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The purpose of this paper is to outline the contributions presented in this special section on the selfie phenomenon and its significance for marketing practice and scholarship.

The significance of the topic is reviewed and themes related to the selfie phenomenon and marketplace issues are discussed in connection with extant research. The contributions of each paper are briefly highlighted and discussed.

Although the selfie is a relatively new phenomenon, both marketing practice and scholarship have noticed its prominence in consumer lives and potential for generating marketplace insights. Despite its frequently presumed triviality, the selfie is a multifaceted phenomenon of significance to key marketing areas such as branding, consumer behavior or market research. Possible avenues for future research are outlined.

Key issues relating to research into the selfie phenomenon for marketing scholars are illuminated.

The marketing literature on service conversation in dyadic services has elaborated two approaches. An advisory approach involves providers giving customers expert advice on how to advance difficult projects. By contrast, a relational approach involves providers exchanging social support with customers to develop commercial friendships. Inspired by the transformative turn in service research, this study aims to develop a third approach, one that helps customers to cultivate their own agency, potential and well-being.

The emergent model of service conversation is based on in-depth interviews with providers and clients of mental health services, including psychological counseling, psychotherapy and personal coaching.

A transformative approach to service conversation involves the iterative application of a complementary pair of conversational practices: seeding microtransformations by asking questions to inspire new ways of thinking, feeling and acting; and nurturing microtransformations via non-evaluative listening to affirm customers’ explorations of new possibilities. This pair of practices immediately elevates customers’ sense of psychological freedom, which, in turn, enables their process of self-transformation, one microtransformation at a time.

This study offers dyadic service providers a conceptual framework of advisory, relational and transformative approaches to service conversation for instrumental, communal and developmental service encounters, respectively. This framework can help dyadic service providers to conduct more collaborative, flexible and productive conversations with their customers.

Three approaches to service conversation – advisory, relational and transformative – are conceptually distinguished in terms of their overall aims, provider practices, customer experiences, customer outcomes, allocations of airtime, designations of expertise, application contexts, prototypical examples and blind spots.

This paper aims to serve as an integrative literature review that organizes the burgeoning literature and findings related to possible impacts of the selfie phenomenon on consumers.

This is a conceptual paper.

The current empirical scholarly work supports two conflicting perspectives on the impact of selfies: the selfie experience as a source of empowerment and the selfie as embodiment of societal control and expression of existing power-relations. While the two perspectives are seemingly discordant, in fact, they pertain to different levels of analysis – individual and social, respectively.

While the empowerment aspect of the selfie experience has been well-documented in existing literature, the mechanisms of control and disempowerment have remained underconceptualized. This research paper offers a framework which addresses this omission and theorizes ways in which the selfie phenomenon perpetuates societal control and maintains power-relations.

As immersive technologies gain wider adoption, contemporary service researchers are tasked with studying their service experiences in ways that preserve and attend to their holistic and human characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to provide service researchers with a new qualitative approach to studying immersive technologies.

Using logic and following established methodological rules, this article develops the scope, definition and set of procedures for a novel form of netnography specifically adapted for the study of immersive technologies: immersive netnography. The research question is “How might netnography be adapted to research service experiences in virtual and augmented environments, which include and overlap with the notion of a Metaverse?”

Immersive netnography should be at the vanguard of phenomenological service experience studies of augmented reality, virtual reality and the Metaverse. A set of data collection, analysis, ethical and representational research practices, immersive netnography is adapted to digital media phenomena (customer and employee) that include immersive technology experiences. Developed through logical argumentation after analyzing key differences between social media and immersive technology, immersive netnography is procedurally customized for experience research in immersive technology environments.

Three of the most significant practical limitations to producing high-quality netnography are rapidly changing contexts, scarce time resources and narrow researcher skillsets.

Industries and organizations may benefit from a new, holistically focused, ethically robust and culturally attuned market research method for understanding service experience in immersive technology contexts.

There have been no prior studies that develop netnography for the service research opportunities presented by immersive technologies. By applying the rigorous methodological guidance provided in this paper, future service researchers may find value in using specifically adapted qualitative research methods to study immersive technology experiences.

It has been suggested that brands and products often assume a role in selfies (Ham, 2014) where the expression of brands and products provokes consumer emotions that bring about greater engagement (Tsai and Men, 2013) and contributes to the interactivity with the brands. This study aims to understand how the selfie phenomenon could mobilize the interactivity between brands and target audiences, in a way that could be used as a marketing tool by companies.

A netnographic research methodology was used for the current study because it is a method specifically designed to study online communities (Kozinets, 2010). The experiences of brand selfie postings on Instagram were studied by analyzing users’ selfies to predict brand usage. A purposive sample of Instagram users was chosen, and from these, a total of 74 brand selfies were analyzed.

This study provided an understanding of consumer behavior and marketing practices in the social marketplace through a detailed exploration of the data using visual and textual analysis. The main finding of this study is that consumers both consume and produce brand meanings in digital platforms; hence, companies should view them not only as passive receivers of messages, but also potential generators and co-creators of brand messages.

An important limitation of this study is that it only examines a small number of cases, and conclusions can only be limited to the specific sample chosen. A future research endeavor could of course be carried out to include a larger sample audience for investigating the effect of brand selfies and the potential purchase decisions of peers following exposure. Theoretically, this study provided further insight into the selfie phenomenon and specifically as a marketing tool and not just a new social trend.

The growing trend in the selfie phenomenon along with social networking sites (hereinafter SNSs) have attracted the attention of both users and marketing experts in terms of consumer–brand relationship (Zhu and Chen, 2015). In line with this current trend, many studies have attempted to understand the influential impact of the selfie phenomenon through SNSs. Studies on the motivation of selfie postings (Pounders et al., 2016) and selfie-posting behavior on SNSs (Kim et al., 2016) have been carried out; however, how brand selfies posted on SNSs appeal to non-users and how they interact with them remain unclear. Consequently, the intention of the current study is to provide some insight in this area.

This study aims to integrate and extend existing approaches from self-identity literature by examining the underexplored aspects of online private self-disclosure. The study first explores the experiential value co-created when consumers voluntarily self-disclose on public platforms. Second, it sheds light on what motivates such consumers to disclose private self-images and experiences, thus giving up some degree of privacy on an unrestricted platform.

This study conducted 65 laddering interviews and observed the profiles of ten consumers, who actively posted self-images on Instagram, through a netnographic study. Then, this study implemented a means-ends chain analysis on interview data.

This study found that online private self-disclosure can involve a co-created experiential value that consists of consumers’ self-affirmation, affective belief and emotional connection. These value components derive from three higher-order psychological consequences – empowerment, buffering offline inadequacy of self-worth and engagement – and four functional consequences – opportunity to learn, online control, self-brand authenticity and impression management.

Operationally, this study proposes that Instagram could be configured and synched with other social networking sites to provide a more complete representation of the online self. Using algorithms that simultaneously pull from other social networking sites can emotionally connect consumers to a more relevant and gratifying personalized experience. Additionally, managers could leverage the findings to tailor supporting tools to transfer consumers’ private self-disclosure skills learned during online communication into their offline settings.

This research contributes to the extant marketing literature by providing insights into how consumers can use private self-disclosure to co-create experiential value, an emerging concept in modern marketing that is key to attaining satisfied and loyal consumers. This study shows that, even in anonymous online settings, consumers are willing to self-disclose and progress to stable intimate exchanges of disclosure by breaking their inner repression and becoming more comfortable with releasing their desires in an emotional exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting the dividend policy of knowledge intensive firms (KIFs).

The study collects data for 86 KIFs listed on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India. The Hausman test is applied to choose an appropriate model. Based on the results of the Hausman test, the random effects panel regression method is applied to investigate the determinants of the dividend policy of sampled firms.

The authors test the effects of six factors on the dividend policy of KIFs, namely, profitability, leverage, free cash flows, firm size, investment and growth opportunities and liquidity. The study found that profitability, free cash flows, liquidity and firm size are significant determinants of the dividend policy of KIFs, while growth and investment opportunities as well as leverage have insignificant effects on the dividend policy of KIFs.

Findings of previous studies on factors affecting dividend policy across various industries cannot be generalized to other industries because of the industry influence on dividend policy. Considering this industry effect on dividends, the present research investigates the dividend policy of KIFs. The KIFs have emerged relatively recently owing to technological advances and remain relatively less explored industry in the context of dividends. Therefore, the paper presents new evidence on the dividend policy of Indian KIFs.