Dr Ameet Pandit

This study explores the interlinkages between artificial intelligence (AI), dynamic capabilities, and relationship marketing (RM) outcomes. Drawing upon insights from dynamic capabilities and RM theory, this study delineates the strategies and initiatives organizations can adopt using machine learning (ML) and AI to enhance their adaptability to changing market dynamics and customer preferences, in order to develop and maintain stronger relationships with their customers. Based on qualitative data from 67 interviews with managers in different organizations in India, this study contributes to existing theoretical knowledge and managerial practices, as it proposes a comprehensive research framework that demonstrates how AI technologies can enhance customer relationships throughout the entire customer journey. More specifically, it adopts a dynamic capabilities lens to extend our understanding of the marketing applications of AI by conceptualizing the dual role of AI as (a) a distinct organizational capability and (b) an enabler of dynamic capabilities, improving firms' position to sense, seize, and transform organizational resources and fortify customer relationships. Our findings also highlight several facilitators and barriers to the adoption of AI, both as a dynamic capability and as an enabler for RM.

Purpose: Social media has transformed communication possibilities for immigrant consumers with their home country in their acculturation efforts. However, the acculturative outcomes of consumer interactions with the home country through social media are largely overlooked in previous research. This study aims to investigate the acculturative processes and outcomes resulting from interacting with the home country through social media. Design/methodology/approach: A netnographic approach is used to collect data from a social media platform that provides an interactive social context in which Iranian immigrants in Australia share their experiences of immigration with non-immigrants who are considering and planning to migrate to Australia. Findings: Findings show how both immigrants and non-immigrant users via social media reflexively contribute to the formation of two competing collective narratives, namely, the dominant, romanticizing narrative and counter, pragmatic narratives. Findings highlight how notions of the home and host countries, and the idea of migrating from home to host, are constructed as the result of the circulation of the dominant and counter narratives. Further findings include how these two collective narratives come into play in the formation of three acculturative outcomes, namely, self-validating, ordinary experts and wellbeing. These insights extend consumer acculturation theory through highlighting the acculturative processes and outcomes of interactions with the home country via a social media platform. This includes, for example, how interacting with the home culture can take on assimilationist properties through the construction of a romanticized representation of the hosting society (i.e. Australia) in the dominant collective narrative. Practical implications: Implications for ethnic marketing practice, policymakers and non-governmental organisations are advanced, especially regarding using social media as a channel to communicate with current and potential immigrant consumers. Notably, policymakers can use social media to engage with immigrants before and after migration to reduce the potential for cognitive dissonance in recent arrivals. Managerially, brands can advertise on Web-based forums, independent websites and social media platforms to target potential immigrants to sell relevant products immigrants needs after migrating to the host country. Social implications: Findings broaden the understanding of the potential acculturative outcomes on social media by moving away from the traditional outcomes, which are restricted to the dichotomy between the home and host cultures. Originality/value: Scholarly attention is deficient on the role of direct interaction with the home country in immigrant consumer acculturation, especially through social media, which is the focus of this study.

Social media supports the creative economy through its involvement in the adoption and appropriation of new innovation and accelerates economic growth. The current paper expands on this notion by identifying and analyzing the interaction between social media-based communities and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as it examines how social media contributes to the knowledge co-creation and supports the adoption, use and appropriation of smartphones in South Asian countries, which are inhabited by approximately 1.6 billion people. The findings obtained through virtual ethnography (VE) provide insights into the dynamics and kinetics of knowledge co-creation and how that benefits large multinationals, small local businesses and consumers in developing societies. As such, we advance the knowledge management scholarship by presenting a holistic model of co-creation of knowledge involving multiple stakeholders.

In this research, we expand our understanding of how aesthetic products induce shoppers' responses at the point of sale. We advance and test a more integrative approach in which not only the sensory evaluations of the aesthetic product, but also the shoppers' personal goals affect their purchase responses. Study 1 uses a lab setting to reveal that shoppers' sensory evaluations of a new apartment elicit feelings of attachment, which mediate the effect of the apartment's aesthetic features on shoppers' purchase responses. Further, shoppers assess the extent to which the product will contribute to attaining personal goals, which moderates the effect of emotional attachment on purchase responses. Study 2 replicates these findings using a field-study approach. In contrast to prior research, our results show that affective processing is not the sole driver of shoppers' responses to aesthetic products, as its effect is moderated by cognitive evaluations of whether social status and materialistic goals will be attained through the acquisition of the aesthetic product. We discuss how both retailers and manufacturers who market aesthetic products can benefit from appealing to the personal goals of their shoppers.