Learning outcomes

The learning outcomes of this paper is as follows: to strategically evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, threats and resulting opportunities that face an entrepreneurial startup. To apply the academic principle of competitiveness and evaluate the competitive advantage of the business and its competitors through the application of Porter’s five forces model. To evaluate the contextual tensions that entrepreneurial ventures face, and how these affect the growth of a sustainable business. To develop the skills to create a target market analysis by using segmentation, targeting and positioning principles. To evaluate the best strategic actions to grow a business through the lens of sustainable entrepreneurship, by using principles such as the triple bottom line and people, opportunity, context and deal and framework.

Case overview/synopsis

The case looks at business challenges faced by an entrepreneur, Renshia Manuel, the CEO of GrowBox, as she attempts to balance the profitability and social impact of her venture in Cape Town, South Africa. GrowBox sells customisable self-contained wooden boxes equipped with all materials to grow a variety of vegetables and herbs for consumers. Large volumes of boxes are often purchased by corporate clients who donated these to lower-income communities as part of their social responsibility projects. Additional landscaping and food-scaping services make up another revenue stream of the business. The case study documents the conception of GrowBox in 2016 and the growth of the business in the first four years of operation. The theft of equipment, and difficulty in recruiting and retaining staff due to the volatile social climate of where the business was situated, have put the business under great financial pressure and reduced the efficiency of business processes. The case highlights a number of the harsh realities of sustainable entrepreneurship where both profitability and social impact are vitally important to ensure business sustainability. The case dilemma involves the choices faced by Renshia at the beginning of 2020 regarding the future, sustainable growth of the business.

Complexity academic level

The target audience for this teaching case is primarily business students at a postgraduate level, particularly those studying in the fields of sustainable entrepreneurship and social development, as well as marketing in emerging markets. This teaching case is intended to be used as a case study in postgraduate business programmes such as postgraduate diplomas in management, specialist Masters programmes such as those focussed on entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship or social development, as well as those studying a Master of Business Administration or related executive education programme.

Supplementary materials

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

This research investigates how employer branding can be strengthened by taking a business ecosystem approach that encourages and leverages indirect social exchanges, such as the behaviour of paying it forward. This work is founded on extant literature and exploratory interviews with individuals from firms seeking to strengthen their employer brand by interdependently operating in a business ecosystem. A model is developed that proposes how indirect social exchanges can occur in an ecosystem, and what types of outcomes it can lead to for the individuals, firms and the ecosystem as a whole. As far as can be ascertained, this is the first study that combines these perspectives. The work suggests that there is value for firms in taking an ecosystem-focused approach to employer branding. The findings highlight that indirect or generalized social exchanges can provide value for individual firms when they form a group of interdependent collaborators rather than simply being competitors. Further, this work adds to the literature related to employee and partner extra-role behaviour by proposing the perspective of an Ecosystem Citizenship Behaviour. Ecosystem Citizenship Behaviour is an extra-role behaviour that occurs in the business ecosystem and as such can be beneficial for joint employer branding initiatives of participating firms.

Kindness can strengthen your employer brand. The business environment is changing, and the value of kindness in the corporate world is garnering increased attention. Paying it forward is a way to pass acts of kindness on to others. This allows employees and business partners to go above and beyond formal expectations that not only benefit the individuals involved but also the businesses they represent. Paying it forward can potentially create competitive advantage for firms from an employer branding perspective (to attract and retain talent) and in the broader market sense. This behavior can strengthen the employer brand in numerous and effective ways, and managers must understand, engage in, and encourage such conduct. In this article, we discuss different examples, benefits, and risks of paying kindness forward on a micro-, meso-, and macro-level. After providing this foundation, we introduce practical guidelines for managers on how to foster a paying-it-forward mindset among employees and the broader organization. The guidelines were created using insights from interviews we conducted with stakeholders in a business ecosystem in northern Sweden.

Marketers play an integral part in the strategic planning process of a firm, both concerning the role of marketing in the strategic discourse, as well as the marketers’ interaction between various levels of hierarchy within an organization. The top management team (TMT) formulates strategic decision and influences the implementation of tactical approaches. Organizations often also mirror their TMT. Organizational strategy plays a critical role in the marketing capability of an organization, as activities are decided based on strategy and organizational goals. A TMT needs to be structurally composed in such a way that the firm is functionally positioned to respond and adapt to challenges in the marketplace continuously. With this in mind, the paper develops a conceptual representation of the interface between marketing organization, strategic decision-making, functional TMTs, and organizational structure. We conceptually assess the impact of functional TMT composition on marketing organization and corporate-level strategy alignment. Our research question focuses on how functional TMT composition and decision-making impacts marketing organization and overall market orientation. At the crossroads between strategic organizational decision-making and leadership, the upper echelon theory and contingency theory serves as the theoretical foundations from which conceptual propositions are developed in the context of marketing organization and market orientation.

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the philosophical considerations of fake news and provide an alternative view to current conceptualizations of its binary nature. Through an evaluation of existing research, a typology of fake news is presented that considers thepossibility that the propagation of fake news about a brand, may be stemming from the brand itself, a previously unexploredfield in the literature.

Design/methodology/approach–This is a conceptual paper based on extensive literature review on thefields of fake news and knowledgecreation, resulting in the creation of a synthesized typology.

Findings–The role of power structures greatly influences the ability for a brand to respond to fake news. Externally constructed disinformation is seemingly more difficult for a brand to address, as a result of having limited control over the message. Internally constructed information, while stemming from the brand itself provides the brand with more control, but a greater public distrust as the source of the fake news seems to confirm the disinformation.

Practical implications–This paper presents a typology that contrasts the source of the construction of disinformation and the extent to which thefacts have been fabricated. Furthermore, this paper provides future researchers with an alternate understanding of the conceptualization of fakenews.

Originality/value–This paper is the first of its kind to establish a typology of fake news on the basis of the source of construction ofdisinformation. The source plays an important role when assessing the associated brand risks and developing an approach to combat potential negative implications.

Purpose

Literature in the entrepreneurial marketing (EM) field continues to flourish with a noted increase in publications in recent years. This study aims to conduct a bibliographic analysis of EM literature, to examine the intellectual landscape of the field and assess scientific productivity and impact.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 1,363 EM papers, extracted from the Web of Science database, were identified between 2005 and 2019. Co-authorship, citation, co-citation and keyword co-occurrence were examined, identifying the most-prominent authors, articles, journals and countries of publication, citation and co-citation. Network maps were created using VOSviewer.

Findings

The findings indicate that EM has become a thriving, multidisciplinary field that has reached a point of maturity, where exploration is seemingly a major focus of the field’s expansion. This maturity is mirrored in the evolution of the EM operationalisation – moving from a narrowly defined scope to a far broader and encompassing operationalisation. Distinct schools of thought emerging in the literature have been identified and emerging trends guiding the future growth of the EM field have been discussed. The expansion of the field continues to be assembled on the foundation of a number of seminal papers.

Originality/value

This research offers an updated examination of the EM field, in particular, including a period of recent expansion in the field. The incorporation of network maps offers a visual depiction of the intellectual landscape of the field.

Purpose - This methodological paper demonstrates how service firms can use digital technologies to quantify and predict customer evaluations of their interactions with the firm using unstructured, qualitative data. To harness the power of unstructured data and enhance the customer-firm relationship, the use of computerized text analysis is proposed.

Design/methodology/approach - Three empirical studies were conducted to exemplify the use of the computerized text analysis tool. A secondary data analysis of online customer reviews (n = 2,878) in a service industry was used. LIWC was used to conduct the text analysis, and thereafter SPSS was used to examine the predictive capability of the model for the evaluation of customer-firm interactions.

Findings - A lexical analysis of online customer reviews was able to predict evaluations of customer-firm interactions across the three empirical studies. The authenticity and emotional tone present in the reviews served as the best predictors of customer evaluations of their service interactions with the firm.

Practical implications - Computerized text analysis is an inexpensive digital tool which, to date, has been sparsely used to analyze customer-firm interactions based on customers' online reviews. From a methodological perspective, the use of this tool to gain insights from unstructured data provides the ability to gain an understanding of customers' real-time evaluations of their service interactions with a firm without collecting primary data.

Originality/value - This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge regarding the use of computerized lexical analysis to assess unstructured, online customer reviews to predict customers' evaluations of a service interaction. The results offer service firms an inexpensive and user-friendly methodology to assess real-time, readily available reviews, complementing traditional customer research. A tool has been used to transform unstructured data into a numerical format, quantifying customer evaluations of service interactions.

Consumers today are well accustomed to a digitized consumer journey, actively seeking social proof from online customer reviews to guide consumption decisions. These review platforms have been shown to be influential in guiding consumer behavior across many product and service categories. The language used to describe products on review platforms is of importance, given its potential to influence consumer perceptions and purchase intentions. Despite this, little attention is placed on the language used in reviews. In order to address this gap, this research sought to analyze and contrast the language used in online customer reviews within the wine category, by contrasting the lexical characteristics of reviews of white and red wine. The research made use of 2917 online wine reviews for four different varietals, two red wine (cabernet sauvignon and shiraz) and two white wine (chardonnay and sauvignon blanc) varietals. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software was used to conduct a lexical analysis, with the results indicating both similarities and differences between the reviews of red and white wine varietals. The results provide insight into the lexical components of the wine reviews and the implications that these bear on the perceived usefulness of the review.

The impact of COVID-19 on global human resource (HR) management has been swift, dramatic and has fundamentally changed HR processes. The prompt online migration of business has altered the skills required by employees to succeed in the workplace of the future. This research examines the hard and soft skill gaps that exist in the digital marketing and advertising industry. Through the use of two data collection points in 2019 and 2020, the research identified a renewed importance being placed on soft skills in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Soft skills and the development thereof have become a key focal area of training for new employees as a result of remote working. The identified hard skill gaps are indicative of the future growth areas of the industry, focusing on data analytics, marketing automation and user experience. Future research should consider an expansion to other industry-specific skills and contrast country-level skill gaps.

The importance of play is well established in early childhood development; however the importance of play appears to diminish in more advanced levels of education. Despite this, the demand for experiential, engaging learning experiences that seek to differentiate graduate-level programs in a fiercely competitive market continues to increase. This research sought to explore the phenomenon of bringing play and playfulness to the graduate-level classroom as a means through which to enhance creativity, student engagement, and teamwork. The LEGO® Serious Play (LSP) activity was originally created to be used as a facilitation strategy for business executives seeking to enhance innovation and business performance. This research sought to develop a protocol to adapt the LSP activity for masters’ students completing a mandatory marketing course. The primary aim of the research considered whether LSP would provide a valuable learning activity for future graduate-level marketing classes. As such, feedback was collected on the activity from students following engagement with LSP. The results of the study provide guidelines for marketing educators to seamlessly incorporate novel activities, such as LSP, into their teaching practice.

This paper considers the evaluation of social media performance from a user’s perspective using the expectation confirmation theory as the theoretical framework. The interplay between initial expectations and subsequent evaluations of social media performance, in particular, forms the basis of the evaluation. The research focuses on the influence that the performance of brand-related user-generated content is able to exert on a user’s brand attitude, self-image, and the development of their personal brand. This conceptual paper develops three propositions suggesting that the social media performance of brand-related user-generated content is able to influence one’s brand attitude, self-image, and personal brand respectively. A typology of four different social media user types is developed through an evaluation of the disconfirmation experienced as a result of the interplay between initial expectations and the actual evaluation of the performance of brand-related, user-generated content. The concept of social media performance is proposed, which considers the subjective evaluation of the performance of a brand-related post shared on social media platforms. In addition, the research expands the expectation confirmation theory to a new context in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of an existing yet under researched phenomenon. 

Today’s students will work in an increasingly diverse environment which requires the ability to understand and connect with consumers from different social groups and cultures. The expectations placed on marketing practitioners to connect with a multiplicity of consumers requires a nuanced understanding of the different lifestyles, lived experiences and values of consumers. Exposing students to societal diversity and inclusive practices in their marketing curricula helps to inform their marketing practice in industry. Using an exploratory approach, through semi-structured expert interviews with marketing educators, two overarching themes emerged as crucial sources of inclusion in marketing education, namely pedagogical considerations and curriculum design considerations. This research proposes the Inside-Out framework as a guideline for marketing educators to foster inclusive teaching practices through the lens of the Experiential Learning Theory. Several recommendations for future research are presented, including the development of a teaching resource, an objective assessment of curriculum design and the continued examination of inclusive teaching practices within marketing education.

The sharing economy has changed many rules of business. One of those rules is the role of the firm and – importantly – the role of consumers, who can perform two roles and become both providers and consumers, i.e. “prosumers”. Therefore, the key network effect to leveraging the power of the sharing economy is for one-sided users, those who are consumers (e.g., Airbnb guests) or providers (e.g., Airbnb hosts), to add the second role and perform as providers and consumers and become prosumers (e.g., those who are Airbnb guests and hosts). Surprisingly, no studies have investigated this important phenomenon and measured how one-sided users may become prosumers. An online survey of 305 Airbnb users showed that trust and gratitude had a significant positive influence on service providers’ and consumers’ intentions to adopt the respective other role and become prosumers, and that those with high gratitude and trust had the highest intentions to become prosumers. However, consumers and providers differed markedly in how trust and gratitude influenced their intention to become prosumers. This study expands our understanding of trust and gratitude and highlights the potential for sharing platforms to create prosumers from both pools of one-sided users. Furthermore, it also makes a valuable contribution to the prosumer and sharing economy literatures by being the first to empirically measure users’ intentions to become prosumers in the sharing economy. We discuss the implications of the findings for practitioners, and suggest how future research could help leverage the sharing economy

Purpose–The purpose of the paper is to investigate the nature of variations among established andemerging middle class consumers in South Africa in response to the institution context factors associatedwith emerging markets that are established in international business studies.

Design/methodology/approach–An exploratory research approach using semi-structured expertinterviews was used to collect data.

Findings–Keyfindings indicate distinct approaches in dealing with factors such as different fallbackpositions, asset ownership, education, language, family responsibility, career aspirations and risk protectionin the middle class process of attaining and sustaining middle class status.

Research limitations/implications–The focus on one country has the potential to minimize thegeneralizability offindings from the study, however, South Africa has a significantly high proportion of sub-Saharan middle class consumers. This provides a basis for further a basis for further research into other sub-Saharan African countries.

Practical implications–Findings from the study provide practical insights on risk profiling of middle-class consumers for marketing practitioners.

Social implications–The study provides insights into the distinct variations between emerging andestablished middle class consumers in areas such as language and education. These insights have potentialimplications on the implementation of government policies such as the Empowerment Policy and consumerprotection.

Originality/value–The paper expands the research agenda in the area of middle class consumer behaviorin emerging markets. By concentrating on South Africa, the research expands existing knowledge beyondemerging giants like China and India, which are often a focus in literature.

This paper investigates employer attributes and perceptions of industry reputation and industry attractiveness, and their impact on employees’ intention to stay in tourism and hospitality. Results show that desired reputation, training, and development value, and prosocial value significantly influence perceptions of industry reputation. Desired diversity and prosocial value have a positive relation to industry attractiveness, while training and development value is negatively related. Perceptions of the industry attractiveness are a major contributor to the intention to remain within the sector. This paper seeks to further the discourse concerning employer branding by introducing an employment value proposition perspective applicable across industries.

This paper explores how competition works in knowledge ecosystems, using a theory elaboration approach. With little research conducted in this area to date, three strategic streams of thought—resource-advantage theory, dynamic capabilities framework, and adaptive marketing capabilities perspective—are compared as a departing point and a frame of reference regarding the dynamics of competition. The streams of strategic thought all converge around the notion that organizations must constantly renew themselves to adapt and align to a fast-changing marketplace. The characteristics of knowledge ecosystems are conceptualized, whereafter an in-depth case study is presented to empirically assess competition in knowledge ecosystems, focusing on the perspective of a keystone actor. At the ecosystem-level, knowledge ecosystems primarily expose and explore knowledge, indicating that they mostly operate in a pre-competitive state. The time needed and the limited control inherent to knowledge exploration translate into the keystone actor focusing on transient rather than sustainable competitive advantage. Knowledge ecosystems further prove to be central in the coevolution and the growth of other ecosystems through connecting and sharing of the explored knowledge base with other ecosystem actors who, in turn, exploit this knowledge common for commercial purposes and innovation.

Intensified competitive pressures related to a dynamic and hypercompetitive global economy, technological advances, unpredictable customers and competitors, and blurring industry boundaries, have compelled industrial marketers to reconsider the strategic imperatives of the organization, in relation to the competitive context in which it operates. As it becomes increasingly difficult for individual firms to identify and respond to external competitive challenges and changes independently, new organizational perspectives have been proposed to thrive in the presence of these forces. The metaphor of the ‘ecosystem’ has increasingly been used in research and practice to highlight the interdependencies between organizations and their environment, providing a renewed way of thinking about the co-evolution, collaboration and creation of value between actors. Although industrial marketers’ knowledge of ecosystems is rapidly developing, the field is still unfolding and relatively little is known about the differences between these ecosystems, especially from a competitive advantage perspective.

To deepen our understanding of its value from an industrial marketing point of view, the current research sought to create conceptual and terminological clarity regarding the ecosystem concept and examine the competitive dynamics present within and between these ecosystems. The central research problem guiding this research is: How is competitive advantage achieved through an ecosystem approach in industrial marketing? Contemporary strategy literature converging at the crossroads between organizational evolution and a fast-changing competitive landscape, proposes that relationships and the resources and capabilities embedded within these relationships are key to the attainment of competitive advantage. As such, theoretical streams that incorporate this line of thought are used as lenses through which to assess competitive advantage. The following research questions emerged:

RQ1: What are the drivers of competitive advantage through a network analysis approach to ecosystems?

RQ2: How does social capital impact the competitive advantage of ecosystems?

RQ3: How do dynamic capabilities impact the competitive advantage of ecosystems?

RQ4: How do resource- and capability-based theories explain competition in ecosystems?

Four papers were constructed as part of the empirical part of this research. Two papers assessed competition and competitiveness within ecosystems, with the other two examining competitive advantage between ecosystems. Two of the papers followed a quantitative descriptive approach, one paper followed a quantitative exploratory approach, while a qualitative exploratory approach was utilized in the fourth paper. The respective approaches were deemed best suited to address the respective research questions. The research contributes to the body of knowledge in that it highlights the centrality of knowledge exploration in leveraging, maintaining and attaining advantage. It also points to a cyclical knowledge-generating process within the ecosystem context, which centers on exploring, then exploiting and finally, transforming of knowledge for sustainable competitive advantage. The dissertation follows a narrative of first sketching the relevance of the ecosystem metaphor within the industrial marketing context, leading to the identification of gaps in the research and an introduction to the research problem. The evolution of the ecosystem concept is then reviewed, laying bare its characteristics, extant definitions and different types of ecosystems. Theoretical perspectives of strategy, inherently embedded in theoretical assumptions of how competition works, are then discussed. The research questions are then introduced, including the respective papers addressing each research question, together with the research methodology followed. The dissertation concludes with a summary of the findings, which also provides a discussion on the research contributions, managerial implications, noted limitations and suggested areas for future research. The four papers are presented as Appendices, of which three have been published and the fourth is in its second round of review.

Brand love is an often ignored, yet important dimension in consumer-brand relationships. Especially consumer-brand relationships with masstige brands that are hedonic and symbolic in nature. Using an experimental design (n = 465), this study investigated the interplay between brand love and brand loyalty, and its impact on brand equity. Contrary to current literature, the findings indicate that consumers can develop brand love without being loyal to a brand and can exhibit high brand love without purchasing from the brand. Brand love had a greater impact on brand equity than brand loyalty, and both brand love and brand equity diminished when consumers experienced brand betrayal. The brand love-loyalty matrix shows the interplay between these constructs for masstige brand relationships and can be used to increase market share. Finally, a decision tree is provided to guide the growth decisions of luxury brands who want to embark on a masstige strategy.

Purpose

Organisational resilience and digital maturity both explain how some organisations are better able to cope with unexpected disruptions. However, research exploring the relationship between these two concepts, and their role in addressing exogenous shocks, remains sparse. This study first aimed to compare digitally mature SME retailers’ organisational resilience with that of digitally less mature SME retailers and then investigate further how their digital maturity impacted their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors adopt an explanatory two-phase mixed-method research design, with online surveys from 79 SME retailers in South Africa, followed by interviews.

Findings

Digitally mature SMEs exhibited higher levels of organisational resilience, specifically with respect to situational awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity. The authors also demonstrate that digital leadership is a greater driver of organisational resilience than digital capabilities.Practical implicationsThe authors suggest ways for SME retailers to develop their digital maturity, particularly their digital leadership, to increase their organisational resilience.

Originality/value

This paper makes a case for SME retailers to focus on building their digital maturity to better cope with and learn from unexpected events. In particular, digital maturity is positively associated with SME retailers’ innovation and creativity and their devolved and responsive decision-making.

This study operationalizes the knowledge-based dynamic capabilities (KBDC) that act as drivers of innovation performance in an innovation ecosystem. Four constructs, knowledge creation, knowledge diffusion, knowledge absorption and knowledge impact, are comparatively analyzed to assess their impact on the innovation performance of developed, transition and developing market economies. Using the Global Innovation Index 2019 dataset, partial least squares path analysis is employed to identify which KBDC is the biggest driver of innovation performance across 129 countries at different stages of economic development. Across all four constructs, knowledge creation is the biggest driver of innovation performance. In developed and developing market economies, knowledge creation is the strongest predictor of innovation performance, while knowledge absorption is the strongest predictor of innovation performance in transition economies. An innovation ecosystem framework, centered around KBDC, is proposed to provide a point of reference for the innovation performance and competitive advantage inherent in each knowledge-related capability.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of product knowledge, both subjective and objective, on the relative importance of four extrinsic product attributes of wine, namely price, age, brand and region of origin. The relative importance of four product attributes is evaluated comparative to consumers' self-reported and objectively measured knowledge of wine, using the conjoint analysis technique. The results suggest that product knowledge does influence the relative importance of extrinsic wine attributes in product evaluation, with the price of wine shown to be the dominant attribute regardless of the level of product knowledge expertise. Brand, age and region of origin received differing rankings of importance. Across all four levels of product knowledge, consumers navigate their evaluative product decisions according to the midpoint between most and least expensive wines in their consideration set. Price sensitivity appears to heavily impact consumer evaluation strategies, which serves to inform wine pricing strategies.

The democratization of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including ChatGPT, has sparked the interest of business practitioners given their ability to fundamentally change the way we work. While AI tools are positioned to augment human capabilities, their effective implementation requires the skill to understand where, when and how to best utilize them efficiently. Furthermore, meaningful engagement with the content produced by generative AI (GenAI) necessitates the intricacy of appropriate prompt engineering to optimize the learning process. As the field of GenAI continues to advance, the art of developing impactful prompts has become a necessary skill for harnessing its full potential. This research develops an AI prompting protocol through a constructivist theory lens. Based on the principles of constructivism, where individuals assimilate new knowledge by bridging it with their existing understanding, this research suggests an active engagement process in the human-AI co-construction of knowledge through GenAI. The goal is to empower business managers and their teams to construct effective AI prompts and validate responses, thereby enhancing user interaction, optimizing workflows, and maximizing the potential outcomes of AI chatbots.

A customer’s experience with a brand, as evidenced in online customer reviews, has attracted multidisciplinary scholarly attention. Customer experience plays an important role as an antecedent to brand engagement, brand adoption, and eventual brand loyalty. Thus, it is important for businesses to understand their customers’ experiences so that they can make changes as necessary. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented changes to the business landscape, forcing businesses to move online, with many utilizing enterprise video conferencing (EVC) to maintain daily operations. To ensure efficient digitization, many turned to the online reviews of others’ experiences with EVC before engaging with it themselves. This research examined how the customer experience is portrayed through emotional tone and word choice in online reviews for the EVC platform Zoom. Using computerized text analysis, key differences were found in the emotional tone and word choice for low- and high-rated reviews. The complexity and emotionality expressed in reviews have implications on the usability of the review for others. The results from this study suggest that online customer reviews with a high rating express a higher level of expertise and confidence than low-rated reviews. Given the potential dissemination and impact, digital marketers may be well advised to first and foremost respond to online reviews that are high in emotional tone.

Purpose: This methodological paper aims to demonstrate the potential benefits of using consumer neuroscientific methodologies to measure consumers’ subconscious responses when consuming wine during a taste experiment. By comparing conscious and subconscious evaluations during a tasting experience this study illustrates how this methodology offers a more nuanced understanding of the consumer evaluation of wine during a consumption experience.

Design/methodology/approach: The research made use of a single-case taste test experiment whereby a wine expert blind-tasted 20 white wine varietals. Throughout each tasting, subconscious responses were measured using electroencephalography (EEG), combined with conscious measures of stated preferences using a questionnaire.

Findings: Stark differences were observed between the results of the conscious and subconscious wine evaluation measures, underscoring the complex nature of consumer decision-making and preference development. This study practically demonstrates the use and value of EEG as a consumer neuroscientific methodology in a wine marketing context.

Originality/value: This paper demonstrates the value of neuroscience techniques in identifying differences in the conscious and subconscious wine evaluation measures. This study practically demonstrates the use and value of EEG as a consumer neuroscientific methodology in a wine marketing context.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the brand personalities that employees are creating of their employer brands, in particular business-to-business (B-to-B) brands, when describing these brands on social media. We examine how the brand personalities, based on written online reviews, differ between high- and low-ranked, and high- and low-rated brands.

Methodology/Approach: 6,300 written employee reviews from a social media platform, Glassdoor, are used for content analysis in DICTION, to determine the brand personality dimensions they communicate (J. L). An independent B-to-B brand ranking data source, Brandwatch, is used as a reference to various brands’ level of ranking, while an ANOVA test is used to determine whether there is a difference in the brand personality trait means when comparing high and low-ranked, and high- and low-rated brands.

Findings: Our findings suggest that a strong social media presence does not equate to a strong employer brand personality perception among employees, since there are no significant differences between B-to-B firms based on their rankings.

Research Implications: Extant literature has mostly explored the impact of either critical reviews or favourable customer ratings and reviews on company performance, with very little research focusing on the B-to-B context. In addition, research employing DICTION for the purposes of content analysis of reviews is sparse. The methodology used in this study could thus be employed to further compare and contrast the reviews from a single company, dividing top and low starred reviews to compare discrepancies.

Practical Implications: The results of this study show how online shared employee experiences of employer brands contribute to the formation of a distinct employer brand personality. From a managerial viewpoint, engaging with current and past employees and being cognizant of the online narratives that they share on social media, may be an early indicator of where the firm is lacking (or showing strength) in its’ employee engagement. This would offer a way for firms to both understand their employer brand personality as well as gauge how they compare to top employers in a specific sector or industry.

Originality/Value/Contribution: The study attempts to grow the literature of employee brand engagement in a B-to-B context, by recognizing the important role that employees play in engaging with their employer brand online. Two main contributions are offered. The first contribution relates to the finding that employees perceive highly-rated B-to-B brands as being more competent, exciting, sincere and sophisticated than low-rated B-to-B brands. Second, the methodology used in this study proves to be a novel and accurate way of comparing employee reviews and perceived employer brand personality, with the employer-created intended brand image.

University-industry partnerships emphasise the transformation of knowledge into products and processes which can be commercially exploited. This paper presents a framework for understanding how social capital in university-industry partnerships affect knowledge transfer strategies, which impacts on collaborative innovation developments. University-industry partnerships in three different countries, all from regions at varying stages of development, are compared using the proposed framework. These include a developed region (Canada), a transition region (Malta), and a developing region (South Africa). Structural, relational and cognitive social capital dimensions are mapped against the knowledge transfer strategy that the university-industry partnership employed: leveraging existing knowledge or appropriating new knowledge. Exploring the comparative presence of social capital in knowledge transfer strategies assists in better understanding how university-industry partnerships can position themselves to facilitate innovation. The paper proposes a link between social capital and knowledge transfer strategy by illustrating how it impacts the competitive positioning of the university-industry partners involved. 

Entrepreneurial ecosystems represent an active and growing area of research. Recognized as a contributor to foster regional competitiveness by stimulating economic growth and promoting innovativeness, interest in the concept spans across disciplines. Despite evolving and inter-disciplinary discussions on entrepreneurial ecosystems, a comprehensive understanding of the research directions and latest developments in the field is elusive. At the same time, a clear understanding of the current lay of the land is necessary to assist in public sector decision-making and policy development. To address this gap, this bibliometric study presents a bibliographic analysis of extant literature in the field, as referenced as the focal topic of concern in academic journal articles spanning 1995–2019. The aim is to provide an overview of the origins of the entrepreneurial ecosystems concept in literature, to offer insight into key concepts that have emerged in research over the past twenty-five-years. The paper employs bibliographic techniques to track knowledge, identify trends, and highlight the primary emerging patterns and conceptual clusters. The analysis offers a map of the covered territory and facilitates the identification of gaps and under-researched areas in the field, with a particular focus on public sector interaction. Using the visualization of similarities, VOSviewer, software tool, citation, co-citation, co-authorship, as well as the co-occurrence of keywords are presented to offer a comparative overview of the diverse representation of entrepreneurial ecosystems developments across disciplines, countries, institutional clusters, networks and teams.

Airports are essential to the global economy, providing significant revenue and driving regional growth. In order to remain competitive and achieve sustainable development, airports must continuously monitor and improve service quality. To this end, understanding traveller perceptions of their experiences is important. While traditional survey-based methods are beneficial, managers are increasingly looking for alternative ways of collecting feedback, such as online reviews. Automated text analysis provides a cost- and time-effective technique with which to analyse large datasets of unsolicited online reviews, providing managers with strategic insights to enhance service quality. This study explores the potential of supplementing traditional airport service quality monitoring methods with automated text analyses to better understand traveller feedback and improve service quality. The results provide new methods to measure airport service quality, offering a fresh perspective on customers’ satisfaction with service quality experiences, and highlighting key strategic implications that can help organisations gain a competitive advantage.