Romantic experience is a positive emotional experience that significantly impacts people's lives and consumption behaviors. However, the extant research merely conceptualizes romantic experiences as intimate relationships between lovers, which limits the research on how romantic experiences influence consumers' choices. This study extends the concept beyond romantic love by addressing generalized romantic experiences in a broader sense. Four experiments show that romantic experiences (vs. neutral experiences)increase consumers' preference for self-improvement featured products, even in areas not related to the initial romantic stimuli(Study 1). This greater inclination for self-improvement products ismediated by a heightened sense of meaning in life(Studies 2 and 3). Happiness orientation plays a moderating role in the influence of romantic experience on the meaning in life and preference for self-improvement products(Study 4). Theoretically, this paper expands the concept of romantic experience and enriches the research on the influence of romantic experience on consumer choice and the research on the emotional antecedents of self-improvement products. In practice, this paper provides suggestions and guidance for romantic marketing and the promotion of self-improvement products.

Whereas the traditional focus in Word-of-Mouth (WOM) literature has been on understanding how WOM of a movie influence the box office of its own, this research investigates the impact of WOM on box office in a dynamic competitive view. We propose that movies released in the same schedule compete with each other dynamically, thus the box office of a movie not only depends on the WOM of its own, but also relates to the WOM of peer movies’ in the same schedule. Using box office and WOM data of 780 movies during 2011-2014 in mainland china, we found that the gap between a focal movie’s WOM valence and the highest WOM valence in the same schedule has a negative impact on the box office of the focal movie. Moreover, this effect is moderated by the number of movies in the schedule and the season the movie is released (whether it’s high season or not). The marketing strategy is discussed as well based on these findings.

Cause-related marketing as a form of corporate social responsibility has grown exponentially in the last 40 years. Existing research on cause-related marketing has mainly focused onits effectiveness by exploring the components and advertising factors that influence consumers participation intention, with less attention paid to the donation feedback. The development of digital technology has enabled more and more companies to conduct donation feedback to consumers. Based on social dentity theory and elaboration likelihood model, this article explored the interaction effect of cause-related marketing feedback framing and self-construal, internal mechanism and boundary conditions. With two experimental studies, we found that individual feedback(aggregate feedback)could induce independent (interdependent)consumers more positive attitude toward company. This is because the matching between feedback framing and self-construal could induce higher consumer-company dentification. However, this matching effect was only supported for high cause involvement, but not for low cause involvement. By focusing for the first time on the cause-related marketing's donation feedback, this study develops new research perspective of cause-related marketing and enriches feedback framing's research context and theoretical connotation. This research also offers practical insights to managers on how to design and execute donation feedback communication for cause-related marketing campaign.

Nostalgia has a significant influence on consumption behavior. In previous studies, most researches took nostalgia as an element of advertisements or brands, which meant that the emotion of nostalgia was triggered by nostalgic advertisements or brands. Different from the past researches, this paper took nostalgia as an independent emotion which was not caused by the advertisements or products (termed incidental emotion) and investigated how it affected consumers’ decisions. To be specific, this research studied how nostalgia affects Chinese consumers’ evaluation of domestic and foreign brands through two experiments. The result indicated that nostalgia cannot elevate Chinese consumers’ evaluation of domestic brands, but it can weaken the evaluation of foreign brands by decreasing the consumers’ materialism. Lastly, the author discussed nostalgia strategies for both Chinese and foreign brands learnt from the result.

Luxurious brands consumption in China is featured by clear conspicuous purposes. This research investigated the phenomenon from the indigenous perspective of social face consciousness. Drawing on Ho’s (1976) framework of gaining versus losing face dynamics, the authors broke down the construct of face consciousness into two dimensions of “desire to gain face” and “fear of losing face”, and developed measurement scales for them. The two scales were then used to examine their effect on conspicuous luxurious brand consumption behavior and found both of them had unique contribution in explaining why Chinese consumers buy luxurious brands.

This paper carries out a research by content analysis on 247 academic papers published in the Journal of Marketing during the year of 2005-2009, with a purpose to describe the subjects, methods and scholars of Western marketing research. The findings are as following: the main subjects that Western marketing research focuses on are consumer behavior, products, brands, marketing general management, industrial marketing, advertising and promotion, services marketing, and network marketing, Among which research on the general marketing management, products, brands, industrial marketing, network marketing have an escalating trend, and adverse on the prices and marketing channels, and the subjects on consumer behavior and services marketing remain to be the focus of marketing research. As for research methods of marketing, quantitative research keeps dominated and are used in such marketing research domain as brand, product and personal selling, the experimental method has been more widely used to study consumer behaviors, prices, advertising and promotion, the qualitative research and mixed research are seldom used, the former is used in industrial marketing, general marketing management, and the latter focus on the subject of marketing theory and philosophy. In addition, there exists a diversified form of cooperation among marketing scholars, which includes scholars’ cooperation in a university, among different universities, between university and business and among different counties.

The digitalization has brought big changes to the economic society, namely, virtualization of market players, digitization of factors of production, dynamization of the production process and platformization of market organizations. These four features of digitalization have further reconstructed the real management world, resulting in disruptive changes of internal and external relationships between organizations, and the underlying logics of production and operation. The nature of marketing is to answer how to solve the interactive relationship between the supplier and the consumer in the best way to realize the value co-creation. Obviously, digital technology is disrupting the traditional interactive relationship, which greatly weakens the effectiveness of the 4P and 4C marketing matrix. Therefore, we are intended to put forward the 4I (Interaction, Interest, Interface, Iteration) framework to reconstruct the marketing matrix in the age of digital intelligence. Finally, we offer some future topics of marketing strategy research and the new development direction of the discipline.

Ecological governance requires not only the joint efforts of the government and enterprises, but also the internal recognition and active participation of the public. It has attracted the attention of researchers that the emergence of online environmental gamification applications represented by“Ant Forest”which has made positive practical exploration to improve the publie's environmental literacy and to strengthen the consciousness of integration of knowledge and action. How to guide game users to change from online environmental protection game behavior to ofline pro-environmental behavior has become an important issue that needs to be further explored. Based on the theories of norm-activation and self-regulation, we construct a structure model to demonstrate the transformation mechanism from users' online game participation to ofline pro-environmental behavior and the moderating effect of hedonic experience. The research findings show that online environmental-protection games facilitate the transition from online to offline pro-environmental behaviors by initilly enhancing users' knowledge of environment(environmental threat perception), which subsequently activates their sense of moral responsibility(personal norms). However, hedonic experience weakens the positive effect of game participation on users' environmental threat perception and on the pro-environmental behavior. The research reveals and veriffies the potential negative effects of gamification on pro-environmental behavior, which provides a new theoretical research perspective for understanding and improving digital green behavior intervention, and offers useful practical enlightenment for enterprises to improve gamification platforms.

Based on attribution theory, this paper empirically analyses the relationship between consumer perception of a firm’s motives for sport sponsorship and purchase intention by using structural equation model. The study reveals that consumer can clearly distinguish egoistic-driven, values-driven, strategic-driven and stakeholder-driven motives of sponsorship. Thereinto, egoistic-driven and stakeholder-driven motives have significantly negative influence on consumers' trust and purchase intention, while values-driven and strategic-driven motives have significantly positive influence on consumers' trust and purchase intention. Further, consumer trust plays a partial mediating role in the impact of a firm’s motives for sports sponsorship on purchase intention. Finally, the paper analyses the impact of consumers’ characteristics and corporate types on consumers’ attribution, and gives some suggestions about sponsoring marketing for the managers.

This research investigates the effect of social crowdingon shape preference and the underlying mechanism thereof. Across five experiments, the research demonstrates that individuals who are socially crowded prefer circular shapes to angular shapes. Such effect is driven by consumers' needs for vitality, specifically, social crowding increases the needs for vitality, which subsequently makes consumers prefer circular shapes as they are related to vitality in consumers' minds. We also examine the moderating role of composition of the crowd, namely the effect of social erowding on shape preference will attenuate for a crowd composed of in-group(vs. out-group)members. This research enriches the literature on social crowding and shape preference in consumption, and provides managerial implications forbrands and products.

The globalization of time-honored brands is an important strategy to build a global brand and enhance China's cultural soft power. The unique cultural resources of time-honored brands are conductive to establishing differentiated market positioning and enhancing brand image in the international market. Based on the perspective of intercultural communication, this paper constructs a theoretical model of the globalization of time-honored brands that is evolving in stages. Thecase study based on Tongrentang shows that:(1)In different stages ofbrand globalization, implementing corresponding intercultural communication strategies based on brand cultural positioning is an effective path to gradually realize the globalization of time-honored brands. (2)According to different stages of brand globalization, time-honored brands should adjust the brand cultural positioning, which can be achieved by combining the target customer range, needs, and available cultural resources to upgrade the brand cultural positioning from the functional, experiential to meaningful. (3)The staged strategies for time-honored brands to implement intercultural communication include:amplifying the advantages ofproducts/services to gain brand product recognition in the building stage of brand globalization; bridging national and foreign cultures to establish brand likability in the expanding stage of brand globalization; extending the brand's additional social and cultural value for global consumers to achieve global brand cultural identity in the mature stage of brand globalization. Differentiated intercultural communication strategies at different stages are the key means to promote the phased upgrade of time-honored brands.

Based on the data on 898 films released in China between September 2014 to December 2017 from China Box Office（www.cbooo.cn），we examine the relationship between the intensity of event marketing and movie box office revenue. The results show that：（1）Event marketing promotes the box office revenue of the movie in general. As the intensity of event marketing increases，the box office revenue increases first and then decreases，showing an inverted U-shape relationship.（2）Some attributes of the movie，like sequel film or imported film，positively impact the movie box office revenue but reduce the effectiveness of event marketing.（3）The appropriate timing for event marketing is the 4th and the 6th week before release and the 2nd week after release. Each additional event marketing can increase the box office revenue by up to 59%.（4）The most favorable type of event marketing is theme song，followed by premiere，meeting，specials，posters，conferences，trailers，and other types of event marketing are not significant.

In recent years, the application of AI-based robot services in the hotel industry has been on the rise, attracting widespread attention. However, existing research on how robot services affect consumer satisfaction has presented conflicting conclusions, and the academic community has not yet deeply explored the relationship between robot services in dfferent scenarios and consumer satisfaction from the perspective of asymmetrical impacts. This study mined consumer review data from China's first fully automated robot service hotel from 2018 to 2022, exploring the asymmetrical impact ofhotel robot services on consumer satisfaction in different scenarios based on the three-factor theory and complexity theory. Through dummy variable regression analysis, this paper identified that robot services in the hotel's alternative service scenarios are the basic factors for consumer satisfaction, those in the enhancement service scenarios are performance factors, while those in the innovative service scenariosare motivational factors. Moreover, using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA), this study fur- ther revealed the configurations of robot services in different scenarios leading to high(low)levels of eonsumer satisfaction, further validating the research results of the dummy variable regresion analysis. The study's conclusions enrich the literature on service scenarios and service satisfaction in the field of robot services and provide practical guidance for the hotel industry to reasonably allocate robot services to enhance consumer satisfaction

Using critical incident technique (CIT) and grounded theory, this paper explores the fellow customers’ reaction to customer misbehavior. Through in-depth interview, 232 customer misbehavior incidents are collected, and then CIT is used to categorize fellow customers' reaction patterns. Based on this, this paper discovers the antecedents of different reaction patterns. The finding suggests five types of fellow customers’ reaction patterns: helping the jaycustomer, mimicking the misbehavior, looking on indifferently, stopping the misbehavior, and giving himself up to help others. Five reaction patterns are quite different in frequency, motive, performance, and influence on five involved agents. The features of jaycustomer, focal customer, other fellow customers, employee and firm, will determine the choice of focal customer, through the intermediary effect of two mediator variables, that is, expectation of interaction consequence, and judgment on interaction responsibility. From the perspective of fellow customers' interaction, this paper not only enriches the literatures on customer misbehavior, but also provides managerial implication for customer misbehavior management and employee training program.

This research examines the effect of success and failure results on consumers’ risk preference. Using different manipulations of success and failure and different measurements of risk preference tendency, five experiments were conducted to demonstrate that a clear success increases consumers’ sense of power, which in turn raises their subsequent risk preference; a clear failure, however, decreases consumers’ sense of power, which in turn reduces their subsequent risk preference. Furthermore, a close result can moderate this effect; that is, the difference between narrow-winners and narrow-losers’ risk preference is weakened. This study further enriches the research about the impact of success or failure on individual’s behavior, and provides suggestions on how to use the results of online and offline competitions to carry out marketing activities.

Consumers’ willingness to pay is an important part of the market research. Taking organic food for example, this paper analyzed and compared the main data acquisition methods of consumers’ willingness to pay, such as contingent valuation method, choice experiment, conjoint analysis and experimental auctions and the main data processing approaches such as discrete choice model and Tobit model. And then the paper investigated the main factors affecting the consumers’ willingness to pay and did a systematic summary. In the end, the future research emphasis was presented based on the evaluation and analysis of the existing relative research.

As a new participative pricing mechanism, PWYW pricing delegates the whole price determination to consumers. Previous empirical research has showed that PWYW pricing increases sellers’ profits, even when consumers can self-determine the price, which conflicts with the basic assumption of economic man in traditional economics. Thus, some other drivers must play a role when the PWYW price is determined. Based on social preference theory, we study the influences of altruism, fairness, reciprocity, sense of guilt and price consciousness on consumers willingness to pay under PWYW pricing mechanism, the study show that reciprocity, fairness and price consciousness have a positive impact on consumer’s willingness to pay, besides, these impacts are moderated by the way of transactions.