Special Session: Marketing and Consumer Wellbeing in Digital Environment: An Abstract

Abstract

The objective of this special session is to explore the intersections among marketing, consumer well-being, and digital environment. The proposed research presentations will address a wide range of cutting-edge topics—digital unengagement, access economy, smart interactive services, social media spokesperson character, influencer, and compulsive media use. These topics are timely, novel, and important and thus are expected to stimulate active discussions at the AMS conference. This special session attends to consumer well-being in digital environment in two ways: physical well-being and psychological well-being. As for the former, we attempt to explore the impact of interactive health applications and smart services. As for the latter, we focus on a social media environment and access economy, where issues related to world-of-mouth from and proper product/service representation are increasingly important. We strongly believe that this special session will effectively deliver one of the key AMS missions—“promoting high standards and excellence in the creation and dissemination of marketing knowledge and the furtherance of marketing practice through a role of leadership within the discipline of marketing around the world.” This session unites scholars from the United Kingdom and Japan, two of the G20 members that represent an important portion of world digital economy. The United Kingdom along with Germany account for 25% of the top 100 digital multinational enterprises, including Internet platforms, e-commerce, and digital content firms (UNCTAD 2017). Likewise, Japan is considered as the innovation hubs of automation, sensory technologies, and artificial intelligence (LSE Consulting 2018). Therefore, our research presentations may reflect important organizational and technological transformations in the business environment.