This research applies a service adaptation framework to examine how the interplay of employee service adaptive behaviors and customer cultural factors influence customer satisfaction. The results show that stronger ethnic identification increased the positive effect of interpersonal adaptive service (but not service offering-adaptive) behaviors and customer satisfaction. Additionally, stronger in-group favoritism expectations strengthened the positive relationship between service-offering adaptive behaviors (but not interpersonal-adaptive behavior) and satisfaction. These findings contribute to the ethnic services marketing literature by shedding light on the factors that impact customer satisfaction in shared ethnicity service encounters. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The amount of information Big Data provides business is massive and growing, and it is having a large impact on social media marketing strategies. Eighty percent of the data being collected comes from sources such as social media, meaning businesses rely on the content of customers’ social media stream as a guide to drive their own and better target their efforts. Content is information and social media is a must for businesses’ marketing strategies. Social media platforms started as a way to keep in touch and maintain relationships. Analyzed by all major stakeholders in society, social media data is often hailed as the last frontier in obtaining key insights into humans. Social media sites like Facebook operate under the incorrect assumption that a singular and converged version of all of one’s identities can exist in harmony within the view of several different facets of social audiences in one’s life.

The ways consumers gather information and communicate about brands have been changing dramatically over the last decade (Hennig-Thurau et al. 2010). Content in the traditional media era was disseminated based on prearranged schedules via one-way communication channels. This model is gradually changing to allow consumers to select the content they want at the time of their choosing (Wildman 2008). This switch challenges brand managers’ understanding about the types of connections that consumers tend to seek in this new communication landscape (Leeflang et al. 2014).

Whether a brand’s personality is perceived to fit a consumer’s self-image is often an important determinant of the product’s appeal. This investigation explores the potential to enhance or undermine consumers’ perceptions of how well a brand’s personality matches their view of themselves in an online environment through the presence of similar or dissimilar avatars. Two studies are reported supporting this potential, thereby underscoring both the opportunities and dangers offered by consumer avatars to Internet retailers and marketers.

Previous literature operationalizes family as a household or comprehensive unit, with only part of its members being researched – primarily parents and children focusing on on the influence of parents on the socialization of the children and their consumption behavior (Childers and Rao 1992; John 1999; Moore-Shay and Lutz 1988; Moschis 1978; Moschis and Churchill 1978; Moschis 1987; Ward 1974), on the influence of the family environment on socialization (Moore-Shay and Berchmans 1996; Moschis 1987), on spousal decision making (Chenting, Edward, and Keying 2003; Davis and Rigaux 1974; Ford, LaTour, and Henthorne 1995; Seymour and Lessne 1984; Webster 2000; Wilkes 1975) and the influence of the child on the parents (Selwyn 2004).

This research uses a social identity theory approach to investigate the impact of cultural identity on ethnic consumer response to ethnic crossover brand extensions—brands associated with one ethnic group that crossover into a product category associated with another ethnic group (e.g., McDonald's Café con leche). Study 1 demonstrates that the manner in which crossover brand extensions blend ethnic consumers' in-group and out-group cultural representations impact brand extension cultural fit and parent brand attitudes, and perceived ethnic target market impacts brand extension attitudes. Study 2 demonstrates that high ethnic embeddedness extensions strengthen ethnic consumers' self-brand connections. These findings provide managerial implications for practitioners considering a crossover brand extension strategy.

This research investigates how affiliation with a corporate parent affects consumers’ perception of corporate societal marketing (CSM). It also examines whether this effect is more pronounced when the affiliation is perceived to be hidden, and therefore in violation of the norm of openness. Lastly, the study examines whether any of the effects flow back to the parent company. Findings include that corporate parent affiliation does not necessarily lead to decreased evaluations of the niche marketer brands. However, when consumers see the affiliation as hidden, evaluations are negatively affected. Evidence suggests effects may depend on prior track record of parent firm. Conceptualization Corporate societal marketing is an increasingly popular method of building brand equity (Hoeffler and Keller 2002). Some niche brands have been successfully built by firms appealing to socially concerned consumers. Several such firms have been acquired by larger firms. Examples of this phenomenon are reviewed and discussed. In each case, a large firm acquired a smaller firm and continued to operate the brand unchanged. This strategy seems to assume that consumers will continue to value the brand based upon its CSM characteristics. It is possible, however, that consumers devalue the brand upon learning of such an affiliation, especially if the parent brand is perceived to lack similar commitment to the cause. The purpose of this paper is to examine how consumers evaluate CSM based brands of a niche marketer affiliated with a larger firm. The study is informed by three principle areas of theory: 1) corporate societal marketing, 2) the correspondence bias in attribution theory, and 3) fairness in marketing. The correspondence bias refers to the attributional bias in which people make judgments about others based upon their behavior, even in the presence of situational constraints that offer alternative explanations. Fein, Hilton, and Miller (1990) found that the presence of ulterior motives acts as an antidote to the correspondence bias. When behavior may be motivated by an ulterior motive, observers become suspicious, and are therefore less inclined to make attributions based on that behavior. In the present research, it is expected that upon learning of the affiliation, the ulterior motive of image management, or of the profit motive, will become accessible as a ulterior motive for the CSM activities, causing consumers to lower their evaluations of the firm and brand. Fairness is an important component of exchange (Oliver and Swan 1989; Campbell 1999). Ashworth and Darke (2006) found that consumers’ perceptions of fairness are affected by violations of prescriptive norms–such as openness–even when the outcomes of the exchange were perceived to be distributively fair. Consumers expect to be treated fairly in the marketplace, not only because of material concerns, but also as a matter of principle. In the present research, it is expected that consumers’ perception of openness will affect their evaluation of the companies and their brands. Corporate Societal Marketing (CSM) has been defined by Drumwright and Murphy (2001) as marketing initiatives that have at least one non-economic objective related to social welfare and use the resources of the company and/or one of its partners. There is evidence that consumers’ evaluation of CSM efforts depend partly upon their perceptions of the marketers’ motivations or intentions. It is expected that consumers will find it more credible that a niche focused firm is sincerely motivated by social objectives than is a larger, more diversified firm.