Purpose: This study investigates the relationship between entrepreneurial marketing and digital twin technology in sustainable marketing, focusing on overcoming sustainable marketing myopia. It aims to determine how combining these approaches can help businesses avoid the pitfalls associated with short-sighted sustainability practices.

Design/methodology/approach: This research uses an interview methodology focused on the Swedish market to analyse the dynamics of entrepreneurial marketing, characterised by innovation and a strong focus on customer needs. It specifically examines how such marketing strategies serve as a defence against short-sighted or myopic sustainable marketing practices.

Findings: The study demonstrates that integrating entrepreneurial marketing with digital twin technology can effectively prevent sustainable marketing myopia. This approach helps businesses maintain authentic sustainability claims, comply with data privacy laws and navigate customer-centric models. The findings highlight the advantages of merging entrepreneurial marketing with advanced technologies, promoting sustainable marketing, ensuring long-term industrial success and enhancing transparency and accuracy.

Originality/value: This research offers unique insights for firms, arguing that merging entrepreneurial marketing with digital twin technology is crucial for enhancing sustainable marketing while sustainable marketing myopia and ensuring long-term success. It underscores the need to balance customer-centric, credible sustainable claims with privacy standards, providing a nuanced approach in the digital era. Additionally, it contributes a range of conceptual and practical propositions to the field.

This paper corroborates Hirschman’s (1987) “People as Products” work by first replicating it in a different context, and then extending it by using new methodologies that examine partner-seeking through a different theoretical lens. The replication finds that some of the original hypotheses hold, some did not, and some, in fact, reversed. This extension shows significant differences between male and female partner seekers on important linguistic psychology dimensions, namely clout, authenticity and tone. Managerial implications relate to emerging trends in human brands, specifically how the words that people use to describe themselves may impact the success or otherwise of human branding and influencing efforts. Overall, the paper demonstrates how an original study can be corroborated and extended in meaningful and interesting ways by varying the context, methodology, or theoretical backdrop, while keeping the problem constant.

Digital advocacy by employees can provide the firm with reach and desirable outcomes. Increased reach and visibility can impact an organization’s brand awareness and employer branding (Sivertzen et al. 2013; Tsimonis and Dimitriadis 2014). In addition, increased brand awareness among stakeholders can help strengthen positive associations with the corporate brand that will make it easier to attract and retain employees (Backhaus and Tikoo 2004; Kohli et al. 2015; Sivertzen et al. 2013). Digital advocacy on social media is very much a double-edged sword, and it is therefore increasingly important for organizations to develop strategies for how best to manage it (Kietzmann et al. 2011; Kohli et al. 2015). The purpose of this research is to investigate and analyse the impact of internal branding and organizational commitment on the willingness of industrial employees to undertake advocacy. Five dimensions of employer branding have been labelled: Work Life Balance, Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR), Training and Development, Healthy Work Atmosphere, Compensation and Benefits (Tanwar and Prasad 2017; Ambler and Barrow 1996; Berthon et al. 2006). This research proposes a second-order hierarchical latent variable model whereby employer branding acts both directly and indirectly through organizational commitment to impact employee advocacy. Data was collected via a self-completing online questionnaire from among employees of a Swedish industrial organization that has a global presence. A total of 306 complete responses were collected with 51.7% response rate. Respondents come from a diverse group of individuals, 66% male; 61%, were aged between 35 and 54 years; 28% were between 18 and 34 years; and 11% were older than 5 years. The structural model was assessed in order to determine how well the empirical data fit with theory (Hair et al. 2014; Sarstedt et al. 2014). Findings indicate that training and development and healthy work atmosphere are the most influential dimensions, followed by a healthy work atmosphere, ethics and CSR. This implicates that industrial organizations who seeks to strengthen their employer brand could focus on these two dimensions primarily. According to Anitha (2014), it is important that employees are engaged in their organization and that can be obtained with the help of a pleasant work environment and good relationships with colleagues. Regarding testing the mediation effect, all the effect that employer branding has on digital employee advocacy is mediated by organizational commitment. This means that even though the employer brand is strong, an employee will not become a digital advocate if he or she is not committed to the organization. A strong employer brand does, however, increase the possibility that a committed employee will become a digital advocate. 

The amount of user-generated content (UGC) in the hospitality industry has exploded. Much of it exists in crowdsourced social media, forums, blogs and review sites. Schuckert et al. (2015) did a study on the role of online customer reviews in the hospitality industry and found that reviews can be a strategic tool and have a crucial role in hospitality and tourism management. By investigating user-generated material more thoroughly, the firms can better align their social media messages to the different and unique needs of their social media users (Zhu and Chen 2015). In doing this, they can better leverage the increasingly important social media. Although the predominant strategic perspectives, including the resource-based view, transaction cost economics and positioning tend to ignore the ultimate objects of strategy, the customer, the advent of social media may lead to a change. With the growth of social media and other UGC, there is a significant opportunity to use the views, thoughts, ideas, attitudes and so on from the actual consumer to help build a strategy from the bottom-up, rather than just top-down. Unsurprisingly, a focus on bottom-up or demand-side strategy is appropriate, especially in marketing strategy, where the customer plays such a crucial role. As this UGC is a source of customer intelligence, firms should be able to improve their market research resulting in better strategic decision making. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to understand whether a firm strategy can be enriched by using demand-side insights generated by customers. Resulting in the primary question—How can user-generated content help firms make strategic decisions? In sum, in this research, we argue that the crowd through its production of online content can aid firms in their demand-side marketing research, particularly concerning strategic decision making. Furthermore, as the amount of user-generated content continues to grow, new tools and techniques allow firms and managers to explore consumers more deeply and to create value, new products and services and new business opportunities. This study uses qualitative data from TripAdvisor and computer-assisted content analysis. From this overall sampling frame of user comments using a custom application, we collected customer reviews and comments from three restaurant segments in New York State—steakhouses, Italian restaurants, and seafood restaurants for an overall total of 282,087 comments. The results confirm that accessing consumer insight directly can be valuable in assisting marketers in making decisions, especially demand-side strategic decisions. It further found that crowdsourcing through the use of user-generated content can be a valuable technique in conducting market research. This study contributes to the theory in a number of ways including giving empirical support for the idea by using user-generated content from customers. 

It is not surprising that managers find it hard to distinguish similar-sounding, IT-based concepts such as augmented reality and virtual reality. To many, all of these constructs mean nearly the same and, as a result, the terms are often used interchangeably. This confusion holds back those eager to explore the different opportunities these new technologies present. This Executive Digest presents six different types of reality and virtual reality—(1) reality, (2) augmented reality, (3) virtual reality, (4) mixed reality, (5) augmented virtuality, and (6) virtuality—as part of our actual reality/virtual reality continuum. We then illustrate their differences using a common example and outline business applications for each type.

Internet as we know it, has entered a spiral of decline while mobile Apps are gradually taking over and are steadily changing the way we go about our individual daily lives. This study examines the fact that certain financial services Apps are far more successful than others, specifically by looking at what makes a user think that an App may be great, and give it a favorable review, or that it is rather ghastly, and give it an unfavorable review. Next, we describe a study of six of the most popular financial services Apps on the iTunes App Store, for which reviews were analyzed using DICTION software. Employing Diction variables, ambivalence and temporal terms were prevalent in negative reviews while accomplishment, motion, optimism and certainty, were predominantly expressed in positive reviews. Human interest, on the other hand, seemed to be uniformly distributed between both types of reviews.

Purpose - Online brand communities provide a wealth of insights about how consumers perceive and talk about a brand, rather than what the firm communicates about the brand. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether the brand personality of an online brand community, rather than of the brand itself, can be deduced from the online communication within that brand community. Design/methodology/approach - The paper is empirical in nature. The authors use community- generated content from eight online brand communities and perform content analysis using the text analysis software Diction. The authors employ the five brand personality dictionaries (competence, excitement, ruggedness, sincerity and sophistication) from the Pitt et al. (2007) dictionary source as the basis for the authors' analysis. Findings - The paper offers two main contributions. First, it identifies two types of communities: those focusing on solving functional problems that consumers might encounter with a firm's offering and those focusing on broader engagement with the brand. Second, the study serves as a blueprint that marketers can adopt to analyze online brand communities using a computerized approach. Such a blueprint is beneficial not only to analyze a firm's own online brand community but also that of competitors, thus providing insights into how their brand stacks up against competitor brands. Originality/value - This is the first paper examining the nature of online brand communities by means of computerized content analysis. The authors outline a number of areas that marketing scholars could explore further based on the authors analysis. The paper also highlights implications for marketers when establishing, managing, monitoring and analyzing online brand communities.

Some of the largest business where created by entrepreneurs who also maintained a full-time job. These hybrid entrepreneurs where able to juggle and balance their two roles for a time. Researchers have shown that one of the critical questions is when so to leave their job to become full-time entrepreneurs. All hybrid entrepreneurs face many challenges and issues as they swing between their job and their business. This article makes the point that the availability of management tools and technology can influence a hybrid entrepreneur’s decisions about the rate of growth he or she desires. The purpose of this article is to introduce the idea that the hybrid entrepreneurship process is affected by questions of venture growth. We will call this “the growth question”. A second and related purpose of the article is to highlight how several conditions surrounding hybrid entrepreneurship impact the growth question. The third and final objective is to suggest that hybrid entrepreneurship at the individual-level may become a less permanent activity over time, due to a new concept we identify and introduce called the Wobble Effect.