Rory Mulcahy

Key account management (KAM) is essential for B2B firms navigating dynamic customer behaviour and competitive landscapes. In the current landscape, KAM is evolving and facing the challenge of optimising practices using novel technology to maintain and support customer relationships. This is an area where limited research exists. This paper aims to fill this gap by providing a conceptual backdrop for exploring how physical interaction and technological platforms – ‘phygital’ – are influenced by external environmental factors and subsequently impact essential KAM practices. Specifically, a theoretical framework integrating the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Social Exchange Theory (SET) is presented as a conceptual foundation for understanding how phygital practices interact to influence KAM's relational capability and outcome success. Integrating RBV and SET offers a novel theoretical lens through which to understand KAM strategies amidst external market volatility and complexity. It also provides practical insights for KAM practitioners, empowering them to optimise phygital KAM practices and foster competitive advantage through leveraging customer relationships as a resource.

The use of AI chatbots in frontline customer service is beneficial as it can provide quick service responses, cost-saving on human employees and accelerate customers’ decision-making process. However, implementing chatbots can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, companies benefit from the use of chatbots. On the other hand, it may hurt customer experience as customers perceive chatbots are less trustworthy and show less social presence. Service failures today have become more unpredictable with the increasing complexity of social environments. Aligning with the trends of online customer service, customers are most likely to encounter a chatbot when seeking online customer service to solve service failures. With most of the previous literature investigating customers’ perceptions of chatbots and chatbot-related service failures, little research has focused on the area where chatbots as service recovery agents and how customers perceive the use of chatbots handling their service requests after service failures.

This paper explores tourists' motivation and behaviours regarding the purchase of local canarium nut food products while visiting Vanuatu. Specifically, the influence that tourists' prosocial food motivation (buying local food to assist local people) and in situ promotional activities (being promotions that occur in Vanuatu during tourists' stay) have on tourists' self-reported purchase behaviour is investigated. In this field study, trained Ni-Vanuatu enumerators collected quantitative survey responses. Data from this exploratory study (n=61) were analysed using partial least square equation modelling. It was found that that tourists' prosocial food motivation increases their interest in local food (passive purchase behaviour) while in situ promotional activities lead to tourists actively seeking out local food (active purchasing behaviour). Practical implications are that agri-businesses in Vanuatu will benefit from enhanced branding and labelling of local food products as well as promoting local foods to tourists' in situ via personal selling and word-of-mouth communication.

It is often assumed that low income earners accept their diminished lifestyles and have lower aspirations to own or purchase goods and services which are seen as luxury or nonessential. It is also assumed that low income earners should not be targeted by social marketers using digital technology due to the digital divide whereby digital literacy and access reduces with income. In an age where digital approaches provide the opportunity to reach large markets in a personalized manner, the need to discover ways to use digital for low income earners is important. This study reports the findings of a quasi-field experiment of 1241 low income Households in Australia as part of a digital social marketing program to reduce electricity consumption. The findings bust the myths about reduced material possessions and digital access by low income earners and provide rigorous evidence that a digital social marketing program can be effective for generating behaviour change and impact.

Social media has the potential to be a powerful tool for influencing social norms and normative behaviour as evidenced by the trends in contexts such as health behaviours including Fitspo, paleo, veganism, CrossFit etc. In any context some individuals have greater influence on consumers than others (Soneji, et al 2015) for example, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has had a significant influence on food policy, school menus and individual food behaviour (Slocum, et al 2011). Individuals who achieve a high amount of attention on social media, with large numbers of followers are now being coined micro-celebrities, as they closely mimic mainstream celebrities on a smaller scale (Page, 2012; Thomas, 2014). As such, social marketers need to understand how consumers engage with social media and how micro celebrities influence consumers who seek to link their real or aspirational identities with those of their favourite micro celebrities or cultural movement for example, paleo. The rapid growth of social media and mobile phone ownership has made it increasingly possible for information exchanges, particularly user-generated content (Bernhardt, et al 2012) from micro-celebrities. The aim of this paper is to investigate social marketing organisations' social media performance and engagement in comparison to that of micro-celebrities.

Technology is changing the way consumers and social marketers interact (Bernhardt, et al. 2012) and providing avenues for the use of avatars; human-like graphic representations personified via computer technology (Holzwarth, et al 2006). To date, the avatar literature has focused on the commercial context and on pleasurable behaviours; for instance gaming entertainment (Bailey, et al 2009) and internet shopping (Pentina & Taylor, 2010). However, avatars used for social marketing purposes differ from these contexts in that the aim is for consumers to perform less pleasurable behaviours such as exercise or recycling and for social good. To date there has been little investigation in a social marketing context about the use of avatars so this research seeks to explore the first step in the process of avatar use; the selection stage. Research in commercial marketing has provided useful insights as to the design features which create an effective and desired avatar by consumers, these include cues such as gender and attractiveness avatar (Bélisle & Bodur, 2010) however we do not know if consumers choose avatars for a social behaviour on the same basis as a commercial or entertainment purpose. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to investigate why consumers choose particular avatars within a social marketing program.

Despite the explosion of mobile games (m-games) and the uptake of games as a social marketing tool for behaviour change, little is known about which game attributes (design factors within a game) are preferred by consumers for social marketing m-games. This research reports the findings of four focus groups (n=23) to propose three new categories of game attributes along with seven preferred game attributes for social marketing m-games. These results provide a unique contribution to social marketing theory given the goal of a social marketing m-game game is both entertainment and behaviour change. Further, the findings suggest strategies for practitioners seeking to develop, design and build social marketing m-games.