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Online firestorms pose severe threats to online brand communities. Any negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) has the potential to become an online firestorm, yet not every post does, so finding ways to detect and respond to negative eWOM constitutes a critical managerial priority. The authors develop a comprehensive framework that integrates different drivers of negative eWOM and the response approaches that firms use to engage in and disengage from online conversations with complaining customers. A text-mining study of negative eWOM demonstrates distinct impacts of high- and low-arousal emotions, structural tie strength, and linguistic style match (between sender and brand community) on firestorm potential. The firm's response must be tailored to the intensity of arousal in the negative eWOM to limit the virality of potential online firestorms. The impact of initiated firestorms can be mitigated by distinct firm responses over time, and the effectiveness of different disengagement approaches also varies with their timing. For managers, these insights provide guidance on how to detect and reduce the virality of online firestorms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Korea, electric vehicles (EVs) are considered as a potential solution for counteracting environmental issues that have arisen due to vehicles with internal combustion engine. Therefore, a multitude of incentives have been offered to the consumers but the effectiveness of those incentives varied due to diverse consumer perceptions on various incentives. To evaluate consumer behavior toward the incentives for EVs, this study performed stated preference experiments of actual EV owners. The experiments showed that, compared with the potential consumers, actual EV owners exhibited a greater inconvenience to charging time. For the incentives, EV owners showed different preferences to the different incentive measures. Especially, they have far greater preference for subsidies during their ownership period, such as discounts to the electricity charging rate and operation subsidies, than for those at the time of purchase, such as purchase subsidies and charger installation. These findings suggest that it would be more effective to formulate an incentive policy that reflects diverse consumer behavior toward EV incentive measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtually all sources on service recovery stress the importance of offering an apology to complaining customers. To date, however, our understanding of who should offer the apology and how to offer the apology is still limited. Taking a cross-cultural perspective, Study 1 shows that Eastern customers attach more value to a manager (vis-à-vis a frontline employee) offering an apology than Western customers in an offline retailing context, but not in an online retailing context. In an online setting, Study 2 further extends these insights by showing that the status of service personnel matters for Eastern customers, but only if the apology is provided publicly on social media and not if the apology is provided online privately. Global e-commerce managers can benefit from these findings when developing their service recovery strategies. By demonstrating that recovery strategies that are proposed and tested in offline settings are non transferrable to online settings, this article provides a clearer understanding of service recovery across online and offline channels. Based on face theory, this research highlights the public versus private nature of an apology in a global online retailing context, thus contributing to the emerging research in online service recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Researchers and managers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the topic of unethical consumer behavior. Where most studies view unethical behavior as something that is identifiable per se, the authors of the present article believe that it only exists because it has been constructed by people operating within a specific context. Hence the efforts made by this paper to explore, at the level of one specific organization, how interactions between employees and consumers might lead to the construct of unethical consumers. Based on a case study of France’s AMDM—a mutual insurance company set up to serve a client base comprising motorcyclists—the paper addresses how one group of consumers ends up being categorized as unethical by revealing the existence of a sensemaking process within the target organization. This process develops in three main phases: the nurturing of a shared ethos; the protection of employees’ recognized status; and the demonization of any group of consumers threatening this status. Managers incorporating this sensemaking process can avoid or mitigate the negative effects befalling organizations when these kinds of unethical consumer behavior are constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital transforms global business and opens new marketing doors to expand and grow around the world. However, it often comes with myths and assumptions that make marketing leaders think going digital and going global are all the same, and that they are quite linear. For global marketers a global footprint is a first step and does not suffice. They have to turn it into tangible and immersive customer experiences in local markets that are just as diverse and demanding. Digital properties offer great ways to meet customer needs more successfully and quickly than ever before, provided they are prepared and optimised to handle multinational, multilingual and multicultural content accordingly.That is the price to pay for delivering total-and-micro experiences aligned with market requirements and customer expectations.To keep the digital globalisation journey cost-and-time-effective, it is essential to set up a stage, incorporate milestones and leverage resources boosting global marketing content. Embracing customer diversity turns new layers of complexity into new layers of growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expectations towards fitness exercises are the major factor in customer satisfaction in the service sector in question. The purpose of this study is to present a segmentation framework for fitness customers, based on their individual expectations. The survey was designed and validated to evaluate individual expectations towards exercises. The study included a randomly recruited sample of 723 subjects (53% males; 47% females; 42.1±19.7 years). Factor analysis and cluster analysis with Ward's cluster method with squared Euclidean distance were used to analyse the data obtained. Four components were extracted (performance, enjoyment, beauty and health) explaining 68.7% of the total variance and three distinct segments were found: Exercise Lovers (n=312), Disinterested (n=161) and Beauty Seekers (n=250). All the factors identified have a significant contribution to differentiate the clusters, the first and third clusters being most similar. The segmentation framework obtained based on customer expectations allows better understanding of customers' profiles, thus helping the fitness industry develop services more suitable for each type of customers. A follow-up study was conducted 5 years later and the results concur with the initial study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how employees in the service sector respond to sexual harassment from customers and attempts to explain why this is so. There are only a small number of previous studies examining the issue of customer-perpetrated sexual harassment. Those that have been conducted have detailed the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment from customers, but this research lags behind employee experience and some emerging policy responses to this issue. The extant literature, whilst growing, remains largely limited to documenting the phenomenon. In this article, we attempt to create a deeper analysis of customer-perpetrated harassment by conducting a new review of the literature to develop propositions about how employees respond to it and the factors that influence their responses. These propositions are analysed in relation to a qualitative pilot study with 15 interviewees who had experienced sexual harassment from customers to understand how they reacted and why. The article shows how the social norms and precarious working conditions of the service sector constrain employees from seeking formal redress, leading to the enactment of informal coping strategies and temporary contestations of the situation. This research is important for building our understanding of the influence of workplace context for framing employee responses to customer sexual harassment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Banks have the challenging task of managing customer experience across many traditional and technological channels in today's financial services world. Recent studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that many customers are dissatisfied with their experiences across channels that are supposed to provide a seamless experience. This customer dissatisfaction potentially diminishes a financial service organization's customer base, and requires the firm to rely on a more fickle customer mix and erodes its reputation. This paper investigates the relationship between individuals' dissatisfaction with their primary bank channel and their intention to leave their bank in the future. The first study examines individuals' overall trust in their bank as a potential moderator in the relationship that reduces customers' likelihood to leave the bank even though they are dissatisfied with a particular banking channel. The second study goes one step further and examines the effect of three trusting beliefs about the bank potentially held by the customer: competence, integrity, and benevolence beliefs. Findings indicate that when customers have a high level of trust in their banks, they are less likely to leave their banks even though they are dissatisfied with their primary banking channel. Furthermore, while competence and benevolence beliefs about the bank have a similar moderating effect, integrity beliefs do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the Sturm-Liouville boundary value problem where $m\geq3$ and $1\leq q\leq m-2$. We note that the nonlinear term F involves derivatives. This makes the problem challenging, and such cases are seldom investigated in the literature. In this paper we develop a new technique to obtain existence criteria for one or multiple positive solutions of the boundary value problem. Several examples with known positive solutions are presented to dwell upon the usefulness of the results obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Financial hardship has been recognised as a growing problem that affects a broad cross-section of Australian consumers. The federal and state governments have sought to respond to this problem by establishing legal frameworks that provide consumer credit, essential services and telecommunications customers with a measure of flexibility, information and access to support that may assist them in meeting their financial obligations. We undertake a detailed analysis of these frameworks, documenting an increasingly national approach to the problem of financial hardship, as well as an emphasis upon transparency in the provision of hardship assistance to consumers. We combine our analysis with a comparative study of company hardship policies in the energy and water sectors, highlighting important gaps in the legal frameworks where the provision of some particularly effective forms of assistance is left to the discretion of individual companies. We also argue for a more coordinated approach to making hardship assistance more accessible for vulnerable consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The study aims to investigate the illegitimate customer complaining behavior (ICCB) in the hospitality industry from the perspective of frontline employees. In particular, this study identified ICCB incidents, ICCB triggering factors and inhibitors in the hospitality industry. Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative research approach was adopted in this study by using in-depth personal interviews. Twenty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted with frontline employees who had first-hand experiences with ICCB in the hospitality industry. The interviews were transcribed, coded and analyzed following the procedures of open coding, axial coding and selective coding. Findings – Analysis of the qualitative data has revealed 7 types of ICCB incidents, 11 ICCB triggering factors and 3 ICCB inhibitors in the hospitality industry, as perceived by frontline employees. The study also proposed a multiple-layer model of ICCB triggers and inhibitors based on the results. Four propositions are developed delineating three layers of driving forces and the dynamics between ICCB triggers and inhibitors that exert joint effects on ICCB. Research limitations/implications – Impacts of various cultural settings, different hospitality business settings (hotels vs restaurants) and profile information of frontline employees on ICCB need to be examined in future research. Originality/value – Findings of this study contribute to the customer complaining literature and the hospitality service management literature by offering the frontline employees’ perspective of ICCB. Hospitality businesses can benefit from this study by using the research findings to develop more effective company policies and training programs to recognize, monitor and resolve ICCB incidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The General Court confirmed that the rejection of a complaint based on Article 106(1) TFEU, read in conjunction with Article 102 TFEU does not constitute a challengeable act under Article 263 TFEU. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Premature battery drain, swelling and fires/explosions in lithium-ion batteries have caused wide-scale customer concerns, product recalls, and huge financial losses in a wide range of products including smartphones, laptops, e-cigarettes, hoverboards, cars, and commercial aircraft. Most of these problems are caused by defects which are difficult to detect using conventional nondestructive electrical methods and disassembly-based destructive analysis. This paper develops an effective computed tomography (CT)-based nondestructive approach to assess battery quality and identify manufacturing-induced defects and structural deformations in batteries. Several unique case studies from commercial e-cigarette and smartphone applications are presented to show where CT analysis methods work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]