Although there are professional journals in the field of marketing management domestically, it is still unfathomable that few marketing articles are published in comprehensive journals on marketing such as the Journal of Management and Business Research. At the invitation of Editor-in-Chief Wei-Chi Tsai, this special issue on “Consuming Behavior and Marketing Strategy in New Era” was published to encourage scholars in marketing to spread their knowledge to the academic field.

The highlight in the theme of the special issue has its roots in the dynamic and diverse marketing environment, which is a product of trends in digitalization and the aging population. The marketing academia and practical world of marketing face new challenges and keenly await new marketing research to introduce a new way of management thinking. Consequently, we especially welcomed manuscripts with innovative perspectives, progressive trends, local features, cross-specialty integration, and multiple research methods.

This special issue has tie-ins with the conference. After a half year of calling for papers, 70 were received in the first stage. To fortify the goals of discussion and interaction during the conference and to reflect the latest international publishing trends among the marketing circle, the conference was held at the National Chengchi University on June 2, 2017 and was divided into two parts: general presentation and a five-minute, simple presentation. A total of 35 articles were presented; the conference held a 50% passing rate, of which 9 articles passed the preliminary anonymous review. Authors' manuscripts were reviewed again after making revisions based on suggestions from the editor of thisspecial issue, the review committee, conference commentators, and on-site scholars. A total of eight papers were published in this issue, with an acceptance rate of 11.4%.

This special issue contains eight articles, arranged in order from inner to outer, from theory to application, from the relationship of the individual consumer to the manufacturer, and from qualitative studies to quantitative studies to qualitative-transformed quantitative analysis. The first article, “Consumer Need for Authenticity: Conceptualization and Scale Development”, begins by defining consumers' need for authenticity. An operational definition and its facets were summarized after conducting in-depth interviews, and a scale for consumers' need for authenticity that includedseven factors and twenty-nine items was established. The scale can be used for the basis of follow-up studies on consumer need for authenticity.

To get the whole picture on the consumer's flow experience,the second article, “Exploring the Flow Experience in the Virtual World by the Auto-driving Method”, selects role-playing online games as the research context. The study's distinguishing feature is that while it uses the auto-driving interview method, it is also a basic studyexpanded fromin-depth interviews. Lastly, in addition to elucidating the nature of flow, the study also presented elements that comprises flow under the context of new interactive media and analyzed the incentives and values of flow.

The third article, “The Activation of Social Media Participation”, explores how manufacturers can increase the frequency and level ofsocialparticipation. Through in-depth interviews with the socialmarketing experts of brands in different industries, the “TRACE social media marketing strategic model”was established, in which the five aspects of target, relevance, approach, complementation, and engagement were proposed. To inject new ideas intosocialmarketing, the study discovered and incorporated concepts such as content curation plan and social media ecosystem. The study is a practical piece of work that provides reference for socialapplication.

The fourth article, “Rethinking Self-Control: How It Interacts with Goal Temporal Distance, Individual Time Orientation and Regulatory Focus”, aims to explore how temporal distance to pursued goal, time orientation, and regulatory focus affect self-control. A classic experimental study, it also incorporatesthe concept ofregulatory focus, a concept that has recently garnered considerable attention, with the main subject, self-control. 

The fifth article, “Back to the Golden Age: When Economic Insecurity Enhances the Effectiveness of Nostalgic Appeal”, explores how the consumers' response to advertisements with nostalgic appeal varies according to their perceived economic insecurity and the moderating effect of perceived brand authenticityon the relationship between the two. This study employed a survey to preliminarily explore the topic and two experiments to explore the causal relationship,using multiple research methods to describe how consumers' economic insecurityaffectsthe effectiveness of nostalgia in advertising.

The sixth article, “How Can Online Customers Be More Loyal? The Mediating Effect of Customer Gratitude”, explores whether during online shopping, customer gratitude sheds light onthe relationship between relationship marketing and customer loyalty.Byinvestigating trait and state of customer gratitudeat the same time, this study enhances the target population of this theoretical model. The research data includes information on customer behavior of online shopping platforms and customer survey questionnaires. Its research design also reflects the significance the marketing field attaches to authenticconsumer behavior data in recent years.

The seventh article, “Social Media Analytics for Convenience Stores: The Effects of Media Characteristics and Marketing Appeals on Customer Engagement”, analyzes posts in the fan pages of Taiwan's four major convenience store chains, exploringthe effect of the media characteristics in the messages and marketing appeal oncustomer engagement behavior. Although not enough—only some 1,000—postswereanalyzed for the studyto be constituted asbig data research, it follows the latest trend in content analysis research. The results of the study have important application in marketing.

Based on dynamic competitiontheory, the eighth article, “How do Followers Respond to the Leader's Competitive Actions? The Moderating Effect of Multimarket Contact”,usesmultimarket contact as the moderating variableand explores how the fringe firms in the four major convenience store chains in Taiwan react to the dominant firm's competitive action. Through structural content analysis, the study analyzes relationship betweenmanufacturers' competitive actions, imitation response, multimarket contact, and performance. This is an empirical study that is less common conducted domestically in the field of marketing strategy.

The successful completion of this special issue and the conference owes its thanks to the hard work and constructive suggestions of the hundreds of manuscript reviewers and commentators at the conference. We express our gratitude to the contributing scholars who made submissions for their dedication and devotion, which allowed the special issue to achieve the goals of integration and forward-thinking innovation and demonstrate the progressive results of academic research in the field of marketing. We sincerely hope that the remarkable articles in this issue make contributions and inspire developments in the future of the marketing management field.