Purpose: “Contactless service” refers to the use of technology in providing products or services without a salesperson. This study explores the mechanism underlying Millennial and Generation Z (M/Z generations) consumers' preference for contactless service over salespersons in retail stores. In addition, this study tests differences between the M/Z generations.Design/methodology/approach: The researchers predict characteristics to be antecedents of young consumer's preference for contactless service over salespersons and that the effects are mediated by technology self-efficacy. Next, a moderating variable (perceived consumer conformity) is added in the path between technology self-efficacy and the preference for contactless service. The hypotheses are tested among 142 Gen Z and 137 Millennial respondents.Findings: The results show that M/Z generations’ characteristics significantly influence the preference for contactless service, except for security seeking. Also, interests in new technology and safety seeking are perceived higher by M/Z generations. The influence of technology self-efficacy on the preference for contactless service is moderated by social conformity.Originality/value: As retail technology rapidly develops, the service industry is expected to change from the past, where salespersons played an important role, to contactless services. This study has academic and practical values, for the authors clarify the underlying psychological mechanisms of why young consumers prefer retail technology rather than communication with salespersons.

Consumers are becoming increasingly aware and sensitive to the negative environmental impact caused by the fashion industry and by consumers’ high consumption of fashion. This study analyzes people’s unfiltered comments and behaviors on social media sites related to the sustainability of fashion products. Recently, the number of social media data, called big data, has exploded, transcending the level that can be analyzed with existing tools. This study aims to identify consumers’ perceptions of sustainable fashion using the search words “sustainable fashion” to examine public opinion trends found in SNS big data. Text mining was employed to extract meaningful words from the SNS texts using semantic network analysis to analyze the connectivity and propagation trends. The text data were collected from Facebook using the Google search engine to detect tendencies in the occurrence of keywords related to sustainable fashion in SNS over the past five years (2016~2020). The results revealed that the keywords “eco-friendly”, “ethical”, and “recycle” had the highest frequency and centrality. As a result of grouping the keywords based on their correlations, sustainable fashion texts from the SNS data could be classified into four groups: “supply chain of sustainable fashion”, “circular fashion”, “fashion business concepts for sustainability”, and “academic importance of sustainable fashion”. This study strengthens the extent of research by using SNS big data and provides guidelines for product development and communication strategies for a sustainable fashion industry based on customers’ meaningful opinions.

With global recession and growing international competition among brands, cross-border acquisitions (CBAs) are increasing in the luxury industry. Since country-of-origin (COO) plays a large role in a luxury brand’s image, a CBA that changes the nationality of the company owning the luxury brand and modifies consumer COO knowledge can influence consumer brand perception. This study explores the influence of a luxury brand’s CBA on perceived brand value and the moderation effect of brand loyalty. In the case of a CBA by a company associated with a superior country image, only perceptions of low-loyalty consumers are affected positively by the CBA information. In the case of a CBA by a company associated with an inferior country image, only perceptions of high-loyalty consumers are affected negatively by the CBA information. The result of this study provides a deep understanding of how consumer brand perception is influenced by the changes of brand-country association.