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The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of emotions that consumers experience following service failures and to assess the effects of each of these emotions on important behavioral outcomes.

This paper extends the work of Wetzer et al. (2007) and draws upon the existing literature to test a series of research hypotheses tying emotions to four important behavioral outcomes primarily using stepwise regression.

When a service failure occurs, customers experience any of a variety of negative emotions. The effect on behavioral outcomes depends on the specific emotion experienced by the consumer. The current research, which benefits by using retrospective experience sampling, finds that frustration is the predominant emotion experienced by customers following service failure, but that anger, regret and frustration affect behavioral outcomes. Uncertainty also plays a role.

Future research should investigate the antecedents of propensity for emotions and predisposition toward industries, as well as the consequences of word-of-mouth (WOM) praise and WOM activity. Additionally, emotions could be examined by service stage. Several other moderators could be investigated, including severity, complaining behavior, repeat occurrence, service importance, remedies and forgiveness, product vs process failures, tenure, gender and age.

The current research emphasizes the importance of understanding which emotion is being experienced by a customer following service failure to identify the behavioral outcomes that will be most impacted. The specific managerial implications depend upon the specific emotional response experienced by the customer and are discussed separately for anger, regret and frustration. Service personnel must be trained to recognize and address specific customer emotions rather than to provide a canned or generalized response.

To date, there has been little, if any, systematic research into the effects of multiple discrete negative emotions on multiple desirable behavioral outcomes. The current study examines six discrete emotions. Predominant emotions are differentiated from emotional intensity. The behavioral outcomes of reconciliation and reduced share-of-wallet are added to the traditional outcomes of repatronage intentions and negative WOM. While existing research tends to rely on a scenario approach, this study uses the retrospective experience sampling method. The authors distinguish between mixed emotions and multiple emotions. The relative effects of disappointment and regret are examined for each of the four outcomes. Finally, importance-performance map analysis was applied to the findings to prioritize managerial attention. Numerous managerial and research implications are identified.

Most research has investigated the fear of missing out (FOMO) in the context of online activities, often associated with negative personal outcomes such as fatigue and stress. However, given the increased desire to be informed and included associated with FOMO, organizations that can effectively meet these needs may develop or strengthen social and structural bonds, thereby turning short-term customers with FOMO into lifelong patrons. This study aims to examine the relationship between FOMO and favorable organizational outcomes as mediated by several constructs associated with the desire for information and inclusion.

This research was conducted within the higher education sector of the service industry. FOMO served as the IV. The mediators represented context-specific aspects of campus involvement and inclusion. Organizational outcomes related to the long-term services relationship served as the DVs. The sample consisted of 435 students recruited from research pools at two southern universities in the USA. Exploratory factor analysis, OLS regression and the Hayes–Macro were used to examine the data.

The results demonstrate that FOMO is positively associated with students’ desires for information and inclusion (informal peer interaction, campus involvement, informal faculty interaction, campus information media use and a preference for in-person course scheduling), which are associated with the desirable university outcomes of satisfaction, connection and alumni donation/activity intentions.

If a university fosters unstructured time spent with faculty and peers, and promotes campus information media involvement, students with higher levels of FOMO are more likely to be satisfied, feel connected to the university and report intentions to donate time and money as alumni.

Prior research on FOMO is generally focused on internet and social media use; this study takes a broader perspective and identifies the effect of FOMO on a desire for information and inclusion within a novel context (a service environment). It also associates FOMO with favorable long-term service relationship outcomes that fortify social and structural bonds.

The emergence of the Internet and its communication capabilities has given rise to a number of complaint sites that function as central forums for consumers to share their bad experiences with other consumers. Companies are reacting by adopting anti‐domain sites in an attempt to prevent the creation of such complaint forums. Data from one complaint forum are analyzed to identify the nature of the complaints, whether the complaints were initially voiced to contact personnel, what other attempts were made to resolve the problem, whether the Internet consumer complaint forum was the initial method used for complaining, the responsiveness of the company to non‐Internet complaints as well as Internet complaints, and the demographics of complainers using the Internet complaint forum. The suggestion is made that companies should embrace consumer complaints, and compete with the independent complaint forums (rather than try to block them) on the basis of ease of the complaint process and the likelihood of response. Recommendations are offered that are specific to Internet use and benefits to the company are described.

The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the role of emotions that consumers experience as a result of assigning causal attributions to service failures. The secondary purpose is to consider the effects of each of these emotions on behavioral outcomes.

This paper extends the work of Wetzer, Zeelenberg, and Pieters regarding emotions and draws upon the existing literature to present a series of research propositions tying attributions to emotions and emotions to behavioral outcomes.

When a service failure occurs, customers experience any of a variety of negative emotions. The particular emotional reaction depends on the customer's perception of why the service failure occurred in the first place. Behavioral outcomes associated with service recovery therefore depend directly on the negative emotion and indirectly on the customer's perception of the cause.

To the extent that marketing managers can frame the cause of the service failure in their post‐failure communications, recovery satisfaction may be increased leading, in turn, to more positive customer response outcomes. The specific managerial implications depend upon the emotional response experienced by the customer.

Research to date looking at causal attributions in service failure is limited to attributions based on stability and controllability and ties them to very few emotions; this paper identifies six attributions and ties each to a specific emotion. The behavioral outcomes of reconciliation and share‐of‐wallet are added to the traditional outcomes of repatronage intentions and negative word‐of‐mouth.

Asks whether service provider nationality significantly influences consumer decision making and, if so, whether the influence of national stereotype is moderated by the presence of additional information, such as professional credentials or service availability, or by the consumer′s nationality. Identifies a significant three‐way interaction effect involving provider nationality, supplemental advertising information and consumer nationality.

Research identifies nearly 73 million adult Americans as illiterate. Analysis of social, economic and demographic trends indicates that the situation will worsen before it improves. Marketing communications copy prepared at an eighth grade reading level or above may not be comprehended by as much as one‐third of the population, resulting in a severe loss of potential sales and excessive advertising expense. Marketing research to date focusses on the impact of message, source, and channel variables on consumer behavior. However, the current “illiteracy crisis” argues that we reform our thinking ti consider how consumer literacy should influence our message, source, and channel determinations. Key tasks for marketers include evaluating the clarity, readability and specificity of promotional materials; pretesting the marketing communication on a sample of the target audience; and carefully assessing all options available for source and channel selection.

With gaining popularity, online communities are increasing. It is leading to the data and information overflow. So, there are some challenges like cyber frauds, cyberbullying, etc. while engaging with online communities. Not only this, anonymity of the participants, stress and racism are also big challenges in online communities' interaction. Online harassers' attack tactics have changed over time. In addition, there are challenges like quality of discussion, inequality in participation of the users, etc. may scale online communities towards incitement and activism. Therefore, this study will try to analyse these challenges for overall benefit of the society.

The underlying fuzzy set theory is employed to handle the fuzziness of users' perceptions since the attributes are expressed in linguistic preferences. Through exhaustive literature review, the authors have identified 15 challenges. These challenges are further categorised as cause and effect by using DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) approach.

Lack of strategic planning and uninspired discussions between users has emerged as a major challenge in cause category. This study further demonstrates how individual challenge can be managed and developed to navigate the online communities to maintain a healthy environment in society.

Results are based on limited dataset. Therefore, findings cannot be generalised for all online communities.

The research findings offer a suitable direction to policymakers to formulate and design policies, laws and regulations to increase user engagement in the online community. The study is beneficial to firms and researchers in understanding the factors influencing effective management of online communities.

Although consumer sophistication and empowerment is on the rise as a result of the digital revolution, there is insufficient academic exploration with the aim of understanding how this empowerment functions on the internet. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by proposing a new conceptual model in light of available literature.

The paper employs a deep and broad literature review and discussion regarding possible consumer power sources on the internet to develop the proposed conceptual model, which is defined as consumer empowerment model (CEM). The components of the model are discussed in detail to reveal possible links, consumer empowerment actualization, and impacts on consumer markets on the internet.

The components of CEM are structured in light of the theory of reasoned action's main proposals as follows: “Perceived consumer power,” “Perceived consumer trust,” “Attitudinal consumer power” and finally “Behavioral consumer power.” Each component is discussed in terms of its possible contributions to the model in order to illustrate how this new form of consumer power actually works. The possible implications of consumer empowerment are also discussed in light of the newly proposed model.

There is no paper discussing how consumer power actualization works and thus how consumer power revolutionizes today's cyberspaces. In this context, the study is the first of its kind.

This study examined how audience characteristics and attitudes relate to their perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness of apologies by public figures posted on YouTube.

Four hundred twenty-seven adult participants recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk completed an online survey via Qualtrics. Participants were randomly assigned to view two of four public figure apologies posted on YouTube.

Results indicated that audience fandom and perceived reputation and attractiveness of the public figure were related to perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness; and perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness were related to intentions of future support.

“Sameness” between the public figure and audience did not garner a more favorable response to the apology, and this is not consistent with earlier studies. For race similarity, the results could have been a reflection of the low number of non-White participants. However, results could indicate that “sameness” is not as simplistic as demographic sameness, such as race, sex or age.

The authors’ findings elevate the importance of gathering and benchmarking pre-crisis attitudinal research to better equip and inform communication professionals for crisis response. In addition, the study suggests that a public figure's strong reputation and fanbase provide a type of inoculation, lessening reputational damage.

The finding that perceived attractiveness relates positively to perceptions of sincerity and forgiveness is consistent with psychological research indicating attractiveness has many positive social implications – even in mediated communication.

Evidence suggests social media apologies matter. Communication professionals need to approach apology opportunities with a keen awareness that relational outcomes and intentions of future support can shift based on social media audiences' attitudes related to the public figure.

Although more than 30 years of research has established the power of word‐of‐mouth (WOM), little work has focused on how it could be managed more effectively. This study examines how incentives would work to actively encourage WOM, and how incentives would potentially interact with other variables that have been shown to drive WOM. In particular, a 3 × 3 × 2 experiment was conducted to examine the impact of incentives, tie‐strength, and satisfaction on WOM behavior. Consumer deal proneness was investigated using a quasi‐experimental design. Suggests from the findings that satisfaction does not necessarily increase the likelihood of WOM being generated. Shows incentives to be an effective catalyst to increase the likelihood of WOM being generated by satisfied consumers and tie strength to be an important variable in explaining WOM behavior. Suggests from the findings that deal prone consumers generate more WOM, independent of incentives. The findings have important implications, and suggest that satisfied customers are a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting positive WOM, and that incentives may be an effective way to get satisfied customers to recommend a firm. Furthermore, incentive programs targeted at strong ties are likely to be more effective than those targeted at weak ties, provided customers are genuinely happy with the service provided.