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Despite its perceived benefits, organic food has very limited uptake in the consumer market. Many studies have investigated the causes of this slow adoption, but limited attention has been paid to the ethical motives of consumer preference for organic food. Also, no research has addressed this issue through an unobtrusive data collection method. Therefore, this netnography-based qualitative study explores the deontological and teleological ethical motives for organic food consumption through the lens of Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics.

User-generated content in the form of posts and comments from a food-related Facebook page, Food Matters (https://www.facebook.com/foodmatters), with over 2.3m followers, was thematically analysed using Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics. Over 1.5m posts and comments were mined through Facepager 4.0.4 after due approvals. Organic-food-related content was manually screened. Netnography, an Internet-based ethnography technique which is a relatively underutilised and unobtrusive method of data collection, was employed on selected content to understand the consumer behaviour towards organic food in an online environment.

This study analysed a total of 158,583 posts and comments generated between March 2008 and December 2019. Out of these, 2,243 posts and comments were focussed on organic food. A total of seven themes emerged out of which six were found to be inextricably linked to ethical values of organic food consumption; three deontological (moral obligations, moral accountability and moral outrage) and two teleological (perceived risk and perceived benefits) themes. However, the seventh theme, consumers' lack of trust in organic food retailers, emerged as a major barrier in the proliferation of organic food.

This study is the first application of Hunt and Vitell's general theory of marketing ethics in organic food. The novel findings are that trust is a bigger issue than the price differential of organic food. Implications for marketers, policymakers, retailers and certification bodies are discussed to extend the current knowledge of motives and barriers to organic food.

Consumers are increasingly spending more time on social media platforms to cope with anxiety and loneliness resulting from the recent pandemic. The extraordinary times, characterised by isolation and lockdown, has placed increasing dependence on online technology as a coping mechanism in which social media influencers (SMIs) served as the human face of brands, helping both consumers and brands maintain human connection. How should practitioners navigate their social media campaigns in this changing environment?

To answer this question, the Source Connectedness Pyramid is proposed to help explain and compare the interactions between consumers and SMIs in ordinary and extraordinary times.

In their interactions with influencers during ordinary times, consumers are satiated with influencer source characteristics of attractiveness, trustworthiness and expertise. However, during extraordinary times, consumers substitute their usual preference to focus on connectedness, characterised by relatedness, belongingness and attachment.

The empirical study within this paper lends support to this proposition and offers additional insights. The proposed Source Connectedness Pyramid contributes to influencer communication theoretically and has strategic implications for practitioners when navigating their social media campaigns in these extraordinary times.

Compares business use of the Internet (Net) and World Wide Web (Web) across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. The reported inter‐country comparison involves studies conducted by the authors in a similar timeframe and using similar methodologies. Finds both similarities and differences across the three countries in how business uses the Web with UK firms more likely to be seeking strategic advantage from use of the Internet. In all countries, business use of the Web involves marketing communication; however, use of the Internet as a marketing channel for transactions is much lower. UK firms are more likely to use the Internet in relationship management than are Australasian firms. Concludes that there is less sophisticated business use of the Internet by Australasian companies relative to UK companies. Further concludes that there is a need for further research to resolve the conundrum facing marketing organisations in all three countries.

The market-based approach to catering for the poor mainly focusses on companies making profits while helping the poor enhance their lives. This concept presented the possibility of there being a ‘fortune’ to make at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) market that was an opportunity for both businesses and consumers. The notion of the BoP market has been widely studied using urban and rural contexts as distinct classifications; yet many argue that the opportunity does not in fact exist in the rural BoP markets. In this chapter the authors examine the prospects in the rural BoP in Sri Lanka through a qualitative study using insights provided by industry practitioners who operate at the BoP level. Findings show that a large percentage of the income of multinational companies is derived from rural BoP markets. Compared to the urban sector, the rural BoP market indicates relatively higher disposable income and is viewed as an attractive market segment by industry practitioners. The findings also show that rural BoP people have more resources and skills than their urban counterparts, although the former commonly have lower levels of education. Moreover, the youth segment in both the urban and rural BoP markets was found to heavily consume social media. The authors conclude their discussion by providing several key proposals for organisations looking to seize opportunities in this market.