Online behavioral advertising (OBA) has become increasingly sophisticated over time, offering consumers personalised options and information. While often seen as beneficial, concerns persist about its impact on consumer autonomy, particularly regarding data privacy and behavioral influence. This study examines how perceived OBA relevance and deal value trigger compulsive buying, using Uses and Gratifications Theory to explain how personalised content designed to satisfy consumer needs may lead to excessive consumption. Integrating the Regret Theory, the study further explores how compulsive buying leads to post-purchase regret, ultimately leading to OBA avoidance. The findings confirm that both perceived OBA relevance and deal value positively influence compulsive buying, with regret fully mediating its impact on OBA avoidance. The moderating role of persuasion knowledge is also assessed, revealing that it weakens the effect of OBA relevance, but not deal value, on compulsive behavior. These results offer new insights into how OBA's intended gratifications may produce unintended consumer resistance.
While older consumers are among the fastest-growing and most affluent demographic segments, they remain largely neglected in marketing practice and research, and firms often struggle to determine the right approach to them. This article highlights how mature influencers and content creators can bridge the gap between firms and older consumers by offering authenticity, credibility, and intergenerational appeal. It introduces a five-step framework for managers to plan influencer marketing campaigns with mature content creators, focusing on selecting the segment, platform, influencer, campaign, and success metrics.
Despite growing interest in the psychological processes underpinning job choice, research has not examined how job seekers react to organizational responses to employee wrongdoing. Crisis communication literature suggests that defensive responses, wherein blame is shifted to the culpable employee, can minimize reputational damage. While focusing on various external stakeholders, extant research overlooks job seekers facing uncertainty in selecting the right employer. Drawing upon Situational Crisis Communication Theory, persuasion theory and organizational justice research, we investigate how employers' responses (accommodative vs defensive) to employee wrongdoing influence job seekers' intentions to apply for a job at the organization involved. Over three scenario-based experiments conducted with 648 U.S. job seekers, we show that job seekers prefer employers that are accommodative, accepting responsibility for the wrongdoing, even when a single employee is explicitly culpable. Mediation analysis confirms that accommodative responses lower manipulative intent inferences, which in turn affect expectations of positive treatment from the prospective employer and subsequent willingness to apply. The preference for accommodative responses, however, diminishes when the employer promises investments to improve employee performance and among job seekers with high autonomous motivation. The article contributes to human resource management research by explaining how employers' responses to wrongdoing influence job seekers' decisions.
This article draws on a collaboration with the Birmingham Royal Ballet to propose a dancing pedagogy for productive unsettlement. Developed within a sociology of consumption module, we show how art can bridge the sociological and empathic imaginations, encouraging learners to 'feel themselves away' from their individual experience and better reflect on the wider social structures that shape it. Ballet, an art form marked by financial, cultural and bodily exclusion, served as a lens through which learners could engage with the experience of being 'out of place' in confronting their own vulnerabilities and privileges in relation to structural marketplace inequalities. This fostered a transformative shift we term 'productive unsettling', whereby rather than accepting and staying in their place, learners were encouraged to try other places, transform place for themselves and make space for others, finding joy in the process of creating social change.
This study investigates how Transformative Digital Cultural Experiences (TDCEs) enhance customer well-being through a customer-centric design approach. It fills three gaps: (1) extending transformative service research to cultural experiences; (2) reframing digital transformation beyond preservation and access, towards intentional customer experience design; and (3) overcoming one-size-fits-all initiatives by stressing personalisation, differentiation, and co-creation. Based on 19 expert interviews and 34 digital cases, we identify four audience segments that are Investigators, Enthusiasts, Nerds, and Novices, and propose matching TDCE formats: In-Depth, WOW, Hook, and Understandable. We also classify TDCEs along cultural content complexity (foundational vs. sophisticated) and digital engagement (accessible vs. innovative). Grounded in the PERMA framework, this novel typology guides cultural organisations in designing inclusive digital experiences that foster individual and collective well-being.
