The emergence of the urban sophisticate consumer has led to changing consumption patterns in the global retail landscape. While there has been a surge in academic literature examining various aspects of urban sophistication, empirical studies examining the attributes of the urban sophisticated consumer in the context of fashion apparel, fashion accessories, and grooming products still need to be included. This study investigates the concept of ‘urban sophisticate’ consumers in the context of marketing, branding, and retailing for the first time. It has proposed a conceptual framework for retailing to urban sophisticates through a qualitative inductive method based on the empirical analysis of the open essay-based responses collected from working men in the UK. The factors making this consumer segment lucrative for retailers include high spending power, focus on appearance, desire for quality, and the availability of unique products as per their preferences. Urban sophisticate consumers prefer modern, high-end fashion items and have shown displeasure towards unsustainable fast fashion. The study's findings will benefit grooming product companies, fashion apparel and accessories marketers, and retailers by providing insights into the behaviour of urban sophisticate consumers. Furthermore, this study could be a turning point to elicit marketers' experimentation in designing new products and expanding their product base to include additional product offerings that could interest urban sophisticates.

Ethical consumer behaviour has been receiving much attention in recent times, due to heightened social issue on sustainability, corporate social responsibility and ethical consumption from the community. Integrated with the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) Theory, this study investigates the influences of altruistic, biospheric, and hedonic values on ethical buying behaviour under the mediating mechanism of behavioural beliefs, personal norms, and subjective norms. Moreover, the present research also explores the moderating effects of perceived product quality and social stigma in the relationship between subjective norms, personal norms and ethical buying behaviour. A cross-sectional survey design approach was employed where data were gathered from students studying in India. The findings indicate that altruistic, biospheric, and hedonic values have an indirect impact on ethical buying behaviour via related behavioural beliefs, personal norms, and subjective norms. The moderating roles of quality and stigma show some interesting counteracting influences. Product quality was found to enhance the subjective norms and ethical buying behaviour relationship while undermining the relationship between personal norms and ethical buying behaviour. By contrast, stigma reduced the influence of subjective norms but enhanced the effect of personal norms on ethical buying behaviour. The work adds to the ethical consumption literature by combining theoretical perspectives and emphasising the complexity of how these moderating variables function in ethical decision-making. The findings provide both theoretical implications from the perspective of the psychological mechanism of ethical behaviour and managerial implications for firms looking to motivate ethical consumption.

Solo dining has gained substantial recognition in the restaurant business worldwide. Considering the growing trend of solo dining, it has attracted increasing interest from academia and industry. Since the current stage of knowledge on solo dining practices and their management is limited and scattered, it requires integration to provide scholars with an outline of the current state of knowledge in this field, as well as the industry expert insights. To address this issue, the current study applies a mixed-method approach to first gather insights from the existing literature by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR). Subsequently, in order to substantiate SLR findings, a qualitative study is designed to garner industry expert views on solo dining experience, enhancing restaurant practices and strategies. The SLR has revealed three distinct thematic areas, such as solo dining antecedents, solo diner's experience while dining, and the solo diner's outcome behaviour. Based on these insights, it was necessary to identify the practical takeaways for the restaurants in the hospitality industry; therefore, a qualitative study was designed following the mixed-method approach of research design. The empirical results present solo dining strategies implemented by restaurant owners and staff. The Gioia technique of qualitative analysis of data brought forward four solo dining aggregate dimensions presenting the solo diner's profile, adaptive comfort, human touch, and restaurant strategies. This study makes a novel contribution to the solo dining literature by identifying psychophysiological aspects of solo dining and offering managerial insights for restaurant industry professionals.

Purpose – This study utilizes intellectual capital theory (ICT) to examine the impact of intellectual agility, digital creativity, platform readiness, algorithmic autonomy support, networking competence and emotional congruence on the social media reuse likelihood of employees. This study also explores the moderating role of platform literacy between intellectual capital dimensions and social media reuse likelihood. Design/methodology/approach – This study employed a cross-sectional, quantitative research design by collecting data from 300 employees working across diverse industries. Covariance-based structured equation modelling is used to analyse the data and test the hypotheses. Findings – The findings demonstrate that intellectual agility, digital creativity, platform readiness and algorithmic autonomy significantly shape the social media reuse likelihood of employees. The results also established the moderating role of platform literacy between digital creativity, networking competence and social media reuse likelihood. Originality/value – This study offers a novel framework grounded in intellectual capital theory by integrating dimensions of human capital, structural capital, relational capital and platform literacy to predict the social media reuse likelihood of employees in technology-centred workplaces.