Purpose: This paper aims to examine the influence of a brand’s innovativeness and green image on customers’ sensory, affective, cognitive, relational and behavioral brand experience and, through that, on brand satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach: To collect primary data, the study used a list of 1,754 e-mail addresses from a hotel in Norway. Of the invited respondents, 283 completed the questionnaire. Findings: The study shows positive influences of perceived brand innovativeness and green image on the experience dimensions. The influences of the brand experience dimensions on brand satisfaction are mixed. The results indicate that the brand experience dimensions partially mediate the influences of perceived brand innovativeness and green image on brand satisfaction. The study also shows a positive influence of perceived brand innovativeness on perceived green image. Practical implications: The paper highlights the importance of carefully managing brands’ innovativeness and green image to improve brand experiences and satisfaction with the hotel. Originality/value: Few studies exist on hotel brand experience, and therefore, future studies should identify antecedents and consequences of hotel brand experience (King, 2017; Khan and Rahman, 2017). This paper examines the role of hotel brand experiences with an explicit focus on the antecedents of such experiences.

Financial access is considered a crucial element of entrepreneurship. Much of the literature focuses on how individual actors demand or supply finance, but rarely within the context of systemic entrepreneurship. The current entrepreneurial finance literature is fragmented and rooted in various traditions. However, the entrepreneur’s perceived role in aggregated wealth creation is currently being strengthened, most recently by the emerging entrepreneurial ecosystem perspective. This calls for exploring the role of finance in systemic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems. By conducting a systematic literature review of financial determinants, sources and effects, the study synthesizes debates across the different research fields, i.e. finance, entrepreneurship and regional development. As the entrepreneurial ecosystem concept is considered a pre-paradigmatic approach, the paper argues that the role of finance depends on how we regard and define ecosystems. The state of knowledge is also underdeveloped due to the obstacles of acquiring longitudinal data. Such issues keep us from achieving a better evolutionary and processual understanding of the financial dynamics in ecosystems and, therefore, presents a promising avenue for future research.

Although a few studies have examined the influences of the co-creation elements of dialogue, access, risk assessment, and transparency (DART), little is known about the mechanisms underlying these influences. In this article, we empirically study the DART element’s influences on brand experience strength and brand satisfaction, and we explore how brand experience strength mediates the DART elements’ influences on brand satisfaction. We use a brand engagement perspective to explain how the co-creation elements influence brand experience strength. A survey (n = 594) of brands from the banking, mobile, hotel, and restaurant services is reported. We find direct influences from all four co-creation elements on brand experience strength, and we find that brand experience strength partly mediates the influences of risk assessment and transparency on brand satisfaction. The results are compared across utilitarian (bank and mobile) and hedonic (hotel and restaurant) services.

This paper aims to advance the understanding of the experience-satisfaction relationship and the impact of the event context on such a relationship. In particular, there is an interplay between four dimensions of experience (i.e. affective, cognitive, physical, and novel) and satisfaction. The current study builds upon a primary dataset consisting of 1599 responses obtained from visitors attending two leisure activities, namely, a sport event and a music festival in Norway. The results show that the four experience dimensions’ direct effects on satisfaction differ between the two types of activities. The impact of affective engagement on satisfaction is significantly higher at the music festival than at the sport event, and the impact of cognitive engagement on satisfaction is significant at the sport event but not at the music festival. This paper highlights the importance of carefully managing events and festival engagement profiles to improve visitor satisfaction. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature by showing that the values assigned by respondents to cognitive, physical, and novel engagement differ significantly between sport events and music festivals and are contextually dependent.

In recent years, many coastal cities in Scandinavia and the Baltic region have invested heavily in hosting sailing events as a means to spark local development and as a tool to attract tourists. However, scant research has examined visitors to those events, particularly in terms of their profile characteristics and expenditure patterns. Against this backdrop, this study aims to shed more light on the characteristics of visitors to such events and their spending patterns by using primary data from 1011 attendees to the German sailing event Warnemünder Woche held in Rostock in summer 2013. Insights offered by this research are important from both an economic and a marketing standpoint. Regarding the first point, the study delivers key evidence on visitors’ origin, primary motivation, and average spending, which constitute crucial input variables for future ex ante economic impact assessments of comparable events (e.g. Tall Ships’ Races and other sailing events hosted along the coast in Scandinavia and Baltic countries). Regarding the second, by providing a clear-cut picture of event visitors’ profile and spending patterns, this research offers a fertile agenda for further marketing inquiries and practical endeavors for Warnemünder Woche’s organizers and marketers. Accordingly, several cases for action are highlighted.

This research assess the role of traditional food producers’ activities in fostering local sustainability in Poland. The study was carried out at the turn of 2021 and 2022, involving a sample of 70 traditional food producers. It utilized semi-structured interviews, which included two categories of questions: the characteristics of traditional food producers and the significance of their operational goals. Given the unique nature of traditional food in Poland, producers can be categorized into three groups, based on their connection to tradition: local, regional, and national. Differences among these groups were analyzed using a series of t-tests. The findings indicate that in the hierarchy of goals for traditional food producers, socio-cultural objectives take precedence, followed by business goals, while goals related to food safety, quality, and environmental responsibility rank as the least important, with significant differences noted. Producers associated with local traditions, predominantly consisting of family businesses, show the least interest in achieving food safety, quality, and environmental responsibility objectives. While traditional food producers in Poland are adopting pro-ecological practices, these are primarily driven by business considerations and market demands.