This study investigates how social media exposure shapes young adults’ attitudes and intentions toward sustainable products in Kuwait—a high-income, oil-dependent context undergoing a digital and cultural shift. Integrating the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), the research explores the mediating roles of environmental responsibility, social influence, and consumer attitudes in the formation of sustainable purchase intentions. Data were collected via an online survey of 702 respondents aged 18–30 and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). The findings reveal that social media usage significantly influences sustainable purchase intention, social influence, and consumer attitudes. Environmental responsibility emerges as a key driver of both attitudinal and normative pathways. Notably, the study finds no direct link between consumer attitude and intention, highlighting a persistent attitude–behavior gap. The results offer theoretical insights into digital persuasion and normative influence while providing practical guidance for marketers and policymakers promoting sustainability in digitally connected, non-Western societies.

1. AI is reshaping service economies and organisational decision processes (Bennett and Bennett 2026; Grewal et al. 2025). Predictive analytics, automated decisions and algorithmic interactions are...

Purpose: This study aims to examine how customer experience (CX) management aligns with broader marketing strategy in B2B contexts, focusing on how the stability of the supplier’s interacting team and the use of financial incentives jointly shape CX and subsequent buyer behaviour. This study conceptualises CX–marketing alignment as a dynamic organisational capability that balances structural continuity and behavioural adaptability. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed-methods approach was used. Study 1 used a quantitative two-wave time-lagged design involving B2B customers in the UK, ensuring temporal separation between predictors and outcomes. Study 2 involved semi-structured interviews with a subset of these customers to contextualise and interpret the quantitative findings. Findings: Results show that the stability of the supplier’s interacting team strengthens the influence of supplier offerings on CX by enhancing factual, emotional and social experiences, while limiting the impact on sagacious experience. Financial incentives weaken the link between sagacious experience and behaviour but enhance the effect of social experience. These mechanisms demonstrate that CX–marketing alignment functions as a paradoxical and dynamic process of balancing continuity and adaptation. Research limitations/implications: This study positions CX–marketing alignment as a dynamic organisational capability balancing continuity and adaptability. Future research could extend this perspective by linking paradox management to ambidexterity, dynamic capabilities and systems theory, and by examining how digitalisation and artificial intelligence-driven marketing systems reshape alignment across industries and cultural contexts. Practical implications: This study highlights two managerial levers for sustained CX alignment: maintaining stable yet adaptable customer-facing teams and designing balanced incentive systems that promote both relational continuity and behavioural flexibility. Originality/value: This study demonstrates that CX–marketing alignment is not a static organisational condition but a dynamic, tension-laden capability shaped by two interdependent mechanisms: structural continuity, reflected in supplier team stability and economic control, reflected in financial incentives. Its success depends on how firms manage the paradox between relational continuity and behavioural adaptability.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is embedded in professional service work, yet its consequences remain uneven and capability dependent. This study examines how GenAI usage shapes organisational gains and risks in B2B marketing agencies and how absorptive capacity and customer orientation selectively configure these outcomes. Drawing on Sociotechnical Systems and Dynamic Capabilities theories, the research combines interviews with agency managers (n = 20), a two wave survey (n = 425) and archival financial data (n = 255).GenAI usage strengthens employee content creativity, employee experience, marketing performance and financial performance. It also improves fulfilment of client data privacy expectations, indicating stronger privacy risk management, while increasing employee job insecurity. Absorptive capacity weakens employee and commercial gains and privacy risk management, but reduces workforce risk. Customer orientation strengthens employee and commercial gains and privacy risk management, yet does not reduce job insecurity. Archival results show positive associations with profit margin, labour productivity and revenue growth, but not return on assets.The study develops a capability trade off explanation of GenAI value creation. Rather than treating organisational capabilities as interchangeable or uniformly value enhancing, it shows that knowledge integration and market facing capabilities produce contrasting effects across employee, commercial, privacy and workforce domains. This extends Sociotechnical Systems theory by explaining how outcomes coexist within the same work system and refines Dynamic Capabilities theory by showing that capability value depends on the outcome pursued.For managers, GenAI deployment should combine customer focused application with employee safeguards, privacy controls, human oversight and capability development tailored to the outcomes sought.