvestigate the power of WOM to avoid misattribution of effects. This study is only study in one category, which means replication and extension to more categories are needed. The limitations of the study include the inability to control for creative differences in the execution of programme promotions or examine possible cross-media synergies for multimedia campaigns.

Findings have implications for how much to invest in WOM-generating activities. Findings also have wider implications for cross-media research and media-mix models, as different media may reach audiences with differing predispositions to act.

This is one of the rare individual-level, longitudinal studies that investigate the influence of WOM in comparison to advertising.

This paper aims to examine the direct impacts of marketing resources and marketing activities on several business performance indicators in the banking industry and the indirect effects through customer-based brand equity.

We use a holistic empirical approach based on resource-based view and marketing productivity chain. The main study consists of a secondary analysis using quarterly data of fourteen banks over four years. We analyze the data using fixed-effect panel data regression, namely seemingly unrelated regressions.

We find that customer-based brand equity is one of the most influential factors on business performance. Moreover, the indirect effect through customer-based brand equity should be considered in improving business performance. Marketing-related financial resources positively impact customer-based brand equity and business performance. Regarding marketing activities, pricing strategies affect the bank preferences of customers, which in turn affect the growth of deposit volumes and churn rates. Additionally, the number of bank branches positively impacts business performance. Advertising spending on different media has differentiated impacts on the performance indicators; thus, the allocation of advertising budget and advertising planning are critical.

This study examines the inter-relationships among marketing resources, marketing activities, consumer response through brand equity and marketing performance. This study contributes to the literature by integrating the resource-based view and the marketing productivity chain to analyze the inter-relationships using panel data and several sector-related metrics. This study provides valuable insights to decision-makers in the banking industry.