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"User-generated content Cross-cultural studies."
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Understanding the influencing factors on firms’ social media marketing strategies development: a cross-country investigation
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors influencing the development of social media marketing strategy in an international context. We specifically look at the potential drivers and barriers throughout the social media marketing strategy development process and how cultural differences shape social media marketing strategy decision-making among firms in international markets.Design/methodology/approachThe study is conducted with an inductive research approach involving in-depth interviews with 32 firms from Finland, China and Brazil. Using inductive data analysis, we identify both internal and external factors that drive and hinder the development of firms’ social media marketing strategies. Moreover, we explore the essential elements in social media marketing strategy development based on the key practices observed among these firms, which enables us to conduct a comparative analysis of how cultural values influence the development of social media marketing strategies.FindingsOur findings underscore the importance of both internal (i.e. resources and capabilities) and external (i.e. market-level and country-level) factors that influence the development of social media marketing strategy. Our analysis also unveiled four key practices throughout the social media marketing strategy development process: social selling, content marketing, risk management and relationship management. Additionally, we identified three distinct mindsets regarding firms’ social media selling objectives across companies in the three countries.Originality/valueThe comparative approach provides novel insight into firms' international social media marketing strategy. Our proposed conceptual model shows the development process of social media marketing strategy in the international context. The research propositions highlight the role of cultural values and open up new avenues for future research.
Journal Article
Exploring drivers of modern Hanfu purchase in digital commerce: A mixed-methods perspective
The rapid growth of the modern Hanfu market, driven by digital commerce and social media, has increased the interest in understanding consumer purchase intentions. This study investigates the key factors influencing online purchase intentions for modern Hanfu by integrating text mining, grounded theory, and quantitative analyses. A dataset of 5,992 consumer reviews from major Chinese e-commerce platforms was analyzed using natural language processing techniques to extract critical themes. Additionally, a structured survey (n = 344) was conducted to develop and validate a measurement scale for assessing the key determinants of purchase intention. The findings reveal that co-design has the strongest influence on purchase intention (β = 0.252), followed by website attractiveness (β = 0.235) and product quality (β = 0.160). Despite product quality being a dominant theme in consumer reviews, its impact on the quantitative model is moderate (β = 0.160). Social media engagement and cultural identity emerge as significant but less frequently discussed factors, while merchant service has the weakest effect (β = 0.145). This study contributes to the literature by integrating cultural identity and co-design into purchase intention models, offering theoretical insights into heritage-driven fashion consumption. Future research should explore demographic variations, cross-cultural comparisons, and longitudinal trends to further refine our understanding of modern Hanfu purchase behavior. These results suggest that the top priority of modern Hanfu brands in their marketing management activities is to encourage and promote consumer engagement. Optimizing website design, improving product quality, considering social media strategies, tapping into the essence of ethnic culture, and enhancing customer service are also important.
Journal Article
Your reviews or mine? Exploring the determinants of “perceived helpfulness” of online reviews: a cross-cultural study
E-commerce platforms allow customers to post online reviews about their products, but many of these reviews remain non-voted by existing customers. Current literature on the perceived helpfulness of online reviews has overlooked the effect of these non-voted reviews. Additionally, current studies lack the cross-cultural perspective to help analyze the influence of cultural factors during an analysis of online reviews in an e-commerce platform. This study proposes a novel cross-cultural framework using online consumer reviews from a global e-commerce retailer to investigate these shortcomings. Our study has twofold contributions: firstly, we identified the significant predictors (such as review-title, review sentiments, star rating, social context, and temporal features) of the count of helpful votes received by online reviews – both voted and non-voted. Secondly, we identified a strong moderating effect of national culture on these predictors during the perception and evaluation of global consumers’ reviews. We also performed a quantile regression across the entire distribution of the count of helpful votes. Findings from our study will guide reviewers who publish helpful and comprehensive reviews. Additionally, customers and sellers from global e-commerce firms will learn to account for cross-cultural differences on the provided features to prevent the distortion of the information content of online reviews.
Journal Article
From Ritual to Renewal: Templestays as a Cross-Cultural Model of Sustainable Wellness Tourism in South Korea
Templestay programs in South Korea represent a unique convergence of Buddhist ritual, cultural immersion, and wellness tourism. While often treated as niche cultural experiences, their broader significance within sustainable wellness tourism remains underexplored. This study examines participant reflections from the Beomeosa Templestay program through thematic analysis of over 600 reviews sourced from TripAdvisor, Google Reviews, and handwritten guestbooks. Using a triangulated framework combining Grounded Theory, Symbolic Interactionism, and the Wellness Tourism Model, the research identifies four recurring experiential themes: spiritual development, emotional healing, cultural immersion, and conscious consumption. Findings reveal cross-cultural variations: non-Korean participants emphasized spiritual exploration and cultural learning, while Korean participants prioritized emotional renewal and reconnection with heritage. Yet, across all groups, participants reported transformative outcomes, including heightened clarity, inner calm, and enhanced self-awareness. These results suggest that Templestays serve as accessible, culturally grounded wellness retreats that align with rising global demand for intentional, mindful travel. This study contributes to sustainable tourism scholarship by framing Templestays as low-impact, spiritually resonant alternatives to commercialized wellness retreats. Practical recommendations are offered to expand participation while maintaining program authenticity and safeguarding the spiritual and cultural integrity of monastic hosts in an increasingly globalized wellness landscape.
Journal Article
Exploring the Discrepancy between Projected and Perceived Destination Images: A Cross-Cultural and Sustainable Analysis Using LDA Modeling
The projected image, created by destination marketing organizations, and the perceived image, formed by tourists’ perceptions, are crucial factors in destination selection. In this paper, machine learning models are used to construct projected image dimensions and perceptual dimensions for Chinese and English to analyze the similarities and differences between projected and perceptual images and their Chinese sustainability and cultural differences issues. We take Xiamen, a seaside tourist city in China, as an example, and analyze it by collecting 110,098 official promotional texts (both in Chinese and English) and tourist online review feedback as data sources using a latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model of natural language processing. The findings show that (1) the official projected image focuses on the overall image of the destination, while the tourists’ perceived image focuses on the specific image. (2) The official projected image covers the whole area of tourism, while the tourists’ perceived image focuses on Xiamen’s well-known attractions. The results of the above two points are the same for both the Chinese and English Topic models. (3) The official projected image focuses on three dimensions of destination: sustainability-economic, socio-cultural and environmental, while the tourist perception is more in the socio-cultural and environmental dimensions. (4) Both the projected and perceived images in Chinese and English differ in cross-cultural situations. The perceived images of Chinese and British tourists are influenced by their respective cultural backgrounds. Chinese tourists’ perceptions reflect cultural values associated with collectivism, long-term orientation, and uncertainty avoidance. On the other hand, British tourists’ perceptions align with cultural values of individualism, short-term orientation, and lower uncertainty avoidance. These differences can be explained using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory. The research in this paper can provide a reference for the promotion of tourism cities, and tourism destination organizations should not only focus on sustainable promotion, but also attract domestic and foreign tourists through differentiated promotion.
Journal Article
How Digital Mythological Narratives in Video Games Enhance Audiences’ Destination Perceptions and Travel Intentions: Evidence from YouTube Comments on Black Myth: Wukong
The cross-fertilization of video games and tourism has expanded in recent years, with digital narratives increasingly shaping real-world travel behavior, yet the mechanisms linking mythological video games to pre-trip travel intention remain underexplored. Using the Chinese mythological game Black Myth: Wukong as a case, this study examines how digital myth narratives relate to overseas audiences’ perceptions of, and travel intentions towards, Chinese tourist destinations in a cross-cultural context. Based on a large corpus of YouTube comments, we integrate topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and interpretable machine learning to identify semantic cues associated with travel intention. The results indicate that multidimensional perceptions elicited by digital myth narratives are associated with a gradual evolution of destination image from cognitive to affective and then intentional. Cultural symbol perception, cross-cultural understanding, aesthetic appreciation, and emotional resonance show positive relationships with travel intention and appear as important predictors in the model. SHAP analysis further suggests a nonlinear threshold effect, whereby the probability that a comment is classified as expressing travel intention increases when overall perception reaches a relatively high level. Embedding the cognition–emotion–intention path within a digital game context, this study provides empirical evidence on destination image and behavioral intention in digital narrative settings and offers implications for cross-cultural communication and sustainable tourism planning.
Journal Article
One AI world, one dream? Cross-platform comparative study of sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence on X and Weibo
This study conducts a computational and comparative analysis to investigate cross-cultural divergences in sociotechnical imaginaries of artificial intelligence (AI), as reflected in user discourses on social media platforms Weibo and X (formerly Twitter). A total of 8741 Weibo posts and 7020 X posts were analyzed across three dimensions: theme, narrative, and sentiment. Results reveal that Weibo users emphasize national strategic goals and practical AI applications marked by prevailing optimism, while X users highlight privacy risks and ethical implications, demonstrating greater caution. These divergences illustrate how sociotechnical imaginaries of AI differ across different cultural contexts. This study further discusses how these divergences are rooted in specific sociocultural settings and, in turn, influence the distinct patterns of AI development and governance, revealing the co-constitutive dynamics among technology, society, and imagination.
Journal Article
Sentiment Modeling of Cross-Cultural Public Opinion Communication: A Case Study of the 28 March 2025 Earthquake in Sagaing Province Based on the Improved MAML Algorithm
Faced with the challenges of cross-cultural communication of public opinion in emergency events, traditional sentiment recognition methods struggle to accurately capture the complex semantics under multi-lingual and multi-symbol systems. This paper takes the powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck Myanmar in 2025 as a case study. It constructs a multi-dimensional public opinion annotation framework that integrates four types of semantic information—time, space, subject, and sentiment—by extracting data from multi-source textual materials, including social media, news reports, and government announcements. Building on this foundation, we design an improved Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) model that incorporates cultural features to enhance sentiment recognition performance in low-resource cross-linguistic scenarios. Experimental results show that the model outperforms traditional methods in terms of sentiment classification accuracy, cultural semantic deviation rate and metaphor recognition ability. Furthermore, the research reveals the coupling mechanism of public opinion communication of “cultural modulation–agenda game”, and clarifies the influence paths and weight distributions among multiple subjects. The research results provide theoretical support and practical paths for improving the governance capacity of cross-border public opinion in emergency events and the construction of multilingual monitoring models.
Journal Article
The impact of mixed eWOM sequence on brand attitude change: cross-cultural differences
Purpose
Despite the importance of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in e-commerce transactions on the global market, there is still limited understanding about the effect of eWOM sequence and its psychological mechanism in cross-cultural settings. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the differences in brand attitude changes according to the eWOM sequence, as well as cross-culturally, based on thinking styles. Furthermore, the authors examine the moderated mediation effect of perceived cognition congruency across cultures to explain its underlying mechanism.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a 2 (eWOM sequence: positive/negative, negative/positive) × 2(culture: East (South Korea), West (USA)) factorial design. Perceived cognition congruency is measured as a within-group variable.
Findings
First, brand attitude changes in the West (USA) for the negative/positive presentation order are significantly larger than for the positive/negative presentation order, while, in the East (South Korea), no significant differences exist. Second, in the Westerner group (analytical thinking style), the perceived cognition congruency shows a significant difference according to the eWOM sequence, whereas in the Easterner group (holistic thinking style), the perceived cognition congruency does not show a significant difference according to the eWOM sequence.
Practical implications
As such, a strategic interpretation of the mixed eWOM presentation order across cultures is needed. In the West, interest and attention are necessary for the eWOM sequence. However, in the East, a different strategic approach, except for the presentation order of mixed eWOM, is required. The other elements of the mixed eWOM, such as attribute type or intensity of negative information, need to be considered for mixed eWOM management.
Originality/value
This study expands the existing body of knowledge on the sequence effect of mixed eWOM. Furthermore, it provides strategic direction and practical implications for mixed eWOM-driven information management, focusing on sequence in cross-cultural settings.
Journal Article