Analyzing the effect of inward- vs. outward-looking activities on student loyalty in Japanese universities

Over the years, the number of organizations investing in CSR activities has increased considerably. This increase is partially attributable to the intention of the organizations to give back to the society to repair and reduce the loss their intentional or unintentional actions might have caused to the environment. The government’s decision to make it mandatory for businesses to invest a small part of their net profit in social welfare activities has also helped nudge the organizations towards CSR activities. However, the question whether this investment influences customers’ intention to purchase the product in any manner remains an unresolved paradox. Limited researches have been conducted in this area to explore and establish the relationship if any between CSR and consumer purchase intention. This research focuses on the five different factors of CSR comprising of loyalty, morality, awareness, behavior and environment, which are identified from the previous literature. With the help of these factors, the authors researched and established the relationship between them and consumer purchase intention. In this descriptive research, the research questionnaire was distributed to 1500 respondents, using convenient sampling method, out of which 319 responses were finally obtained for the analysis purpose. After testing the reliability and validity of the data, the five hypotheses were tested using SEM (Structural Equation Modeling). It was found that all the five hypotheses were supported and thereby acknowledged the significant influence of CSR related activities performed by companies on the consumer purchase intention. The CSR driven morality is emerging to be the most important dimension that appears to influence the consumer purchase intentions. These finding will help decision-makers to formulate their promotion activities in such a manner that it aligns with the value system of the consumers and increase the overall consumer base.

In daily life, people tend to use mental shortcuts to simplify and speed up their decision-making processes. A halo effect exists if the impression created by a dominant attribute influences how other attributes of an object or subject are judged. It involves a cognitive bias that leads to distorted assessments. However, the halo effect has barely been researched in a sports-related context, although it can substantially contribute to understanding how sport fans think and behave. The objective of this paper is to answer the question that is of interest for both theory and practice of sports marketing: Is there a halo effect in sports? Does the sporting success or failure of a professional soccer team radiate or even outshine other sports-related and non-sports aspects and influence or distort how the club is perceived by its fans? Fans of six soccer clubs selected from the first German soccer league Bundesliga were interviewed. This paper presents the results of an empirical study based on a data set consisting of a total of 4,180 cases. The results of the analyses substantiate the distortion of the fans’ perception with regard to a very diverse range of aspects that is triggered by the sporting success or failure of their favorite club.

Due to increasing competition in the private hospital sector in Saudi Arabia, the organizations need to adopt the new ways to foster the brand loyalty and repeated visits. In this context, content marketing may have pleasant effects on a business in terms of customer engagement, trust and loyalty. The present research attempts to investigate the multi-dimensional relationships among content marketing, loyalty, trust and customer engagement in the private hospital sector using primary data collected through a questionnaire from 400 randomly selected respondents. A simple random sampling technique is utilized to select the patients or their family members visiting the private hospital to have their perception regarding hypothesized variables. The findings indicate that content marketing has a positive impact on the factors like customer engagement, trust and loyalty. In comparison, content marketing is found more effective in persuading the loyalty of the customers in comparison of trust and loyalty. Further, the customers’ trust towards a brand has a strong positive relationship with the loyalty. Moreover, the positive effect of customer engagement on the trust has also been found. Based on the results, this study suggests that the private healthcare institutions should adopt a multi-channel content marketing approach to exploit its maximum benefit. Multiple social media platforms and popular healthcare blog sites should be chosen for an effective content marketing advertisement.