Explore the vast range of titles available.

Although several urban design and planning features, such as community spaces, green infrastructure, and traffic measures that prioritise pedestrians and children, have been identified as important characteristics of child-friendly cities and neighbourhoods, there remains a gap in our understanding regarding the specific elements of children’s daily environments that influence their experiences. This study focuses on the everyday activity spaces of children (aged 9–12) living in physically and socially diverse neighbourhoods of low-to-average income in Ankara, Turkey. Drawing on findings from thematic and qualitative GIS-based analyses of 40 participatory map-based focus groups with 217 children, this study aims to understand how neighbourhood design influences children’s everyday experiences across different neighbourhood types and genders. By visualising children’s perceptions of their neighbourhoods and activity spaces, and thematically analysing their comments related to neighbourhood design features that may facilitate positive and negative experiences, this child-centred study contributes to the limited research on children’s experiences of place. Our findings revealed key neighbourhood design features influencing children’s experiences and highlighted gender-based differences. While natural settings were valued across settings and genders, boys reported more physical activities in open spaces while girls more frequently emphasised the need for accessible playgrounds and natural settings. Children in urban neighbourhoods frequented streets, parks, and local shops more often, while those in suburban and sprawling areas preferred amenities near their homes. The study demonstrates that children’s positive everyday experiences can be supported by modifying the neighbourhood design, providing valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers on developing more child-friendly neighbourhoods.

Purpose A place brand is a culmination of its exclusive history, people and traditions that affect customer and community experiences. Place branding has become increasingly important for collective heritage brand strategy, as stakeholders undertake efforts to create an aura of a distinctive geographic location. Though place branding has received considerable scholarly attention, there is a lacuna: the role of residents as co-creators of a place and its heritage. Accordingly, this paper aims to develop a “bi-directional participatory place branding” model by applying the stimulus–organism–response approach grounded theory. Design/methodology/approach A grounded theory approach with multi-sited ethnography, personal interviews (with residents and city leaders) and observational techniques were adopted in a UNESCO world heritage city of India, Ahmedabad. Findings The findings indicate that the people (residents) aspect of place branding is associated with their life stories, past experiences, feelings and aspirations. However, the place acts as a nostalgia enabler, disseminating symbolic and heritage metaphors to residents and visitors as place brand ambassadors. When the place and people components are perceived positively, residents participate involve themselves with the place and thus, in turn, become the place ambassadors. Originality/value No prior studies have analyzed the association between residents, the place where they reside and the resultant behavior toward the place. The unique contribution is the bi-directional participatory place branding model, especially involving a UNESCO world heritage city rather than solely a site.

With the growth of the wellness tourism industry, cultural tourism destinations offering authentic experiences for well-being are attracting increasing attention. In this context, this study aims to explore the place experiences of Templestay, Korea's representative cultural and authenticity-seeking tourism destination, through an analysis of participant reviews. It seeks to contribute to strengthening Templestay's spatial characteristics as a destination pursuing authenticity. Unstructured data were collected from portal sites and SNS travel reviews of Templestay, with 22,736 pieces of data analyzed through text refinement. Text mining and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling analysis were employed on the collected textual big data. The LDA topic modeling analysis revealed two topics related to Templestay's place experiences: spatial activity and physical environment, highlighting tourists' perception of authenticity. Leveraging these findings in destination marketing strategies for Templestay can offer customized information for authenticity pursuits and enhance its appeal as cultural tourism. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of tourism studies and the development of the wellness tourism industry as a sustainable tourism model by empirically analyzing the place experiences of Templestay as a tourism destination oriented toward authenticity using big data.

This research focuses on the significance of place experiences in shaping effective place branding strategies. It introduces a novel method that leverages social media data analytics to uncover and understand place experiences, addressing the challenges of capturing these elusive experiences. The study examines the 20 major cities in the Nordic region, investigating both common and distinctive place experiences among them. Additionally, it explores the changes in place experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, shedding light on the impact of the crisis on people’s experiences in those cities. The research collected a dataset of 1,943,772 tweets associated with the 20 cities from 2017 to 2022, and employed various analytical techniques including topic modelling, associative word analysis, and principal component analysis to analyse and visualise the place experiences. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the practical applications of generative AI in place branding by using Midjourney and GPT-4 to create branding materials that capture the unique experiences of a city. Overall, the research contributes to the understanding of place experiences, introduces a multi-level perspective, and highlights the potential of generative AI in place branding.

Current research regarding the experiences of African American women in higher education clusters staff, faculty, and students together, overlooking the unique contributions and challenges of each cohort. The purpose of this article is to explore the opinions and experiences of African American women in student affairs administration, in order to add to the body of knowledge regarding women in student affairs. Implications for best practices for African American women in student affairs administration are discussed, and recommendations for further research are provided.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the in situ place experiences of people in Luton and Darlington.Design/methodology/approachThe study used 109,998 geotagged tweets from Luton and Darlington between 2020 and 2022 and conducted topic modelling using latent Dirichlet allocation. Lexicons were created using GPT-4 to evaluate the eight dimensions of place experience for each topic.FindingsThe study found that Darlington had higher counts in the sensorial, behavioural, designed and mundane dimensions of place experience than Luton. Conversely, Luton had a higher prevalence of the affective and intellectual dimensions, attributed to political and faith-related tweets.Originality/valueThe study introduces a novel approach that uses AI-generated lexicons for place experience. These lexicons cover four facets, two intentions and two intensities of place experience, enabling detection of words from any domain. This approach can be useful not only for town and destination brand managers but also for researchers in any field.

PurposePersonnel, particularly frontline employees, represent the face of retailers and help promote the brand, enhancing customer loyalty and satisfaction through positive interactions. This research examines retailing versus non-retailing marketing positions to uncover factors that can increase job satisfaction in retail: work environment factors, job characteristics and psychological factors. These factors allow for a holistic view of today’s competitive market that addresses human motivation theory and reveals important insights for attracting and retaining retail talent who can provide compelling, positive experiences for customers.Design/methodology/approachSurvey research provided the means to collect data and compare retailing versus non-retailing marketing positions. A paid online panel of 2,334 marketing and retail professionals yielded 659 completed surveys. To capture workplace experience of retailers and other marketing professionals, the study measured work environment factors (compensation, customers, recognition received, supervisor support and co-workers), job characteristics (performance feedback, power and control, work variety, autonomy and altruistic opportunity) and psychological factors (job stress, work overload, role conflict and job burnout).FindingsThe findings suggest that job characteristics, psychological outcomes, organizational factors, family support and altruistic opportunity affect retail employee satisfaction. These findings offer actionable responses for retailers in their quest to attract and retain retail employees in today’s competitive job market and, in turn, enrich the customer experience journey.Research limitations/implicationsCompetition for the best marketing people to work in retail and avoiding negative interactions between retail employees and customers can be expected to increase brand competitiveness. This research was based on survey responses of individuals in marketing positions suggesting individuals that care about their marketing careers. This research has implications for marketing leadership with regard to critical issues of today’s retail personnel. There is an opportunity to make a difference. Without highly satisfied employees, retail will continue to face challenges in finding and keeping individuals who enhance the customer journey and promote desirable brand experiences. Research consistently shows that when job characteristics, satisfiers and stress are negative aspects of the job, people shift to other jobs that provide more personal career fulfillment (Leider et al., 2016; Stamolampros et al., 2019). Even carefully executed digital marketing, strategic data analytics, aesthetics and promotions cannot drive customers to become raving fans of a retail brand without satisfied employees. Retail personnel are critical as they represent the brand and have a significant impact on the customer experience. With limited resources available to retail management, a priority could be in recruiting and training managers to attract and retain the best retail workers and improve the customer experience. Creating positive customer connections is critical in retail.Practical implicationsPractically, this research provides insight into specific areas that need strategic management action to make retail more appealing.Originality/valueThe study provides an overview and comparison of the key aspects of job satisfaction in retail marketing positions compared with non-retail marketing positions.

With the growth of the wellness tourism industry, cultural tourism destinations offering authentic experiences for well-being are attracting increasing attention. In this context, this study aims to explore the place experiences of Templestay, Korea’s representative cultural and authenticity-seekingtourism destination, through an analysis of participant reviews. It seeks to contribute to strengthening Templestay’s spatial characteristics as a destination pursuing authenticity. Unstructured data were collected from portal sites and SNS travel reviews of Templestay, with 22,736 pieces of data analyzed through text refinement. Text mining and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling analysiswere employed on the collected textual big data. The LDA topic modeling analysis revealed two topics related to Templestay’s place experiences: spatial activity and physical environment, highlighting tourists’ perception of authenticity. Leveraging these findings in destination marketing strategies for Templestay can offer customized information for authenticity pursuits and enhance its appeal as cultural tourism. This study contributes to the theoretical understanding of tourism studies and the development of the wellness tourism industry as a sustainable tourism model by empirically analyzing the place experiences of Templestay as a tourism destination oriented toward authenticity using big data.

Spatial media bring out new forms of interaction with places, leading to the emergence of new ways of embodying the experience. The perception of place and its dynamics of change has been multiplied by the emergence of digital platforms, which create many and varied representations of place in spatial media. These representations are dependent on the digital platforms’ ecosystem, formed by platform-specific mechanisms of digital placemaking. The study applied text mining techniques and statistical methods to explore the role of user-generated content as a digital placemaking practice in shaping place experience. The online reviews were collected from Google Maps for 23 places from Poznań, Poland. The analysis showed that place experience is described by three dimensions: attributes, practices and atmosphere, or place practices that most closely reflect the specificity of a place. The place attributes blurred the boundaries between their digital images, whereas the atmosphere dimension reduces the diversity and uniqueness of the place. In conclusion, user-generated content (UGC) as an element of the process of digital placemaking increases place awareness and democratizes human participation in its creation, yet it affects its reduction to homogeneous information processed through mechanisms operating within a given digital platform.

Recent advances in the accessibility and reliability of mobile technologies, roaming services and associated data have led to an increased use of modern navigational devices using Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This paper reports on a study that explored concerns about over-reliance on these navigational technologies, specifically among young people in the Global North. Based on an experiment in which participants were asked to navigate a series of different (unfamiliar) routes on foot, using different navigational technologies each time, we argue that routes navigated are more memorable, and the process of way-finding is more enjoyable, when navigational tools/methods enable sensory and social interactions. GNSS aids, although claimed by participants as their preferred navigational aid, were the least enabling in this regard. We conclude that, although concerns about young people's way-finding abilities may be overstated, the importance of sensory and social interactions with(in) environments might usefully be borne in mind in the development of future GNSS aids and locative media.