Purpose: Over the last 50 years, increased attention for personalization paved the way for one-to-one marketing efforts, but firms struggle to deliver on this promise. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a complete picture on personalization, develop a future research agenda and put forth concrete advice on how to move the field forward from a theoretical, methodological, contextual, and practical viewpoint.Design/methodology/approach: This research follows a systematic literature review process, providing an in-depth analysis of 135 articles (covering 184 studies) to distill the (1) key building blocks and components of personalization and (2) theoretical, contextual, and methodological aspects of the studies.Findings: This manuscript uncovers six personalization components that can be linked to two personalization building blocks: (1) learning: manner, transparency, and timing and (2) tailoring: touchpoints, level, and dynamics. For each of these components, the authors propose future research avenues to stimulate personalization research that accounts for challenges in today's data-rich environments (e.g. data privacy, dealing with new data types). A theoretical, contextual, and methodological (i.e. industry, country and personalization object) review of the selected studies leads to a set of concrete recommendations for future work: account for heterogeneity, embed theoretical perspectives, infuse methodological innovation, adopt appropriate evaluation metrics, and deal with legal/ethical challenges in data-rich environments. Finally, several managerial implications are put forth to support practitioners in their personalization efforts.Originality/value: This research provides an integration of personalization research beyond existing and outdated review papers. Doing so, it accounts for the impact of new technologies and Artificial Intelligence and aims to advance the next generation of knowledge development on personalization.

Understanding consumer behavior in digital environments is increasingly becoming crucial. This study investigates the influence of key metaverse characteristics—sociability, immersiveness, and environmental fidelity—on continuance intention to use the metaverse by examining the mediating role of consumer experience. In study 1, a Delphi method involving 26 experts was employed to establish a consensus on the significance of metaverse characteristics in shaping consumer experience and behavior. In study 2, data from 391 metaverse users were collected via an online survey, and a two-step PLS-SEM approach was used to evaluate the hypothesized relationships. The Delphi study confirmed the theoretical relevance of the identified metaverse characteristics, which were subsequently validated through user data. The results show that consumer experience fully mediates the influence of immersiveness and environmental fidelity on continuance intention and partially mediates between sociability and continuance intention. Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) further established consumer experience as a prerequisite for continued metaverse use, while importance performance analysis (IMPA) identified sociability as the most influential driver of continuance intention. This study advances our theoretical understanding of consumer behavior in virtual settings and offers practical insights for enhancing consumer engagement and continued metaverse use.

Despite growing academic interest in hyper‐personalization in fashion retail, consumer adaptive behavior remains an under‐researched construct. This research addresses the gap by applying self‐determination and social comparison theories to examine how consumer motivations and willingness to co‐create influence adaptive behavior and re‐patronage intentions in hyper‐personalized fashion retail. Data from 403 online fast fashion consumers in Zimbabwe were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results indicate that consumer motivations and willingness to co‐create significantly impact adaptive behavior and re‐patronage intentions. Additionally, social comparison and privacy concerns moderate these relationships, except for utilitarian motivations. These results extend current understanding of hyper‐personalized fashion retail by introducing adaptive behavior as a key outcome and identifying psychological and contextual variables that influence it. Marketers operating in emerging markets can apply these insights to design personalization strategies.

The growth of social media technologies has triggered an acceleration of interest in customer engagement (CE) in tourism and marketing. Hence, the current chapter develops and suggests a theoretical model to determine the relationships among social media technologies, relationship quality (i.e., trust and satisfaction), CE creation (positive emotions and CE) and CE contributions (i.e., behavioral intention, word of mouth, and firm performance) in the post-COVID-19 pandemic. Further, this study examines the moderating role of customers' COVID-19 perceptions between the proposed modeled relationships. The current chapter offers significant contributions to CE-based tourism and hospitality literature. Tourism and hospitality practitioners can refer to this study to obtain useful insights regarding the benefits of social media technologies, relationship formation, CE creation, and CE contributions. The chapter concludes by delineating important implications that arise from the study, followed by further research opportunities.

Customer engagement (CE) research has been increasingly developed in recent years. With the increased utilization of technology in customer engagement, tech-based solutions such as virtual reality (VR) are transforming customer engagement. Therefore, there is a need to understand the evolving patterns and thematic trends in the CE literature that has been developed concerning VR. Hence, this study provides a broad overview of CE literature developed around VR using a systematic literature review method. To achieve this aim, this study uses the theories, contexts, and methods framework based on the content and thematic analysis of 36 peer-reviewed articles. Finally, we develop a future research agenda that helps customer engagement scholarship to move the field forward through VR. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->