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PurposeThis article aims to examine political marketing strategies adopted by the politicians operating in base of the pyramid (BOP) areas and their impact on the BOP voters using the tenets of the social influence theory.Design/methodology/approachThe authors resorted to a qualitative phenomenological inquiry for this study. The responses obtained from two qualitative studies were subjected to thematic analysis. Two thematic maps were integrated into a conceptual model.FindingsStudy 1 indicates that the politicians operating at the BOP resort to vote-bank segmentation, clientelism, mobilizing opinion leaders, short guerilla war against opposition and communication bombarding. Study 2 has elaborated on how poor voters perceive these strategies and form their opinions towards the party/candidate.Social implicationsThe findings of this study highlight the need for essential policy formulation to protect BOP consumers from deceptive political tactics.Originality/valueThis study develops a model of the effectiveness of voting strategies at the BOP. It also contributes to the literature on social influence theory by indicating how the three social influence processes (compliance, identification and internalization) result in different ways of accepting political influence.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore the impact of other customer's opinion on a service firm and its alliance on the evaluation of the airline by the focal customer by integrating qualitative and quantitative user-generated content. The study also explores the relative importance of core and peripheral attributes in consumer evaluations.Design/methodology/approachA text mining and natural language processing-based approach was followed to extract insights from the qualitative part of 18,457 consumer reviews, which were later analyzed along with the quantitative information obtained from the reviews using linear regression and logistic regression methods.FindingsThe authors found that customer satisfaction and recommendation behavior is formed by own and others' opinion about the airline and alliance. The relative importance of the core and peripheral attributes depends on the psychological distance from the evaluation of the attribute.Research limitations/implicationsThe theoretical contribution and managerial implications have been discussed in detail.Practical implicationsIt helps in review management strategy, service design strategy and the alliance and partnership strategies of the airlines.Originality/valueThis is the first paper that explores the impact attribute-level evaluations found in prior reviews on the future reviews of customers. It also explores the effect of prior reviews in the context of a service business and its alliances.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic study of important research trends and published electronic word of mouth (eWOM) studies over the past 20 years in the emerging economy. This research is designed to identify the key areas of eWOM based on the Antecedents-Consequence-Intervention (ACI) framework. This paper is also aimed to analyze the current research status of each WOM area and critically review each area for developing future research directions.Design/methodology/approach616 articles were selected from 112 journals for in-depth review analysis. For the systematic review of articles, an ACI framework was adopted. This paper used systematic review analysis methodology to critically analyze important research studies in each area of the ACI framework with a set of research questions.FindingsResults identify six significant areas of eWOM, i.e. WOM antecedents, outcomes, senders, receivers, eWOM platform and eWOM management representing the whole environment. The result highlights increasing research interest on mixed eWOM and rich eWOM content and market-level source credibility factors. Research also identifies research gaps based on the ACI framework.Originality/valueAnalyzing the recent trends in the eWOM environment with the SLR approach and linking these trends to the ACI framework with a future research agenda in the emerging market indicated a pioneering attempt in eWOM research.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consolidate the antecedents of electronic word of mouth (eWOM). Thereafter, it examines the impact of eWOM and its antecedents on consumer-based brand equity (CBBE). Design/methodology/approach A total of 93 research articles on eWOM and CBBE were critically reviewed using the systematic literature review method. Findings This study has consolidated the antecedents of eWOM from the extant literature. It has identified eight antecedents of eWOM including information or argument quality, loyalty, social relationship, source quality, satisfaction, subjective norms, and information quantity. This study has come out with a conceptual framework, followed by 16 hypotheses addressing the possible relationships between eWOM, its antecedents, and CBBE. Originality/value This study pioneers to examine the impact of the antecedents of eWOM on CBBE through an exhaustive review of contemporary literature. It has also explored the possibility of eWOM acting as a mediator between the antecedents of eWOM and CBBE. Therefore, this study unravels a wide array of directions for researchers to examine the relationships between the constructs mentioned above and CBBE.

PurposeThe tourism literature has focused only on destination branding; nonetheless, measuring the quality of a destination from the tourism point of view has been overlooked, especially in the context of the emerging markets. This paper aims to focus on developing a scale measuring the overall quality of the tourist destinations.Design/methodology/approachWith the help of extensive review of the literature, the study identified the key variables for measuring the quality of tourism destination in emerging markets. Thereafter, to determine the factor structure (purification stage) and assess the stability of the factor structure (validation stage), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) has been conducted. A second-order CFA has been conducted to analyse the factor structure stability of the broad dimensions, namely, the quality of service, the quality of destination features and the quality of experience.FindingsThis research shows that the quality of tourism can be determined not only by the quality of destination features but also by the quality of service and the quality of experience one perceives from a destination. Together, these three dimensions and their various sub-dimensions form a valid scale to measure the overall quality of a tourist destination.Practical implicationsThis study provides marketing managers an idea of the dimensions that affect tourist destination quality. They can now align the dimensions measuring destination quality with the destinations that they are marketing to tourists. This can add to the competitive advantage of any place brand.Originality/valueThis study has developed three distinct measurement scales for quality of experience, quality of destination feature and quality of services and validated the same with adequate data following appropriate scale development procedure. Through empirical research, the authors have integrated these three dimensions as the constructs for measuring the overall quality of tourist destinations. Hence, as a pioneering attempt, the authors have developed a scale to measure the quality of tourist destinations.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of retailer personality on consumer‐based retailer equity.Design/methodology/approachThe authors developed a retailer personality scale and find its impact on consumer‐based retailer equity by adopting the scale developed by Pappu and Quester. A mall‐intercept survey was undertaken using a systematic sampling of department store shoppers of age 18 years and above in a metropolitan city, Kolkata, India. The questionnaire was used to collect data from seven department retail brands. The impact of each retailer personality dimension on each consumer‐based retailer equity dimension was explored, using structural equation modeling.FindingsThe study proposed a five‐dimensional scale to measure department store personality. Results indicated that the three dimensions of store personality, namely sophistication, dependability and empathy, have significant positive impact on each consumer‐based retailer equity dimension except one (empathy→retailer loyalty). The remaining two dimensions of retailer personality, namely authenticity and vibrancy, have no impact on each consumer‐based retailer dimension.Originality/valueThe paper is the first to propose a scale for measuring department store personality and to explore the link between retailer personality and consumer‐based retailer equity.