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This study aims to develop and test a new research model of consumer response to celebrity transgression. It examines the effects of celebrity past transgression and philanthropic histories in influencing consumer acceptance (i.e. forgiveness and blame) of a single celebrity transgression behavior and the subsequent endorsement potential of the transgressed celebrity. It also examines consumer acceptance of celebrity transgressions from the gender perspective.

By using real celebrities, this study conducted a 2 (transgression history: high vs low) × 2 (philanthropic history: high vs low) × 2 (celebrity gender: male vs female) between-subject online experiment with 823 US young adults.

Results showed that forgiving (blaming) the transgressed celebrity was positively (negatively) associated with the celebrity’s endorsement potential. Transgression history had a significantly negative indirect effect on endorsement potential via its negative effect on forgiveness and positive effect on blame. Philanthropic history mitigated the negative indirect effect of transgression history on endorsement potential only for male celebrities, not female celebrities.

This study contributes to the current human brand and celebrity transgression literature and fills the research gap by using real male and female celebrities to incorporate the real history of celebrities as determinants of consumer judgment of celebrity transgression. This study also makes its unique contributions by focusing on the celebrity-related outcomes and demonstrating the moderating roles of past philanthropic behaviors and celebrity gender for their potential to mitigate the negative effects of transgression history on consumer responses to a single transgression.

The study examines how two types of trust – institutional and system trust – predict online banking intentions (OBI) as a function of generational cohort membership.

The study uses a cross-sectional survey of 559 U.S. Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) members using quota sampling from three generational groups: SGI (born before 1946), older boomer (born 1946–1954), and millennial (born 1977–1992).

Results showed generational cohort differences in system and institutional trust as well as OBI. Serial mediation model results showed the model where institutional trust precedes system trust best explains the relationship between generational cohort membership and OBI.

While diverse, the sample comprised of MTurk workers and relied on self-report measures of behavioral intentions, thus limiting the generalizability of our findings.

This study introduces two levels of e-trust into the technology acceptance literature and provides a guideline for financial institutions and system designers to understand the role of trust in driving online service adoption and use for different generations.

This study explores generational differences in technology use with special focus on older adults, which is yet to be fully explored in the literature. This study differentiates between two levels of e-trust and explores the order in which both trust types mediate the relationship between generational cohort membership and OBI.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the content of food advergames and the nutritional quality of foods promoted in those advergames with the presence of child visitors.

This study integrates three different sources of data, first, characteristics of the audience from internet audience measurement metrics; second, an analysis of food advergame content; and third, an analysis of the dietary quality of the foods in advergames.

The results show that 83.2 percent of the total 143 advergames are sponsored by CFBAI participating companies and 79.5 percent of the total 44 advergames reaching children are sponsored by those companies. About 87 percent of the advergames reaching children do not include age limit specification. By contrast, about 71 percent of the advergames reaching children include ad breaks and about half of the advergames reaching children include healthy lifestyle information. Compared to the total, advergames reaching children seem to have a higher level of brand integration. Moreover, most foods that the advergames promote are classified as unhealthy. Finally, the results show that ad breaks and number of brand identifiers are the two significant predictors of food advergames with child unique visitors.

Despite the increased attention to and scrutiny of innovative and interactive food marketing targeting children, little is known about the extent to which such techniques actually reach children, nor about the content and nutritional quality of foods they promote. This study attempts to fill in the gap by focussing on food advergames.

The purpose of this research was to utilize protection motivation theory, which states that individuals will take actions to protect themselves from threats when they have both knowledge of actions that will protect them from the threat and the motivation to do so, to develop a better way of training adolescents to be safe on the Internet.

This study utilized an experimental approach in a high school environment to test its hypotheses. Participants were split into two groups: a group who received a tutorial about how to stay safe on the Internet (an enactive mastery tutorial that allowed students to actually try out the skills they were learning) and a group who did not receive the training. Participants were then asked about their intentions to engage in protective behaviors, their perceived ability to do so, and the likelihood that these protective behaviors would help them to stay safer on the Internet.

The findings indicated that an enactive mastery training program increased intentions to engage in safe online behavior in the future, offering a foundation for the development of future theory-based online safety interventions.

This study was conducted in a small geographic region in schools that agreed to utilize a class period to test the enactive mastery tutorial, which limits its external validity. Furthermore, this study only measured intentions to engage in protective behaviors, not actual behaviors.

This research provides a guideline for an effective way of increasing the likelihood that adolescents will engage in protective behaviors online, which has great practical applications for teachers, administrators, PSA advertisers, etc.

This chapter provides a framework for creating programs to help adolescents engage in safer behavior. Furthermore, it introduces the idea of involvement to the protection motivation theory literature, which is a valuable variable to consider when determining how to create an effective campaign to change behavior.

This paper aims to examine the effects of narrowing social distance with celebrity endorsers (i.e. via close relationship social categories) and their origin (i.e. local or international) on consumer attitudes about advertisements. It is proposed that using such a relational approach to celebrity endorsement, where celebrities are framed as socially close social categories, leads to more favorable attitudes toward the advertisement.

A pilot test on actual advertisements and three laboratory experiments tested the proposed hypotheses on the effects of varying celebrity social distance levels, with self-referencing as mediator, on attitudes toward the advertisements.

Celebrity endorsements are more effective when the advertisement features celebrities as socially close social category; furthermore, these effects are more pronounced when the celebrity is local as opposed to foreign. The study also proposes that consumer self-referencing vis-a-vis celebrities’ social distance through framed social categories mediates these effects.

Anchored in the identity and social identity theories, implications on relational approaches to celebrity endorsements and international marketing communications are discussed together with the fact that Asian culture inherently subscribes to relational celebrity endorsements.