While positive brand relationships have received a great deal of academic attention, negative brand relationships—specifically brand avoidance—have been neglected. As part of any decision to reject a particular brand, various types of brand avoidance have previously been identified, including experiential, identity, moral, deficit value, and advertising avoidance. These impact product and service industries, such as tourism and airlines. Thus, this research aims to investigate brand avoidance in the airline industry, specifically the impact of anti-consumption (at a general/societal level) and the types of brand avoidance and their outcomes (avoidance behaviour). Quantitative methods were used to attain the purpose of the research, specifically a survey distributed from panel data. The constructs were measured using items derived from previous studies and analysed using SPSS 28. The findings show the importance of anti-consumption as a driver of the types of brand avoidance. Deficit-value avoidance was found to be the main driver of brand avoidance behaviour, with contributions made by all the other types of brand avoidance, apart from identity avoidance. This study contributes to the understanding of brand avoidance in the airline industry and the levels as well as the types of avoidance, indicating the strategies required by airlines in their relationship-building strategies.

Purpose: This study explores clothing disposal in a developing economy. It focuses on how consumers dispose of clothing and what motives influence them to use a specific disposal method.

Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews, a qualitative research method, were conducted with a purposive sample of 27 participants from diverse demographic backgrounds within the developing economy of Ethiopia. The interviews were coded and analysed using thematic analysis to identify categories and themes.

Findings: The findings reveal various clothing disposal methods, such as bartering, donating, gifting, repurposing and reusing, and discarding. Different motives drive consumers to use these methods, including economic benefits, altruism, and convenience.

Originality/value: The study bridges an important knowledge gap in literature mainly on three aspects, as highlighted by previous research. Theoretically, in addition to proposing a different perspective of bartering as a disposal method, the study investigates the motives behind clothing disposal methods from diverse consumer groups and proposes a conceptual framework to illustrate the link between clothing disposal methods and motives. Methodologically, the study addresses the call for a more inclusive and diverse sample, considering gender and varied socio-economic groups. Contextually, while previous research has focused on developed economies, this study explains clothing disposal methods and motives from a developing economy context, specifically Ethiopia. 

This study examined the communication styles of rectors and vice-rectors of German public universities during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore the influence of gender on leadership communication. We collected data from social media and university websites; and analysed the language used to identify transformational, transactional, and servant leadership styles. Our results showed that female leaders demonstrated more positive communication than men and a stronger preference for transformational leadership, while male leaders tended to use a transactional style. Additionally, we found that both male and female leaders exhibited a high degree of empathetic concern for their stakeholders, contributing to the overall positive tone of communication. These findings suggest that gender may play a role in how university leaders communicate during times of crisis, highlighting the importance of inclusive and compassionate leadership in higher education.

Esports represent an increasingly influential and innovative component of the global media business landscape. The ever-evolving ecosystem of dynamic new media is driven by a heterogeneous array of stakeholders that co-create value in online and offline spaces, often described as servicescapes, where innovations are increasingly influential in diverse areas including entrepreneurial business models, media, sports, entertainment, culture, and consumer engagement. In this research, a semi-systematic literature review was undertaken focused on the intersection of the esports ecosystem, servicescapes and innovations. Four clear directions for future research, with questions specific to esports, servicescapes and media were identified. Scholars can utilise these findings to enhance understanding of innovation from the servicescape perspective, with relevance for scholars engaged in business, marketing, and media.

The aim of this chapter is to provide a broad overview of the processes and stakeholders involved when organizing and managing a stand-alone (offline) esports event, tournament, or LAN. Through analyzing existing documents and having discussions with industry practitioners, this chapter presents a practical guide where the requirements and expectations of key stakeholders and the necessary considerations involved are discussed. The chapter covers a diverse range of factors when organizing esports tournaments and offers practical recommendations for those involved in planning and executing esports events. Key highlights include: (1) a practical how-to guide is presented, identifying the various aspects of organizing an esports event along with relevant stakeholder considerations; (2) a summary table is included that identifies opportunities and challenges when organizing esports events along with related stakeholders to engage; and (3) practical aspects of managing in-person esports events are presented. 

This paper explores the intersection between sustainability and social media activity by studying how user-generated content (UGC) creation enacted and communicated social sustainability in times of restricted social interaction. The context is Wuhan in China, a city that implemented a 76-day lockdown in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a sample of 187 short videos created and posted by Wuhan residents on Douyin (TikTok) during the lockdown, this paper answers this question - how did UGC creators produce short videos on social media to facilitate social connections with others? UGC creators' video-making practices are conceptualised in the typology of Evoking, Performing, Collaborating, and Narrating, and each practice enabled creators to connect and socialise virtually with others, thus contributing to all participants' social sustainability in a pandemic. This study contributes to media management scholarship by adding knowledge to the understanding of two areas: the productive role of media audiences, especially their content production practices and logics; the nature of short videos as media products.

Purpose: The increased importance of sports and athlete brands highlights the need for athletes to pay attention to branding as it has positive impacts. As athletes, Muslim women have not succeeded in building their brands. This study aims to understand the branding challenges facing Muslim female athletes and how to overcome them.

Design/methodology/approach: These branding obstacles and guidelines were explored using qualitative methods – specifically semi-structured interviews with Muslim female athletes and focus groups with experts. Data were analysed using open and axial coding to identify the codes.

Findings: The study identifies three major obstacles to branding by Muslim female athletes. Self-related obstacles, such as knowledge of brand building, social media, personal pressure and a lack of role models, impact the brand-building decision. Social-related (family and society) and sport-related obstacles (participation as women and as Muslims) further complicate this task. Experts provide additional insights regarding these obstacles, suggesting strategies to overcome them.

Research limitations/implications: The research focuses on athletes from one geographical area and has limitations associated with using qualitative methods.

Practical implications: The study suggests how self-, social- and sport-related obstacles are faced by athletes. It provides suggestions for federations, sports codes and other stakeholders to support athletes to overcome these barriers.

Originality/value: This study expands the understanding of the struggles Muslim women face in building their brands as part of an under-represented group.

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to understand the role of the migrant entrepreneur's social capital and specifically their family social capital in the success of their crowdfunding ventures.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper develops an exploratory single case study of the Persu Bag started by a Chinese migrant entrepreneur in the USA, which was documented through in-depth interviews, email communication, social media interactions and secondary documents publicly available. This paper draws on crowdfunding and social capital literature to fulfil the purpose and adopt the perspective of the migrant entrepreneur in the study.

Findings

The study shows that the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneur's family network contributes with their operand and operant resources from both the country of residence and country of origin. Besides having financial capacity, institutional knowledge and experience from both the host and home countries, the family network in both countries make the crowdfunding immigrant entrepreneur's families more resourceful, providing additional benefits to the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneurs in the development of the campaign and crowdfunded venture.

Originality/value

This study broadens the understanding of the ways migrant entrepreneurs can rely on their family social capital for building financial capacity and starting a crowdfunded venture.

Customer engagement is an important topic for organisations, providing a range of outcomes, including contributing to their financial performance. For tourism establishments and destinations, having engagement tourisms can result in repeat visits and positive comments. The importance of engagement means that it needs to be measured. The purpose of this chapter is to examine diverse metrics that can be used to measure online and offline engagement and how they can be used by tourism establishments. It includes behaviour and perceptions which are measured using a range of metrics. It is proposed that customer engagement value comprises several metrics across a range of transactional and non-transactional behaviours, including referrals. Each of these metrics and their associated measurement techniques are presented and their application to the hospitality industry is indicated.

Events, occasions on which people gather for a particular purpose, represent a well-established tourism-based distribution channel. Given recent technological advances, virtual tourism events offer a growing platform. As a particular virtual tourism event subtype, e-sports gaming events are online sports-based video-gaming competitions. During COVID-19, the number of e-sports game players and -spectators globally has grown, particularly through lockdown. However, despite this growth, literature-based insight into player- and spectator engagement with e-sports gaming events and their ensuing co-creation lags behind, revealing an important research gap, as explored in this chapter. Based on this gap, we develop a social presence theory-informed model that depicts the effect of e-sports gaming event-perceived intimacy, immediacy, nonverbal communication, and efficiency on player- and spectator engagement and its ensuing impact on e-sports event-perceived co-creation during the pandemic. We conclude with an overview of implications that arise from our work.