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This study employs a multi-method approach to investigate how perceived relationship marketing investment affects perceived relationship value and consumer gratitude, influencing consumer involvement, word-of-mouth intentions, and long-term relationships across three retail consumer types.

The study analyses a model involving 542 consumers, employing structural equation modeling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to identify distinctive factor configurations across public, semi-public, and private retail organizations.

A retailer’s investment in relationship marketing significantly enhances relationship value and consumer gratitude, leading to increased engagement and word-of-mouth intentions. Perceived benevolence moderates the effect of relationship marketing on gratitude. However, gratitude alone does not ensure long-term relationships. Using fsQCA, we identify four distinct consumer configurations, providing nuanced insights.

Retail organizations broaden relationship marketing strategies to boost perceived value and elicit consumer gratitude, influencing consumer performance outcomes.

Retail organizations should broaden relationship marketing strategies to boost perceived value and elicit consumer gratitude, influencing consumer performance outcomes.

Managers should develop strategies that lead to consumer gratitude toward the firm, such as journey mapping can help visualize retail delivery. Grateful consumers may contribute to firms’ profitability by influencing current and potential consumers in their social networks and communicating their expertise through review/feedback for improvement. Therefore, various strategies are needed to stimulate positive comments from grateful consumers about the firm’s excellent performance.

This study builds on Lawler’s affect theory, highlighting how relationship value and consumer gratitude profoundly influence exchange process outcomes. It introduces new psychological mechanisms to explain the impact of perceived relationship marketing investment on performance outcomes. Integrating these elements provides a comprehensive understanding of retailer–consumer dynamics, revealing how emotional and psychological factors shape marketing strategies and business performance. This contribution enriches theoretical frameworks and offers practical insights for enhancing relationship marketing practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between ethical leadership and academics’ retention in universities. It draws on the conservation of resources theory to deepen the understanding of a process underlying this relationship whereby academics are more likely to stay in universities through the practice of ethical leadership. Specifically, it advances academics’ job-related affective well-being as a potential mediating mechanism, fostered by ethical leadership, which lowers their intention to leave.

This study is conducted through a cross-sectional survey of 303 academics in Australian universities. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis procedures are deployed to analyse academics’ data. The research hypotheses are tested through a bootstrapped regression analysis of academics’ perceived ethical leadership, affective well-being and intention to leave.

The findings lend support to the hypothesised relations, indicating a significant role of ethical leadership on enhanced intentions of academics to stay in universities by directly conserving their job-related affective well-being.

This paper contributes to knowledge of the relationship between ethical leadership and academics’ retention by identifying job-related affective well-being as an underlying mechanism in the university sector.

This paper has practical implications for higher educational institutes seeking to retain their academic staff. Its findings show that the practice of ethical leadership in universities matters, because it lowers academics’ intentions to leave by nurturing their well-being at work.

This is the first study to examine the impact of ethical leadership on academics’ well-being and intentions to leave in the context of universities in Australia. It is one of the first studies to explore the mediating role of affective well-being in the ethical leadership and leadership and intention to leave relationship.

Occasionally, retail employees “break the rules” in order to help customers. Currently, there is little research on the mechanisms by which a sales assistants’ positive deviance intentions help them attain specific personal and organisational goals. The purpose of this paper is to examine one mechanism, hope, which develops employees’ deviance intentions to provide benefits to the customer, themselves and the organisation.

A survey captured responses from 270 frontline employees from the retail and services sector. AMOS 23 was used to conduct measurement, path and mediation analyses.

This study highlights the role of employee hope in developing employees’ positive deviance intentions, and improving perceptions of organisational performance. Results demonstrate that the direct positive impact of hope on positive deviance intention was significant. Furthermore, positive deviance intention was found to positively impact employee goal attainment and perceived organisational performance. The authors’ employee hope model offers a better understanding of positive outcomes of employee deviance, suggesting that retail managers should invest resources to build strong employee–organisation relationships.

This is the first study to empirically demonstrate that employee hope can explain how customer-oriented positive deviance intentions help employee goal attainment and improve their perceptions of organisational performance.

Off-price fashion retailers are expected to dominate the retail sector over the next five years. Surprisingly, selling excess designer labels, in what some describe as a disorganized manner, appeals to certain shoppers who enjoy the “thrill of the hunt.” Recent research conceptualized consumers, whose motivation for, and outcomes from, fashion shopping set them apart from previously reported shopper types. Referred to as “Sport Shoppers,” they view fashion shopping as an achievement domain. The purpose of this paper is to quantify such shoppers through the development of a valid psychometric scale.

Four studies, comprising depth interviews and online surveys, across two countries were employed to develop a three-dimensional scale of the sport shopping experience. Factor analyses and structural equation modeling were used to analyze and test a theoretically hypothesized model.

Study 1 generated items aligned to the three theoretical dimensions of the sport shopping experience. Study 2 confirmed reliability and factor structure of the psychometric scale. Study 3 provides evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with previous shopper types. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates nomological validity through a theoretically hypothesized model of the sport shopping experience.

This is the first study to employ achievement goal theory in a consumer behavior context to delineate an emergent shopper type. The developed scale is the most comprehensive, multi-dimensional measure of the experience of this new consumer type. As such, it represents a valuable contribution to fashion retail and consumer behavior literature. The scale enables practitioners to quantify target markets and identify relationships to other factors, such as overall satisfaction and brand repurchase intentions.

Pakistan had never been a place of serious and nuanced debate and contestation of politics of postcolonial critique, that is, the continuity of economic, political, and cultural dependency of newly independent countries (NICs) on ex-colonizers as pointed out by neocolonialism, dependency theory, and postcolonial theory, respectively. Instead, Pakistan is presented by extant liberal academic literature as a “failed nation” and a state dominated by the military and plagued by religious extremism. As opposed to this, through the literary and activists writings of Aziz-ul-Haq, this chapter will try to illustrate how cultural contestation of the nation-building project postindependence from British rule was a lot more complex and interesting in Pakistan. This was so because the nation-building project of Pakistan was, on the one hand, an amalgamation of Indo-Persian, Arab, Indian, and Western colonial and civilizational influences and, on the other hand, entailed suppression of resilient local and national cultures of its constituent nationalities developed over centuries. This was later expressed in ethno-nationalist politics. However, when it came to the politics of the marginalized in the late 1960s, there were important political, theoretical, and literary insights which caused a change in the direction of political practice in Pakistan, which paralleled the politics expressed by writers like Fanon and early Subaltern Studies influenced by the Naxal Movement in India. The contestation and confusion arising from this dialectic also entered Pakistan's literary and cultural sphere. This chapter not only tries to give a different postcolonial critique of the failure of nation-building project in Pakistan but, though at a preliminary level, is an attempt to separate the original postcolonial theory in its radical tradition from contemporary postmodern/poststructuralist postcolonial theory marked with pessimism and resignation.

Despite consumers' widespread use of social media platforms, there is scant research on the underlying factors that influence their willingness to share digital footprints on social media. The purpose of this study is to address this research gap by examining consumers' cognitive and affective attitudes simultaneously.

This research used quantitative method by using online survey administered to a sample of 733 social media users.

The findings indicate both cognitive and affective attitudes jointly influence consumers' behavioural intentions with trust as a key construct mediating the relationship between attitudinal antecedents and consumers' willingness to share digital footprints on social media.

This study contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by offering a comprehensive framework constituting the joint attitudinal components as antecedents to consumers' behavioural intention for sharing digital footprints while trust works as a mediator.

This paper has important managerial implications. It helps marketers and IS managers in profiling consumers, understanding consumption patterns, sharing of digital footprints, which are useful for effective market segmentation, product development and future design of social media platforms. It informs social media providers of the importance of not only focussing on functional aspects but also underscores the essence of paying attention to consumers' affect towards social media platforms, especially trust.

The paper presents an original framework that explains the influence of joint attitudinal components on behavioural intention, with trust as a mediator.

This research study investigates the factors that influence e-customer satisfaction, e-trust, perceived value and consumers repurchase intention in the context of the B2C e-commerce segment. It investigates the mediation effect of e-customer satisfaction, e-trust and perceived value on repurchase intention. It also examines the moderating role of prior online experience.

Based on the adapted questionnaire, pre-recruited enumerators collected the data from five leading business universities of Karachi. They distributed 425 questionnaires and received 415 questionnaires. The study has used Partial Least Square-Structure Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique for data analysis.

We have tested 20 hypotheses, of which our results do not support five, including two direct, two mediating. Our results support all the direct hypotheses except the following two: (1) delivery service affects e-satisfaction (2) customer services quality effect on trust. We did not find support for the following two mediating hypotheses (1) e-satisfaction mediates delivery services and repurchase intention, (2) service quality mediates customers' service quality and repurchase intention. Our results do not support one moderating relationship. Prior online experience moderates e-perceived value and repurchase intention.

This research provides valuable information to the online retailers of B2C e-commerce, which can help them make strategies based on their consumers' behavior and encourage them to make repeat purchases from online retailing stores. It allows future researchers to replicate the model in cross-cultural studies in different product categories.

We have examined the moderating effect of prior online experience between (e-satisfaction, e-trust and perceived value) on the repurchase intention.

The research concerning brand credibility of charity brands is scantly examined. The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating role of brand credibility within the customer-based brand equity model to investigate donor perceived brand equity of charity brands.

In a cross-sectional research design, a survey-based research strategy is followed to collect data from 448 active Muslim donors in Pakistan. The collected data are analysed by employing confirmatory factor analysis based on Smart PLS 2.0.

The results indicate that donor perceived brand association, brand awareness and brand loyalty strongly relate to perceived brand equity of charity brands. The brand credibility moderates the relationship between perceived quality, equity and brand loyalty, and equity paths.

The charity brands need to focus on building a strong brand image and reputation to uplift brand credibility which can be achieved by offering training programmes addressing various social causes such as HIV and Cancer prevention.

The proposed moderating effects of brand credibility and its application to charity brands operating in an Asian Muslim country context are unique products of this study.

The purpose of this paper is to study in depth about frugal lifestyle and analyze it within the framework of the principles of Islamic consumption ethics.

This research uses a textual–contextual approach to explore the concepts of frugal and Islamic consumption by studying various existing literature.

The research findings highlight both similarities and notable differences between frugal and Islamic consumption. While they share aspects such as materialism, avoidance of materialism and support for sustainable consumption, the contrast lies in the fact that Islamic consumption is rooted in faith and devotion to Allah SWT. Unlike the primarily individual-focused and worldly orientation of frugal concepts, Islamic consumption is motivated by a commitment to individual desire and social balance, also well-being in both the present and the hereafter. Islamic consumption places an unique emphasis on social solidarity, a feature absent in the individualistic long-term goals of a frugal lifestyle.

This study offers a valuable contribution to marketers, particularly those who are engaged in the Islamic marketing field. Marketers are keen on understanding frugal consumers as a potential emerging market segment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is considered the first attempt to link the idea of frugality with the Islamic ethical principles of consumption. It highlights how Muslims should comprehend the concept of frugality accurately, avoiding misinterpretations that portray it solely as a means to combat materialism and consumerism, as has been commonly understood.