Tourists’ emotions as a resource for customer value creation, cocreation, and destruction: a customer-grounded understanding

Research on customer value creation in a tourism setting has tended to prioritize the firm’s over the customer’s perspective. However, new understandings of customer value through the lens of customer-dominant logic emphasize the need to consider value as emerging within the broader context of a customer’s lifeworld, which transcends customer–firm interactions and includes interactions with others. Tourism experiences are experiential and meaning-laden at the individual and collective levels. As a resource for value creation, emotions play an important but underexplored role during value-in-use and influence the tourist’s consumption experience. We provide a customer-grounded understanding of value creation as emerging and evolving over time by examining how emotions are experienced and contribute to the holistic consumption experience both intra- and intersubjectively. By demonstrating how emotions, as a customer operant resource, contribute to the process of value creation as well as value destruction, we extend our knowledge of experiential consumption practices

Effects of new-to-market E-store features on first time browsers

Understanding the effects of website design features on website usage is complicated when buyers differ in their willingness to process information to make decisions. However, it becomes more difficult for a new-to-market e-store with no established familiarity. While extant literature suggests the use of interactivity and personalization features offered by e-stores to reduce consumers’ risk perceptions and improve trustworthiness of such stores, there is little guidance on the level of feature provision required to enhance consumer satisfaction in making product selections from a new and unfamiliar e-store. The authors explore this issue in an online experiment with 273 subjects browsing 4 websites offering identical products but with variable levels of interactivity and personalization features. Findings reveal a positive association between the level of feature provision and browser decision-making outcomes. However, interactivity features are more effective for maximizers, whereas personalization ones are more effective for satisficers

Communicating Temporary Brick-and-Mortar Store Closures During Covid-19 Lockdowns in the UK

This research examines how retail businesses from central England’s Midlands region communicated temporary closure of their brick-and-mortar stores via shop window messages during the first two Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. These closure notices represent important forms of crisis communication for businesses, which display various levels of information, emotional language, or functional intent, and offer signposts for business continuity. 417 shop window closure notices were photographed - 167 and 250 from the first and second periods of lockdown respectively. In order to analyse the data, a multimodal social semiotic framework was employed, allowing the study to examine the language, design and function of each notice. Interviews were then conducted with selected businesses and customers to generate insights into the nature of messaging used by businesses. The findings detail how businesses adopt corporate/personal voices for their messaging, outline uncertain temporality about reopening, and help to amplify national public health messaging

Unconventional luxury: The reappropriation of time and substance

This study addresses the transformational role time and substance play in an unconventional luxury experience. Adopting a giving, as opposed to having, perspective of unconventional luxury, in-depth interviews were carried out with tourists in a luxury Ecocamp in Kenya. We demonstrate how the reappropriation of time is central to the transformational effects of unconventional luxury experiences. Time and substance are interlinked whereby an emphasis on substance promotes a reconsideration of time and vice versa. Time is reappropriated through a process of appreciation, learning and (re)discovery resulting in inner (self), outward (self in relation to others) and onward (non-related distant others) transformations. We present the bidirectional relationship of giving experiences and a blending of inner and outward transformations resulting in an unintended ‘matcher’ experience. We reposition unconventional luxury as grounded in ethicality and its associated positive impacts on one's wellbeing, reflecting higher levels of personal meaning and relevance in the consumption experience

Tourists’ Emotions as a Resource for Customer Value Creation, Co-Creation and Destruction:A Customer-Grounded Understanding

Research on customer value creation in a tourism setting has tended to prioritize the firm’s over the customer’s perspective. However, new understandings of customer value through the lens of customer-dominant logic emphasize the need to consider value as emerging within the broader context of a customer’s lifeworld, which transcends customer–firm interactions and includes interactions with others. Tourism experiences are experiential and meaning-laden at the individual and collective levels. As a resource for value creation, emotions play an important but underexplored role during value-in-use and influence the tourist’s consumption experience. We provide a customer-grounded understanding of value creation as emerging and evolving over time by examining how emotions are experienced and contribute to the holistic consumption experience both intra- and intersubjectively. By demonstrating how emotions, as a customer operant resource, contribute to the process of value creation as well as value destruction, we extend our knowledge of experiential consumption practices

The magic of branding: The role of ‘pledge’, ‘turn’ and ‘prestige’ in fostering consumer trust in financial services

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of brand image on consumer trust through empirical investigation in the context of financial services sector. Whilst trust helps to bind consumers to brands, a strong brand image works like magic in reducing consumers’ risk perception and promoting trust. This study analyses how brand image influences consumers’ trusting intention through operationalising an interdisciplinary brand-trust model. Constructs and measures were drawn from interdisciplinary brand and trust literature and tested through employing EFA, CFA and structural equation modelling. Data were collected through a quantitative survey of 300 financial consumers. Using the analogy of a magic trick, the study unveils the key role of financial services branding in engendering consumer trust in the ‘pledge’ or ‘prestige’ parts of the trick but not in the ‘turn’. The research contributes to the convergent and mutually inclusive theories of trust and branding as well as services marketing literature. For managers and policy makers in the financial services sector the findings will help them to effectively manage brand image and foster consumers’ trusting intention

Trust in financial services: the influence of demographics and dispositional characteristics

So far, very little attention has been paid to examining consumer perceptions of trust from an interdisciplinary perspective. The purpose of this study is to examine how consumer trusting belief and disposition to trust within the financial services sector vary on the basis of individual demographic differences in trust. The research provides new insights into how consumers with higher dispositional trust have higher institutional trust and higher trusting belief and how consumers’ trusting belief significantly differs according to their demographic background in terms of age, marital status, ethnicity and gross annual income. The findings offer useful insights for the managers in financial institutions to carefully consider the impact of the influence of these individual differences on consumer behaviour in order to serve the needs of consumers in their target market and be able to design financial products and develop trust building strategies to attract and retain them. They also call for the action of the regulators and the financial institutions to play their part in building strong institutional systems that contribute to engendering higher levels of consumer trust

Hyperoxemia and excess oxygen use in early acute respiratory distress syndrome : Insights from the LUNG SAFE study

Publisher Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.Background: Concerns exist regarding the prevalence and impact of unnecessary oxygen use in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). We examined this issue in patients with ARDS enrolled in the Large observational study to UNderstand the Global impact of Severe Acute respiratory FailurE (LUNG SAFE) study. Methods: In this secondary analysis of the LUNG SAFE study, we wished to determine the prevalence and the outcomes associated with hyperoxemia on day 1, sustained hyperoxemia, and excessive oxygen use in patients with early ARDS. Patients who fulfilled criteria of ARDS on day 1 and day 2 of acute hypoxemic respiratory failure were categorized based on the presence of hyperoxemia (PaO2 > 100 mmHg) on day 1, sustained (i.e., present on day 1 and day 2) hyperoxemia, or excessive oxygen use (FIO2 ≥ 0.60 during hyperoxemia). Results: Of 2005 patients that met the inclusion criteria, 131 (6.5%) were hypoxemic (PaO2 < 55 mmHg), 607 (30%) had hyperoxemia on day 1, and 250 (12%) had sustained hyperoxemia. Excess FIO2 use occurred in 400 (66%) out of 607 patients with hyperoxemia. Excess FIO2 use decreased from day 1 to day 2 of ARDS, with most hyperoxemic patients on day 2 receiving relatively low FIO2. Multivariate analyses found no independent relationship between day 1 hyperoxemia, sustained hyperoxemia, or excess FIO2 use and adverse clinical outcomes. Mortality was 42% in patients with excess FIO2 use, compared to 39% in a propensity-matched sample of normoxemic (PaO2 55-100 mmHg) patients (P = 0.47). Conclusions: Hyperoxemia and excess oxygen use are both prevalent in early ARDS but are most often non-sustained. No relationship was found between hyperoxemia or excessive oxygen use and patient outcome in this cohort. Trial registration: LUNG-SAFE is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02010073publishersversionPeer reviewe

An immune dysfunction score for stratification of patients with acute infection based on whole-blood gene expression

Dysregulated host responses to infection can lead to organ dysfunction and sepsis, causing millions of global deaths each year. To alleviate this burden, improved prognostication and biomarkers of response are urgently needed. We investigated the use of whole-blood transcriptomics for stratification of patients with severe infection by integrating data from 3149 samples from patients with sepsis due to community-acquired pneumonia or fecal peritonitis admitted to intensive care and healthy individuals into a gene expression reference map. We used this map to derive a quantitative sepsis response signature (SRSq) score reflective of immune dysfunction and predictive of clinical outcomes, which can be estimated using a 7- or 12-gene signature. Last, we built a machine learning framework, SepstratifieR, to deploy SRSq in adult and pediatric bacterial and viral sepsis, H1N1 influenza, and COVID-19, demonstrating clinically relevant stratification across diseases and revealing some of the physiological alterations linking immune dysregulation to mortality. Our method enables early identification of individuals with dysfunctional immune profiles, bringing us closer to precision medicine in infection.peer-reviewe

A blood atlas of COVID-19 defines hallmarks of disease severity and specificity.

Treatment of severe COVID-19 is currently limited by clinical heterogeneity and incomplete description of specific immune biomarkers. We present here a comprehensive multi-omic blood atlas for patients with varying COVID-19 severity in an integrated comparison with influenza and sepsis patients versus healthy volunteers. We identify immune signatures and correlates of host response. Hallmarks of disease severity involved cells, their inflammatory mediators and networks, including progenitor cells and specific myeloid and lymphocyte subsets, features of the immune repertoire, acute phase response, metabolism, and coagulation. Persisting immune activation involving AP-1/p38MAPK was a specific feature of COVID-19. The plasma proteome enabled sub-phenotyping into patient clusters, predictive of severity and outcome. Systems-based integrative analyses including tensor and matrix decomposition of all modalities revealed feature groupings linked with severity and specificity compared to influenza and sepsis. Our approach and blood atlas will support future drug development, clinical trial design, and personalized medicine approaches for COVID-19