The interplay of strategic and internal green marketing orientation on competitive advantage

This paper seeks to clarify and refine the relationship between strategic and internal green marketing and firm competitiveness. Despite the significance of corporate environmental strategy to firms adopting a triple-bottom line performance evaluation, there is insufficient focus on strategic green marketing and its impact on a firm’s competitiveness. This study fills the gap by providing a comprehensive view of strategic green marketing and its impact on competitive advantage. Findings also reveal the moderating role of internal green marketing actions towards the development of a sustained competitive advantage. Specifically, the findings build on contemporary green marketing literature suggesting that a significant interplay between strategy and people exists which enhances the creation of competitive advantage. This in turn increases financial performance. Finally, this research uses an updated approach to build on current literature concerning the drivers and outcomes of strategic green marketing. This provides managers with nuanced insights about environmentally-driven competitive advantage

The accommodation experiencescape: a comparative assessment of hotels and Airbnb

PURPOSE: Accommodations providers in the sharing economy are increasingly competing with the hotel industry vis-à-vis the guest experience. Additionally, experience-related research remains underrepresented in the hospitality and tourism literature. This paper aims to develop and test a model of experiential consumption to provide a better understanding of an emerging phenomenon in the hospitality industry. In so doing, the authors also expand Pine and Gilmore’s original experience economy construct. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Using data from a survey of 630 customers who stayed at a hotel or an Airbnb in the previous three months, the authors performed a multi-step analysis procedure centered on structural equation modeling to validate the model. Findings The authors demonstrate that the dimensions of serendipity, localness, communitas and personalization represent valuable additions to Pine and Gilmore’s original experience economy construct. Airbnb appears to outperform the hotel industry in the provision of all experience dimensions. The authors further define the pathways that underlie the creation of extraordinary, memorable experiences, which subsequently elicit favorable behavioral intentions. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: The findings suggest the need for the hotel industry to adopt a content marketing paradigm that leverages various dimensions of the experience economy to provide customers with valuable and relevant experiences. The industry must also pay greater attention to its use of branding, signage and promotional messaging to encourage customers to interpret their experiences through the lens of these dimensions. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The study expands a seminal construct from the field of services marketing in the context of the accommodations industry. The Accommodations Experiencescape is offered as a tool for strategic experience design. The study also offers a model of experiential consumption that explains customers’ experiences with accommodations providers

HR: Innovation\u27s Accelerator

[Excerpt] Amazon and Borders. Netflix and Blockbuster. Uber and taxi drivers. Digital camera makers and Kodak. The list could go on and on. Individual stories of disruptive innovation such as these are some of the most well known - and ca utionary - business tales of our times. Yet, many firms remain blindly confident that such an outcome will never happen to their company. Recent research suggests otherwise. According to a 2016 report by the innova tion -focused firm Innosight, high M&A activity and billion -dollar startup valuations are creating significant market turbulence, with 28 companies being replaced on the S&P 500 index in 2015 alone. At current churn rates, Innosight estimates that by 2026, half of the entire S&P 500 will be replaced-a staggering and sobering figure. As such, the ability to develop deep innovation capabilities has never been more important, for both growth and survival. This year\u27s CAHRs Research Assistant (RA) project takes on this very topic, examining the intersection between HR & Innovation, and how progressive HR leaders can create value and impact through a range of human capital strategies and solutions. Consistent with past CAHRS RA projects, the research methodology for this paper was qualitative in nature, including 41 interviews with HR and business executives at 31 different partner companies, all within the Fortune 500. Unique to this year\u27s project, and in addition to the traditional focus on HR leaders, research assistants also spoke with more than 10 business and innovation leaders, to get a richer, deeper view of innovation. Interviews consisted of 11 questions, but largely focused on three key categories: Why is innovation often so hard? What factors lead to innovation success? How can HR leaders be innovation change agents within their company? Our findings and recommendations follow below

COBRA framework to evaluate e-government services: A citizen-centric perspective

E-government services involve many stakeholders who have different objectives that can have an impact on success. Among these stakeholders, citizens are the primary stakeholders of government activities. Accordingly, their satisfaction plays an important role in e-government success. Although several models have been proposed to assess the success of e-government services through measuring users' satisfaction levels, they fail to provide a comprehensive evaluation model. This study provides an insight and critical analysis of the extant literature to identify the most critical factors and their manifested variables for user satisfaction in the provision of e-government services. The various manifested variables are then grouped into a new quantitative analysis framework consisting of four main constructs: cost; benefit; risk and opportunity (COBRA) by analogy to the well-known SWOT qualitative analysis framework. The COBRA measurement scale is developed, tested, refined and validated on a sample group of e-government service users in Turkey. A structured equation model is used to establish relationships among the identified constructs, associated variables and users' satisfaction. The results confirm that COBRA framework is a useful approach for evaluating the success of e-government services from citizens' perspective and it can be generalised to other perspectives and measurement contexts. Crown Copyright © 2014.PIAP-GA-2008-230658) from the European Union Framework Program and another grant (NPRP 09-1023-5-158) from the Qatar National Research Fund (amember of Qatar Foundation

Consumption authenticity in the age of the sharing economy: the keys to creating loyal customers who love your brand

Airbnb has gained popularity as an alternative to hotels, with the authenticity of the consumption experience being a critical differentiating factor. However, the hospitality and tourism literature has not fully explored how Airbnb and traditional hotel brands are facilitating authentic travel experiences and the impact of these experiences on brand love and brand loyalty. In this study, we explore three elements of consumption authenticity and examine their how they interact in the context of an accommodation brand. Second, we compare the components of consumption authenticity across hotels and Airbnb, and examine their relative impact on brand love for these two segments of the accommodations industry. We found that hotels and Airbnb draw upon different sources of authenticity to create brand-loving customers. Our results indicated that Airbnb leverages brand, existential, and intrapersonal authenticity in creating brand-loving and brand-loyal customers, while hotels utilize only brand authenticity. Thus, the keys to creating customers who love and are loyal to the brand differ between hotels and Airbnb. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and areas of future research are identified.Accepted manuscrip

Diffusion Analysis of the Emerging Market for Low Emission Vehicles

Non peer reviewedPostprin

Of impacts, agents, and functions: An interdisciplinary meta-review of smart home energy management systems research

Smart home energy management technologies (SHEMS) have long been viewed as a promising opportunity to manage the way households use energy. Research on this topic has emerged across a variety of disciplines, focusing on different pieces of the SHEMS puzzle without offering a holistic vision of how these technologies and their users will influence home energy use moving forward. This paper presents the results of a systematic, interdisciplinary meta-review of SHEMS literature, assessing the extent to which it discusses the role of various SHEMS components in driving energy benefits. Results reveal a bias towards technical perspectives and controls approaches that seek to drive energy impacts such as load management and energy savings through SHEMS without user or third-party participation. Not only are techno-centric approaches more common, there is also a lack of integration of these approaches with user-centric, information-based solutions for driving energy impacts. These results suggest future work should investigate more holistic solutions for optimal impacts on household energy use. We hope these results will provoke a broader discussion about how to advance research on SHEMS to capitalize on their potential contributions to demand-side management initiatives moving forward

Consumption authenticity in the age of the sharing economy: The key to creating loyal customers who love your brand

Airbnb continues to gain popularity as an accommodation alternative to hotels, with the authenticity of the consumption experience being a critical differentiating factor. However, the hospitality literature has not fully explored whether and how brands in the sharing economy as well as traditional hotel brands are facilitating authentictravel experiences and the impact of these experiences on brand love and brand loyalty. The purpose of this study is twofold. First, we develop a model of consumption authenticity in the accommodations industry and identify, operationalize, and measure its components. Second, we examine the impact of consumption authenticity on brand love and brand loyalty in both hotels and Airbnb accommodations. By surveying 1,256 American participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, we found that Airbnb leverages brand, existential, and intra-personal consumption authenticity in creating brand-loving and brand-loyal customers, while hotels utilize only brand authenticity. Implications for theory and practice are discussed, and areas of future research are identified

Designing IS service strategy: an information acceleration approach

Information technology-based innovation involves considerable risk that requires insight and foresight. Yet, our understanding of how managers develop the insight to support new breakthrough applications is limited and remains obscured by high levels of technical and market uncertainty. This paper applies a new experimental method based on “discrete choice analysis” and “information acceleration” to directly examine how decisions are made in a way that is behaviourally sound. The method is highly applicable to information systems researchers because it provides relative importance measures on a common scale, greater control over alternate explanations and stronger evidence of causality. The practical implications are that information acceleration reduces the levels of uncertainty and generates a more accurate rationale for IS service strategy decisions

Are black friday deals worth it? Mining twitter users' sentiment and behavior response

The Black Friday event has become a global opportunity for marketing and companies’ strategies aimed at increasing sales. The present study aims to understand consumer behavior through the analysis of user-generated content (UGC) on social media with respect to the Black Friday 2018 offers published by the 23 largest technology companies in Spain. To this end, we analyzed Twitter-based UGC about companies’ offers using a three-step data text mining process. First, a Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model (LDA) was used to divide the sample into topics related to Black Friday. In the next step, sentiment analysis (SA) using Python was carried out to determine the feelings towards the identified topics and offers published by the companies on Twitter. Thirdly and finally, a data-text mining process called textual analysis (TA) was performed to identify insights that could help companies to improve their promotion and marketing strategies as well as to better understand the customer behavior on social media. The results show that consumers had positive perceptions of such topics as exclusive promotions (EP) and smartphones (SM); by contrast, topics such as fraud (FA), insults and noise (IN), and customer support (CS) were negatively perceived by customers. Based on these results, we offer guidelines to practitioners to improve their social media communication. Our results also have theoretical implications that can promote further research in this area