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This study investigates the motivations of socially responsible consumption from the perspective of identity-based motivation theory. The findings suggest that personal-identity appeals promote socially responsible products with utilitarian values more effectively than relational-identity appeals. However, with respect to socially responsible products with hedonic values, relational and personal identity had no differential effect. Moreover, public identity appeals were found to promote socially responsible products with utilitarian values significantly. With respect to hedonic products, public identity influenced purchase intention only through anticipated guilt. These results have implications for marketers about ways to promote socially responsible products effectively.

Student life causes many sources of stress due to the requirements of managing schoolwork, family, friends, health and wellbeing, and future career planning. Some students are overwhelmed and lack resilience to overcome stress, especially if they are inexperienced in managing setbacks, fail to achieve expectations, or lack skills to independently manage social skills, recreation, and study time. The long-term accumulation of stress has a negative impact on students’ physical and mental health, and may lead to a range of symptoms such as depression, anxiety, headache, insomnia, and eating disorders. Although most universities provide psychological counseling services, there is often a shortage of professional psychologists, which leads to students suffering from stress for longer than necessary without immediate assistance. The build-up of stress can lead to tragic consequences including abnormal reasoning, anti-social behavior, and suicide. There should never be a need for a student to wait more than a month to make an appointment for counseling services and every request for help should be immediately addressed and assessed. In this research, we designed a unique test platform for an immersive virtual reality group chatbot counseling system so students can receive psychological help and stress management counseling anytime and anywhere. First, the research used questionnaires to measure the stress levels and identifies how stress affects their lives. An immersive virtual reality chatbot was developed using professional psychological counseling knowledge that can provide answers during individual or group counseling sessions. Students can log in to the platform as avatars and ask the chatbot questions or interact with other students on the platform. This research provides college students with a new technology-based counseling environment designed to help relieve stress and learn new ways to improve student life quality from others. The platform provides a test base for future clinical trials to evaluate and improve the automated virtual reality chatbot counseling system.

In East Asia, consisting of societies strongly collectivist in nature, a marketing style called the "night market"—essentially a large bazaar which can cover many city blocks—is very successful in spite of the notable crowding and limited space. Although there has been research on crowding in store environments in Western societies, that demonstrated the negative role of crowding stimuli in consumer response, given the long-standing success of night markets in East Asia, those findings are obviously not universal. Hence, the purpose of this research is to investigate crowding effects in a collectivist culture and shed light on why these night markets can be so successful. This research devises two experiments to look for causal congruencies in Taiwanese night markets. Each experiment is in line with one product type—durable or non-durable—for specific products which one commonly finds in Asian night markets. The results indicate that shoppers have different responses to crowding stimuli with respect to each of these types. The results provide new findings and offer useful insights for marketers as they formulate marketing strategies, particularly involving environmental design and considerations of product type in collectivist cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]