Search

Understanding the emotions of the photo audience or Viewer Affect is essential because marketers want to elicit specific responses with photos. Nevertheless, the relationship between Viewer Affect and tourists' behavioral intentions is still unclear. This research investigated Viewer Affect with association strengths and association valences of destination photos and statements and developed the Imagery Diagnosis Model as a new approach to synthesize findings. The Imagery Diagnosis Model recommends leveraging Treasures, developing Hidden Gems, ignoring Traps, and proceeding cautiously with Roadblocks. Furthermore, this research used the Destination Content Model to test the impact of Viewer Affect on travelers' behavioral intentions. Our findings suggest that Destination Affect positively influences willingness to visit, recommend, and pay. Destination marketers evoke Destination Affect with text or photos but use text to change Destination Image. This research collected 796 online responses from four countries and used the structural equation modeling to confirm the Destination Content Model.

Sharing instead of buying is regaining traction among today's consumers. This study aims at identifying segments of sharing consumers to unearth potentially viable clusters of a consumer behavior that is a market of growing economic relevance. By means of a qualitative study and a survey with a roughly representative sample of 1121 Swiss-German and German consumers, a set of trait-related, motivational, and perceived socioeconomic variables is identified that can be used to group individuals into segments that differ with regard to their approach to sharing. A cluster analysis based on these variables suggests four potential clusters of sharing consumers-sharing idealists, sharing opponents, sharing pragmatists, and sharing normatives. Two sets of testable propositions are derived that can guide further research in this domain and pave the way to a more targeted approach to the growing market of "sharing" businesses.

Although brand authenticity is gaining increasing interest in consumer behavior research and managerial practice, literature on its measurement and contribution to branding theory is still limited. This article develops an integrative framework of the concept of brand authenticity and reports the development and validation of a scale measuring consumers' perceived brand authenticity (PBA). A multi-phase scale development process resulted in a 15-item PBA scale measuring four dimensions: credibility, integrity, symbolism, and continuity. This scale is reliable across different brands and cultural contexts. We find that brand authenticity perceptions are influenced by indexical, existential, and iconic cues, whereby some of the latters' influence is moderated by consumers' level of marketing skepticism. Results also suggest that PBA increases emotional brand attachment and word-of-mouth, and that it drives brand choice likelihood through self-congruence for consumers high in self-authenticity.