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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.

Drawing upon the social cognitive and customer engagement theories, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how individuals’ simple follow, purely aiming for information but with little contribution, could affect fans behavior and make them engage in company social network (CSN). The study identifies the impact of personal motivators (follower participation motivation), environmental antecedents (perception of information quality) and individual behavior (fan engagement behavior and stickiness) on CSNs and examines the interaction relationship between the follower participation motivation and perception of information quality.

Data collected from 392 valid questionnaires from WeChat Official Account users were analyzed by structural equation modeling.

Personal factor such as follower participation motivation (intrinsic and extrinsic motivator) was found to be significant predictor of fan engagement behavior. Environmental factor (perception of information quality: perceived usefulness as well as perceived entertainment) was a significant factor in determining followers’ proclivity to engage in CNSs. One significant interaction effect was found: the effect of perceived entertainment on fan engagement behavior was manifested to a greater extent when followers’ participation aimed for intrinsic motivator. The second interaction effect, between the extrinsic motivator and perceived usefulness, was also found to be statistically significant.

This study enriches and extends the studies on the theories of customer engagement and social cognitive theory. It applies the above theories to CSNs and advances CSNs research by taking into consideration both personal and environmental factors (follower participation motivation and perception of information quality), and the interaction effects of the two on individual behavior.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the factors influencing content generation and community initiative in PESCs. Taking advantage of an emerging PESC – Xiaohongshu APP, the study identifies three antecedent resources, including customer-owned knowledge, harmonious passion to shopping and perceived information usefulness, that affect content generating and further community initiative.

Based on the service-dominant (S-D) logic model and resource integration related work, the authors proposed a conceptual framework empirically tested using data of a survey and the real content-generating behavior from 347 respondents.

This paper identifies three resource antecedents of content generating behavior with significant influence. Furthermore, there is a moderating effect of perceived information usefulness among these three resources, which echoes the concept of resource integration. Content generating has a significant and positive influence on community initiative.

First, the paper identified customer and platform resources promoting the prosperity of PESCs, enhancing the research on antecedents of community prosperity. Second, the paper empirically quantifies the process and outcome of resource integration conceptual model. Third, it enriches the understanding of C2C interaction by investigating the value creation process on PESCs. Moreover, findings in the study provide insights for community managers to improve the operation of PESCs.

Thriving brand communities are inseparable from engaged members and their word-of-mouth behavior. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which customer experience elevates customer engagement and consequent word-of-mouth intention in online brand communities, and how.

From the perspective of service ecosystem theory, a framework with several hypotheses was proposed. The model was verified with structural equation modeling based on questionnaire data collected from smartphone communities in China.

Empirical results indicate that customer experience promotes community engagement, and further enhances word-of-mouth intention. Furthermore, the mediating effect of community engagement in the relation between customer experience (social support and flow) and word-of-mouth intention has been verified.

This paper informs practitioners about the importance of experience co-creation with community members in brand and community promotion, and provides several implications to encourage more engaged customers with fostering pleasant customer experiences.

This study contributes to the theory of service ecosystem by empirical examination of its several propositions in a brand community context. The paper extends the present theory with the discussion of the mediation effect of community engagement in the continuing value co-creation process.

In social media context, service failures become public domain, making them visible to vast audiences of customers who are virtually present. Thus, this study aims to discuss the roles of service failure type and management response on observers’ perceived helpfulness.

The authors conducted econometric analyses on a dataset incorporating 107,984 reviews and 34,641 management responses to negative reviews.

The results reveal that, for process failures, specifying a form of action (initiatives for solving the problem) is associated with more perceived helpfulness of reviews than accounts (explanation) or acknowledgments (recognition and acceptance), while responding to an outcome failure by providing an account is associated with increased perceived helpfulness of reviews.

For process failures, managers should make every effort to convince observers through specific actions that similar failures are less likely to occur in the future. For outcome failures, managers should strive to provide clear and fast explanations of the failure causes to restore observers’ evaluation of the firm’s capabilities.

The authors’ work extends sparse insights on observers and sheds new light on the effect of service failure type and response strategy on observers’ actual behaviors. The interplay between service failure type and response strategy provides guidance on how to use management responses to influence potential customers.

This study investigates how the complexity of sentiment in online reviews affects perceived helpfulness. Analyzed over 730,000 reviews from Tripadvisor.com, the research explores how information overload and increased cognitive load impact consumer decision-making.

This study applied the BERT deep learning model to analyze sentiment complexity in online reviews. Based on cognitive load theory, we examined two key factors: the number of attributes mentioned in a review and the variation in sentiment valence of across attributes to evaluate their impact on cognitive load and review helpfulness.

The results show that a higher number of attributes and greater variation in sentiment valence increase cognitive load, reducing review helpfulness. Reviewers’ expertise and review readability further moderate these effects, with complex or expert-written reviews worsening the negative impact.

This research introduces a method for measuring attribute-level sentiment complexity and its impact on review helpfulness, emphasizing the importance of balancing detail with readability. These findings provide a foundation for future studies on review characteristics and consumer behavior.

Brand communities have been labeled as a social aggregation of brand fans and businesses. Yet, limited research has examined customers’ perceived relationship benefits in brand community on social media. Drawing from social capital theory and relationship benefits research, the purpose of this paper is to discover how online harmonious brand community influence customers’ perceived relationship benefits (i.e. confidence, special treatment, social and honor).

Hypotheses are tested by applying a structural equation modeling and the data are collected from a survey of smartphone community members (n=543) based on Sina Weibo.

The results suggest that harmonious brand communities strengthen customers’ perceived relationship benefits on social media, which are the important factors to form community satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth of community. And community engagement amplifies the influence of harmonious brand communities and has a moderating effect on the role of harmonious community relationships in confidence benefits.

The present study extends prior research on relationship benefits from the perspective of brand community based on social media and reveals the role of harmonious community relationships in developing community satisfaction and positive word-of-mouth.

In response to food scares related to high levels of agro-chemical residues sometimes found on foods, consumers in China increasingly demand for organic foods. As little is known on consumer perceptions and attitudes toward organic food products, the purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the purchase of organic food products by consumers and to explore the main factors driving this process.

Mixed (quantitative and qualitative) market survey approaches were used to provide a potentially deeper insight into consumer’s perspective and could help get a better picture of the complex factors involved.

The main trigger for purchasing organic food products is that consumers expect them to be healthier and safer. The respondents who have bought organic food products tend to have a higher education level and disposable incomes, be families with children and be older than those who have not bought them. The main barriers to increasing the market share of organic food products are the consumers’ lack of knowledge, the relatively high price premium and the lack of availability of organic food products. Informing consumers about unique characteristics of organic production methods, the decline in the prices of and increasing the availability of organic food products to its customers might be a promising strategy to develop the market for organic food products.

This paper provides a unique insight into buying behavior and attitudes of organic consumers in China. The results of the research could provide information for the organic food industry to expand its market and improve its profitability and reliability.

Exploring the intrinsic connection between the ecological environment and the digital economy and empirically testing how the level of digital economic development affects the ecological environment. Using the entropy weighting method to analyze the weights of the indicators in the digital economic development level and ecological environment system to explore the factors that have the greatest impact on the ecological environment in the indicator system of the digital economic development level so as to deepen the theoretical understanding of the relationship between the level of development of the digital economy and the ecological environment. Explore the regional heterogeneity of the level of development of the digital economy to promote the healthy development of China’s ecological environment proving the difference in the level of development of the digital economy in the east west and central regions of China and the difference in the effect on the ecological environment.

Based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2013 to 2021 this paper fits the index system of digital economy development level with three factors. A digital infrastructure digital industry and digital application combines environmental pollution and energy consumption to construct ecological environment indicators and explored the impact of digital economy development level on the ecological environment by using the entropy weight method and the random effect model.

The findings indicate that the degree of digital economic development has a positive and significant impact on promoting the healthy development of the ecological environment, in which the digital industry has the greatest impact on the ecological environment. Meanwhile, the improvement of industrial structure also has a positive effect on the improvement of the ecological environment, whereas the level of human capital inhibits the healthy development of the ecological environment, and the governmental support fails to effectively and significantly promote the improvement of the ecological environment. Furthermore, the empirical research indicates that the level of digital economy development has obvious regional heterogeneity on the healthy development of the ecological environment: the eastern and central regions have a significant effect, while the western region has a less significant effect.

Although domestic and foreign scholars and experts have conducted sufficient studies on the ecological environment and the development level of digital economy respectively, there are few studies on the empirical analysis of the positive significance and regional heterogeneity of the impact of the development level of digital economy on the ecological environment, which can be supplemented and referred to in this study. At the same time, it also provides intellectual support for our country to achieve high-quality development of digital economy and efficient governance of ecological environment.