Dear Assistant Prof. Moon,

These articles have been hand-picked by the newsletter co-ordinator Dr Chris Hodkinson from the University of Queensland and are available until Friday 3 June 2016.

Announcing new Associate Editors

We would like to thank Professor Craig Lefebvre for his valuable work as one of our inaugural associate editors and wish him well as he finishes his term. 

The increasing number of submissions to the journal (in 2015 this was over 400) has led to the need for three additional associate editors to join the team.  After receiving a large number of expressions of interest, we are pleased to announce the addition of the following scholars; two with expertise in the social media/mobile phone/e-services field and one with a long history of contribution to the services field. 

• Professor J. Joseph Cronin, John R. Kerr Eminent Scholar Chair in Marketing and Service Innovation Department of Marketing Florida State University
• Associate Professor Raechel Johns, Head of School of Management, University of Canberra
• Associate Professor Ramendra Thakur, The Lafayette Coca-Cola Professor of Marketing, University of Louisiana

We have also refreshed our editorial advisory board this year with a number of additions and some departures. For a full list of members visit our website.

Co-creating value with service customers through social media

The concept of the co-creation of value is well established in marketing.  Similarly, social media is a well-established, if somewhat uncontrollable, element of the marketing environment with the ability both to build and destroy brand equity.  Tzu-Yi Kao et al. have developed their IEPR process model to assist enterprises in facilitating social media value co-creation with their customers.

Invisible cultural differences

Intercultural service encounters are an inevitable outcome of globalisation and they are challenging to manage as their service outcomes can be variable and sometimes harmful to perceptions of service quality. Researchers have often assumed that intercultural dimensions are unidimensional in nature but in this study Sharma et al. combine cross-cultural differences in service expectations with recent work on personal cultural orientations. The net result is an experimental design that uses data from two countries across four personal cultural orientations.

Spreading the bad news? Depends on your focus

Despite the rapid growth of e-tailing, research has mainly focussed on factors external to the consumer, for example the security and privacy environment. Innovatively, using Regulatory Focus Theory (a ‘goal pursuit theory’) as a basis, Das devised a laboratory-based experiment to investigate how consumers’ personal characteristics influence e-tailing behaviours. Shoppers were classified as either ‘promotion-focussed’ (ie achievement-oriented) or ‘prevention-focussed’ (ie risk-avoidant). Their on-line behaviours were studied in relation to purchase intentions, product review, and spreading positive word-of-mouth