As firms increasingly deploy artificial intelligence (AI) to navigate complex market environments, understanding how AI-powered data capabilities shape outside-in marketing processes has become theoretically consequential. Employing a qualitative design with in-depth interviews across diverse industries, organizational sizes, and geographic contexts, this study addresses the knowledge gap. Grounded on the Resource-Based View, Dynamic Capabilities perspective, and Relational View, we develop an integrative framework of AI-powered data capabilities with two core dimensions (AI intelligence and AI action). Research findings clarify how these capabilities enable market sensing, customer profiling, customer linking, and partner bonding. Based on this framework, AI-powered data capabilities are adaptive, relational, and ecosystem-enabling dynamic capabilities, rather than static strategic resources. The study also reveals four boundary conditions that moderate the impacts of AI-powered data capabilities: regulatory constraints, the ripple effects of privacy initiatives, social privacy sentiments, and AI interoperability. These findings offer both theoretical advancement and practical guidance for AI-powered marketing strategy.
E-commerce is critical for managing increased customer demand and maintaining operational efficiency during disruptions such as natural disasters, health crises, and political instability. Despite this, little is known about how crisis-driven market changes influence dynamic capabilities, technology adoption, and customer experience (CX). This study provides insights into how e-tailers can leverage technology to enhance the CX for first-time online shoppers (FTOS). Given the limited literature on FTOS, which differs from repurchasers, three studies were conducted using a multi-method approach. Study 1 involved an environmental scan of 109 news articles and journal papers for practical insights. Study 2 consisted of in-depth interviews (IDIs) with senior managers working full-time for e-tailers, while Study 3 involved IDIs with FTOS. Findings reveal that e-tailers adapt to crises by leveraging technology to bridge demand–supply gaps through dynamic demand forecasting and improved last-mile delivery. They also use advanced technologies to provide personalised and immersive experiences, helping narrow the gap between offline and online shopping for FTOS. This study contributes to theory with a conceptual framework, with empirically grounded, theory-informed propositions linked to the Resource-Based Theory (RBT) and CXM frameworks, to explore how e-tailers leverage crisis-led capabilities to enhance FTOS experience. It conceptualises a new understanding of how e-tailers adapt to enhance FTOS CX amidst crises which can serve as a springboard for future research. The insights from an empirically grounded conceptual framework and propositions, offer managerial implications for e-tailers and other service providers.
The increasing use of crowdsourcing platforms for behavioural research rests on the assumption that research participants are exclusively human. This assumption is now under threat. AI agents from browsers such as OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet can autonomously complete online surveys. These agents can simulate specific personas or demographic profiles and follow survey prompts, select responses and submit data with fluency and internal consistency. Such capabilities threaten data authenticity and integrity, especially as subjective perception, motivation and emotion are central in behavioural research. This research note outlines practical mitigation strategies to detect AI responses. In addition to immediate measures, the emergence of AI-generated survey data requires broader methodological reflection, updated ethical guidelines and transparent reporting practices. We also situate these risks within the emerging literature on synthetic data, distinguishing unauthorised AI-generated responses from the transparent and theory-driven use of synthetic data for research purposes. Finally, we offer a forward-looking research agenda for protecting human data while responsibly engaging with synthetic data in marketing research. Instead of treating AI solely as a threat, researchers can use this as an opportunity to strengthen methodological rigour and protect the authenticity of human data in an increasingly automated research environment.
The rapid adoption of virtual and hybrid work arrangements has reshaped the workplace, presenting unique challenges for employee and customer experiences. This study investigates how work arrangements influence employee service quality, focusing on the mediating roles of knowledge sharing and employee experience, and the moderating effects of growth mindset and psychological safety. Drawing on Conservation of Resources (COR) Theory, three interconnected studies were conducted. Study 1 reveals that virtual and hybrid work arrangements lead to lower employee service quality compared to onsite work due to the spatial distance that impedes knowledge sharing and diminishes employee experience. Study 2 demonstrates that a strong growth mindset mitigates these adverse effects, enabling employees to maintain knowledge sharing and service quality across diverse work arrangements. Study 3 highlights the critical role of psychological safety, showing that when psychological safety is high, employees in virtual and hybrid settings achieve levels of service quality comparable to their onsite counterparts. The findings extend COR Theory by integrating individual and contextual factors that influence employee resilience and adaptability. This research offers theoretical and practical insights into optimising work arrangements, emphasising strategies to enhance employee and customer experiences in increasingly flexible work environments. Organisations are encouraged to foster growth mindsets and psychological safety to mitigate the challenges of remote and hybrid work, ensuring sustained service excellence.
Narrative advertising dominates contemporary brand communications, with its effectiveness often attributed to psychological mechanisms such as transportation and identification. However, the relationship between narrative structure and customer engagement and purchase intention remains underexplored, particularly in explaining why identical narratives are interpreted differently by brand users and non-users. This study examines how the structural elements of narrative advertising shape customer engagement through the customer hero journey framework, using a deductive analysis of semi-structured interviews with these two customer groups exposed to a social media carousel advertisement. The findings reveal that each narrative phase aligns with distinct engagement mechanisms: cognitive reflection in the departure phase, affective and sensorial immersion in the journey phase, and emotional fulfilment and social belonging in the return phase. Sensorial experience emerges as a fifth, empirically distinguishable dimension of engagement. A single narrative also produced divergent interpretive pathways: non-users followed aspirational, discovery-oriented readings, whereas current users engaged through recognition and confirmation of existing brand relationships. These results show how a stage-based narrative structure can evoke differentiated engagement across customer segments. The study extends narrative advertising by specifying phase-specific mechanisms and usage-based interpretive pathways and offers design principles for structuring stories that effectively engage both brand users and non-users.
As consumer demand for corporate accountability intensifies globally, understanding how brand transparency drives ethical purchasing decisions becomes critical for sustainable business success. This study explores the influence of observability-based brand transparency on socially conscious purchasing, focusing on the mediating role of brand social responsibility and the moderating effect of consumer karmic belief in an emerging market context. Using a three-stage mixed-methods approach, comprising an exploratory qualitative study (Study 1), a primary quantitative study analyzing data from 402 consumers (Study 2), and a subsequent quantitative validation study (Study 3)—results from partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) indicate that observability-based brand transparency significantly enhances socially conscious purchasing, with brand social responsibility acting as a key mediator. Consumer karmic belief significantly moderates the relationship between brand social responsibility and socially conscious purchasing, while fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) reveals that high observability-based brand transparency is a highly relevant contributing condition that plays a foundational role in driving socially conscious purchasing, underscoring transparency’s pivotal role in ethical consumption. This study extends signaling theory and social identity theory by identifying cultural-spiritual moderators and configurational pathways in an emerging market, offering strategic guidance for managers developing transparency communication strategies tailored to emerging markets.
Supermarkets are among the most frequently visited retail environments, yet they are commonly understood as transactional spaces defined by price, convenience, and efficiency. This study examines how routine shopping practices can, over time, generate meaningful consumer-place relationships. Drawing on affordance theory and place attachment literature, we conceptualise supermarkets as accumulated storescapes: environments in which significance develops through familiarity, habit, and repeated engagement rather than isolated encounters or curated experiences. Using mobile ethnography with shoppers in Australia and the United Kingdom, the study traces how ongoing interaction with store environments gives rise to two distinct relational outcomes. Place affinity reflects instrumental reliance and alignment with personal identity without emotional attachment, while place attachment involves emotional investment, a sense of ownership, and resistance to change. The findings demonstrate that even ordinary retail settings can create enduring forms of attachment, not through spectacle or premium branding, but through stable routines, predictable layouts, and everyday use. By emphasising temporality as a central process rather than background context, this research extends servicescape and retail attachment theory and clarifies how place meanings accumulate through practice. It also offers practical insight for managers seeking to cultivate resilient customer relationships that extend beyond price competition or convenience alone.
Intelligent automation is increasingly deployed in service settings, yet its effects on customer loyalty remain unclear. This study examines how different degrees of intelligent automation; human-only service, partial automation with human support, and full automation without human involvement, shape customer loyalty, and investigates the mediating role of customer engagement and the moderating role of emotional intelligence. Using a field experiment in the hospitality context, the findings reveal a non-uniform pattern: full intelligent automation reduces customer loyalty relative to human-only service, whereas partial automation mitigates this negative effect and performs more favorably than full automation. These effects operate through selected dimensions of customer engagement, while other dimensions show limited or null effects. Emotional intelligence further conditions customer responses, highlighting important boundary conditions. Overall, the results demonstrate that the impact of intelligent automation on customer loyalty is contingent rather than uniformly positive.
Podcasts elicit strong affective reactions that shape how listeners participate and evaluate. Drawing on Emotional Engagement Theory, we conceptualize emotion as a behavioural activation process that translates emotional expression into observable participation. We specify how this operates via the Elaboration Likelihood Model: utilitarian shows tend to invite more central-route processing (argument quality, informational utility), whereas hedonic shows more often engage peripheral-route cues (narrative tone, affective heuristics). We analysed a dataset of 108,464 Apple podcasts with 2,017,209 reviews using a transformer-based artificial intelligence emotion detection model. We found that low levels of anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and surprise, next to a dominant joy emotion, positively influenced the number of reviews a podcast receives for both utilitarian and hedonic podcasts. In contrast, achieving higher ratings requires minimizing these alternative emotions relative to joy. Some differences emerged between utilitarian and hedonic podcasts, with hedonic podcasts benefitting from a broader range of emotions, while balancing the effects of the mixed emotions in terms of increasing the number of reviews and reducing the average rating score.
Integrating the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and Self-Determination Theory (SDT), this study advances a more human-centric and future-ready SPC framework that aligns internal HR practices with external service outcomes through enriched employee experiences. In our conceptualisation, we critically reexamine the nature and relevance of job resources as originally proposed in the SPC, highlighting the need for recalibration in response to emerging work demands such as cognitive overload, emotional labour, and the blurring of work-life boundaries. Concurrently, SDT revisits legacy constructs such as job satisfaction, employee loyalty, and productivity from an employee-centric perspective, foregrounding psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness as key drivers of sustainable performance. The study proposes a paradigmatic shift in the SPC framework by advocating for the replacement of job satisfaction with EX and loyalty with Employee Engagement. EX is conceptualised as a multidimensional construct encompassing work design, leadership, well-being, and career development, while engagement captures the intrinsic motivation and discretionary effort essential for delivering superior service. Additionally, this paper argues for a reconceptualisation of Internal Service Quality (ISQ), positioning it as a critical enabler of EX, highlighting job resources, such as flexibility and psychosocial well-being as essential for addressing the heightened demands of contemporary work environments.
While scarcity often enhances product desire, we introduce and examine synthetic scarcity, a demand-side deception where firms falsely imply excess demand despite sufficient supply. Six studies demonstrate that synthetic (vs. authentic) scarcity elicits greater resentment, but this effect is critically moderated by consumer Machiavellianism. For low Machs, synthetic scarcity triggers feelings of betrayal, driving heightened resentment. High Machs, in contrast, report equally high resentment towards both scarcity types, as their response is driven by a perceived loss of control rather than betrayal. We provide indirect process evidence for this mechanism by identifying structural power as a boundary condition: the interactive effect of scarcity type and Machiavellianism emerges only under high power, where high Machs' need for control is activated; under low power, the interaction dissipates. These findings illuminate the distinct psychological pathways through which consumers respond to deceptive scarcity tactics.
Activism has the potential to both positively and negatively impact an athlete's brand meaning (e.g., the perceptions held by others about the athlete). The present research extends prior work into how this occurs by adopting, for the first time, a multi-actor perspective. The data comes from the Instagram posts of 608 German athletes who participated in one of three mega sporting events (Tokyo 2021 Olympics, Beijing 2022 Olympics, and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar). Using an qualitative research design, we uncovered ten actor groups that contribute to the co-creation of branding meaning for activist athletes, and four different "levels" of co-creation performances: Autonomous activism, collaborative activism, sports-network activism, and beyond-network activism. We also found that brand meaning co-creation can be influenced by the number of actors involved, independent to the activism issue. Theoretically, the research contributes a novel framework for understanding the co-creation of an athlete's brand meaning when engaging in activism and offers strategic insights for brand managers on the need to balance activism with other brand building efforts.
Amid the rise of livestream commerce as a next-generation retail model, this study investigates how different forms of interaction, including customer-livestreamer (C2L), customer-customer (C2C), and customer-business (C2B), impact customer-centric outcomes. Drawing on Social Presence Theory and Parasocial Interaction Theory, the research adopts a mixed-method approach to examine these relationships. Quantitative analysis using survey data from 267 respondents confirms that both C2L and C2C interactions significantly enhance C2B interaction, which in turn positively influences customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. The primacy of C2L interaction over C2C interaction is also highlighted. Qualitative interviews add depth to these findings. This research contributes to the livestream commerce literature by offering a comprehensive interaction framework and providing actionable insights for enhancing relationship quality and strategic customer outcomes in interactive shopping environments.
Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) has gained prominence across disciplines for evaluating structural relationships among latent variables. Despite its widespread use, the application of conditional mediation (CoMe) modeling remains underutilized. This paper addresses this gap by offering a comprehensive guide on implementing CoMe models using PLS-SEM. We outline the conceptual foundations of CoMe, present a detailed step-by-step analytical procedure to apply CoMe, and provide practical interpretation guidelines. A case study of luxury counterfeit purchases illustrates the application of CoMe and demonstrates its enhanced ability to uncover complex relational dynamics. Additionally, we propose best-practice guidelines for researchers employing CoMe within PLS-SEM. By highlighting the value of CoMe in generating nuanced theoretical insights, this paper aims to encourage its wider adoption in empirical research accross disciplines.
In many societies, fashion serves as a medium of self-expression and a site of social regulation, where sartorial decisions can expose consumers to social censure and physical risk. Consequently, consumers must navigate the tension between adhering to local norms and participating in global fashion cultures. This study draws on impression management theory to examine how young consumers in a socially restrictive society use fashion as a means of identity expression while mitigating potential social risks. It uses data from in-depth interviews (n = 40) and open-ended surveys (n = 150) with consumers aged 18 to 35 years, analysed using an abductive thematic approach. We conceptualise consumer bricolage as the creative and strategic recombination of available cultural and material resources to manage impressions and negotiate identity. The analysis identifies five bricolage practices: ideational bricolage, accessorising, customisation, hybrid styling and assembling. The findings also highlight antecedents, such as cultural and religious identity, fashion innovativeness and identity distinctiveness, which help explain why young consumers engage in bricolage in restrictive settings. This study contributes to impression management theory by theorising fashion consumption as adaptive agency within constraining sociocultural environments and refines the concept of bricolage by specifying practice-level mechanisms of identity work.
Influencer marketing has emerged as a prominent strategy for brands to engage with consumers in the digital age, with virtual social influencers playing a pivotal role in shaping consumer perceptions and behaviors. To effectively evaluate influencer effectiveness and optimize marketing strategies, there is a need for a standardized measure. We introduce a virtual social influencer scale, which provides a comprehensive framework for assessing their performance across the dimensions of trustworthiness and connectedness. Drawing on insights from socio-technical systems theory, the use of an algorithmic approach in scale development spawns from the psychology literature. This research provides the foundation of its introduction into the marketing discipline. Future research directions include refining the scale, addressing algorithmic limitations, and exploring cross-cultural variations to enhance the scale's validity and applicability in diverse contexts. The virtual social influencer scale represents a significant advancement in influencer marketing research, offering valuable insights to marketers, researchers, and practitioners in the digital marketing landscape.
This study examines the often-overlooked influence of brand endorsements on the public perception of promoting celebrities. Grounded in Para-social Interaction Theory, this study examines how consumers' para-social relationships with brands indirectly influence their propensity to disseminate positive word-of-mouth (WOM) regarding celebrities. Using a sequential mixed-methods approach, including a survey (n = 485) and in-depth interviews (n = 40), the findings reveal that consumers' para-social relationships with brands are positively associated with their likelihood of engaging in positive WOM about endorsing celebrities driven by self-enhancement motives. However, this effect diminishes when consumers have a strong emotional attachment to a celebrity. This research advances branding literature by illustrating how brand perceptions can enhance a celebrity's image through self-image augmentation. It also extends endorsement research by identifying the conditions under which celebrities can strategically manage their public image through brand partnerships, particularly when consumer attachment to the celebrity is low.
Social media influencers (SMIs) are powerful role models that can effectively shape followers' intentions towards prosocial causes and contribute to social good. Drawing on social comparison theories, followers engage in upward (comparison with more advantaged others) and downward (comparison with less advantaged others) social comparisons in response to SMIs' attractiveness, which in turn evoke emotional and motivational reactions such as envy. This study examines how SMI attractiveness triggers benign and malicious envy as the two forms of envy, and how these emotional reactions translate into prosocial intentions. Across three experimental studies, the findings confirm that feelings of envy towards SMIs can be powerful motivators for positive behaviour, effectively enhancing followers' involvement in prosocial causes. This research highlights the significance of SMI attractiveness and the concepts of wishful identification and envy among followers, along with the subsequent impacts on prosocial behaviour and gender differences. The results yield clear theoretical and managerial implications for leveraging influences to support social causes.
This study examines how brand social responsibility (BSR) drives positive word-of-mouth (WOM) in service brands. Based on social identity theory, we propose that a brand's commitment to societal welfare strengthens customers' emotional attachment, fostering positive WOM. By exploring the BSR-WOM relationship, this study provides new insights into the dynamic mechanisms at play within service branding. Using a sequential two-stage mixed-methods approach, we conducted qualitative in-depth interviews followed by an experiment and a large-scale survey. The findings highlight the pivotal role of BSR in cultivating brand commitment and explaining how brand experience enhances the effectiveness of BSR initiatives in driving positive WOM. This study advances ethical branding literature and provides implications for practitioners.
