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Everyday users of professional networks such as LinkedIn are flooded by posts presenting the achievements of their connections (e.g. I got a new job/award). The present research takes a self-discrepancy perspective to examine the mixed-emotional and behavioral consequences of viewing such idealized self-promotional content on professional networks.

The emotional and behavioral consequences following viewership of idealized self-promotional content on LinkedIn are explored through one pilot study (N = 109) and one online experiment (N = 714), which is evaluated using structural equation modeling.

Viewership of idealized self-promotional content on professional social networking sites acts as an emotional double-edged sword for LinkedIn users. Users feel both dejection and symhedonia (i.e. happiness for others), dependent on their reported career-based self-discrepancy. We find the experience of symhedonia to be bound by the relational closeness of the poster (acquaintance vs close friend). Furthermore, we show how resultant emotions drive self-regulatory compensatory IT-use behaviors (i.e. direct resolution, fluid compensation, dissociation, and escapism).

We offer four distinct contributions. Firstly, we disentangle inconsistent findings of mixed emotions by introducing symhedonia to IT literature. Secondly, we investigate the boundary condition of relational closeness. Thirdly, we extend our findings by investigating compensatory-consumption behaviors that stem from mixed-affective outcomes. Finally, we do so in the context of professional networks, which are greatly understudied and are distinctive from personal networks. Practical implications are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to understand the effect of increasing the intensity of sexual or violent content on consumer responses to online video advertisements, with a particular emphasis on sharing intentions.

The paper uses a between-subjects experimental design across two studies using new to the world online video advertisements as stimuli.

Study 1 finds that increasing the intensity of sexual and violent humor improves advertisement effectiveness amongst men but leads to significantly more negative attitudes toward the advertisement and brand amongst women. Study 2 identifies gender and humor type as moderators for sharing intentions in the presence of audience diversity. While men are more likely to publicly share sexual and violent humor advertisements, social anxiety mediates intentions to share sexual humor advertisements in the presence of greater audience diversity.

The paper offers insights to practitioners regarding the use of risqué forms of humor as part of a digital marketing strategy.

Drawing on and extending benign violation theory, the paper introduces and verifies a theoretical model for understanding consumer responses to the use of risqué forms of humor in online advertisements. It identifies how audience diversity affects sharing intentions for sexual and violent humor-based advertisements on social media.

Augmented reality (AR) has emerged as a new interactive technology, swiftly transforming the field of marketing. Driven by its rapid uptake in marketing practices, academic research on AR has proliferated. This study aims to offer a holistic view of the past, present and future of augmented reality marketing (ARM) scholarship by analyzing its current and evolving research profile as well as its social and conceptual structures to inspire further research.

This study enriches the ARM scholarship by integrating a quantitative bibliometric analysis with a chronological-thematic review and a qualitative content analysis to develop a more comprehensive understanding of this novel area and suggest future research courses.

The bibliometric analysis reveals the key performance indicators as well as the social and conceptual structure of the ARM research field. The chronological-thematic review exhibits the advancement of ARM research over time and forecasts the emerging trends for the domain. Finally, the content analysis of recent articles reveals the current research hotspots and provides future research directions.

The database limits the selection of literature, as the information in databases such as Scopus is updated regularly, resulting in alterations in the number of articles and citations.

AR developers and brand managers may use this study’s findings to understand the current ARM landscape better and make strategic decisions based on AR adoption and consumption patterns.

This study is singular in using a mixed methods approach by integrating the findings from bibliometric and content analyses for more reliable results and to offer a holistic perspective of the ARM sector, thereby significantly advancing the field of technology-led marketing.

The present study aims to examine whether leisure time posts shared on WhatsApp status drive to travel and tourism consumption among users.

In this study, discriminant analysis was employed to test hypotheses and identify essential factors.

The study indicated that the eight most contributing factors are expressing happiness, planning leisure time, views and comments, attractiveness, inquiring about places, preferring to post, nice way of expression and relax. These factors came from the latent variables of attitude, motivation and self-expression. Overall, the main influencing factors are internal (attitude and motivation), followed by an external factor i.e. self-expression. Additionally, the findings indicated that these significantly and positively impact travel and tourism consumption.

The discriminators identified in the study would guide tour and travel agencies and the agencies' managers on how best to adopt WhatsApp and WhatsApp's status application to influence aspiring travelers.

This study enlarges the existing literature by integrating three factors, attitude, motivation and self-expression, into a model to influence the behavioral outcomes of aspirational travelers using WhatsApp status.

Conceptual and empirical research over the past 20 years has moved the social media (SM) literature beyond the embryotic stage to a well-developed academic discipline. As the lead article in the special issue in the Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing on Cutting-Edge Research in Social Media and Interactive Marketing, this review and agenda article has two key goals: (1) to review key SM and interactive marketing research over the past three years and (2) to identify the next wave of high priority challenges and research opportunities.

Given the “cutting-edge” research focus of the special issue, this review and research agenda paper focused on articles published in 25 key marketing journals between January 2021 and March 2024. Initially, the search request was for articles with “social media, social selling, social commerce” located in the article title, author-selected key words and journal-selected keywords. Later, we conducted searches based on terminology from articles presented in the final review. In total, over 1,000 articles were reviewed across the 25 journals, plus additional ones that were cited in those journals that were not on the initial list.

Our review uncovered eight key content areas: (1) data sources, methodology and scale development; (2) emergent SM technologies; (3) artificial intelligence; (4) virtual reality; (5) sales and sales management; (6) consumer welfare; (7) influencer marketing; and (8) social commerce. Table I provides a summer of key articles and research findings for each of the content areas.

As a literature review and research agenda article, this paper is one of the most extensive to date on SM marketing, and particularly with regard to emergent research over the past three years. Recommendations for future research are integrated through the paper and summarized in Figure 2.

Consumer welfare is one of the eight emergent content areas uncovered in the literature review. Specific focus is on SM privacy, misinformation, mental health and misbehavior.

Acknowledging previous scholarly focus on functional attributes in understanding technology acceptance behaviour, the current study aims to offer a novel perspective by integrating eight different dimensions of utilitarian and hedonic attributes to examine their influence in delivering a holistic web-based retail shopping experience.

The research model was tested and validated through data collected from 370 online shoppers across both hedonic and utilitarian product ranges. Hypotheses were tested using covariance-based structural equation modelling with multi-group analysis to examine the moderation effect.

The findings strongly support the model confirming eight new utilitarian and hedonic dimensions that influence web-based retail shopping behaviour. The findings also confirm that hedonic attributes remain important even for utilitarian product purchasing.

The key managerial implication is the demonstrated need to balance utilitarian and hedonic attributes in web-based retail platforms, where previously, there has been an overemphasis on functional features. Web-based retailers should consider the optimal blend of utilitarian (e.g. information quality) and hedonic (e.g. aesthetic) attributes in the design of a retail shopping site, irrespective of the product category.

This study integrates multiple dimensions of utilitarian and hedonic attributes into a single model and highlights the interplay of these attributes, thus extending the technology acceptance model. This paper also advances scholarship through its identification of attribute impact across different product categories.

The “what is beautiful is good” (WIBIG) effect implies that observers tend to perceive physically attractive people in a positive light. The authors investigate how the WIBIG effect applies to user personas, measuring designers' perceptions and task performance when employing user personas for the design of information technology (IT) solutions.

In a user experiment, the authors tested six different personas with 235 participants that were asked to develop remote work solutions based on their interaction with a fictitious user persona.

The findings showed that a user persona's perceived attractiveness was positively correlated with other perceptions of the persona. The personas' completeness, credibility, empathy, likability and usefulness increased with attractiveness. More attractive personas were also perceived as more agreeable, emotionally stable, extraverted and open, and the participants spent more time engaging with personas they perceived attractive. A linguistic analysis indicated that the IT solutions created for more attractive user personas demonstrated a higher degree of affect, but for the most part, task outputs did not vary by the personas' perceived attractiveness.

The WIBIG effect applies when designing IT solutions with user personas, but its effect on task outputs appears limited. The perceived attractiveness of a user persona can impact how designers interact with and engage with the persona, which can influence the quality or the type of the IT solutions created based on the persona. Also, the findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction.

The findings point to the need to incorporate hedonic qualities into the persona creation process. For example, there may be contexts where it is helpful that the personas be attractive; there may be contexts where the attractiveness of the personas is unimportant or even a distraction.

Because personas are created to closely resemble real people, the authors might expect the WIBIG effect to apply. The WIBIG effect might lead decision makers to favor more attractive personas when designing IT solutions. However, despite its potential relevance for decision making with personas, as far as the authors know, no prior study has investigated whether the WIBIG effect extends to the context of personas. Overall, it is important to understand how human factors apply to IT system design with personas, so that the personas can be created to minimize potentially detrimental effects as much as possible.