Session-Based Recommender System for Sustainable Digital Marketing

Sustainability Transitions in E-commerce Research-Academic Achievements and Impediments

To date, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the blossoming of e-commerce, which has brought both advantages and impediments to a more sustainable future. The central aim of sustainability transitions (ST) research conceptualizes and explains how radical changes can occur in the way that societal and environmental functions are fulfilled. Embedding ST logic with e-commerce could help us understand the current standing of e-commerce, and lead to solutions applied from its implications. However, there is a lack of research that pivots ST into the context of e-commerce. Thus, this paper fills the gap by conducting a comprehensive literature review to look into how the current e-commerce research fits into the ST framework. We find that the current sustainable e-commerce research is unevenly scattered alongside different dimensions, and there is an urgency to employ government power and drive public awareness. This paper extends the scope of ST into the e-commerce context; solutions for practitioners to achieve effective governance have been particularly emphasized.

Designing Multi-Modal Embedding Fusion-Based Recommender

Recommendation systems have lately been popularised globally. However, often they need to be adapted to particular data and the use case. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation system, which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary to existing recommendation systems, our system supports multiple types of interaction data with various modalities of metadata through a multi-modal fusion of different data representations. We deployed the system into numerous e-commerce stores, e.g., food and beverages, shoes, fashion items, and telecom operators. We present our system and its main algorithms for data representations and multi-modal fusion. We show benchmark results on open datasets that outperform the state-of-the-art prior work. We also demonstrate use cases for different e-commerce sites.

Smart Digital Marketing Capabilities for Sustainable Property Development: A Case of Malaysia

Digital tools and marketing have been widely adopted in various industries throughout the world. These tools have enabled companies to obtain real-time customer insights and create and communicate value to customers more effectively. This study aims at understanding the principles and practices of sustainable digital marketing in the Malaysian property development industry by investigating the extent to which digital marketing has been adopted, the impediments to its adoption, and the strategies to improve digital capabilities for the local context. Digital marketing theories, practices, and models from other industries are adopted and applied to the local property development industry to lay the foundation for making it smart and sustainable. This paper proposes a marketing technology acceptance model (MTAM) for digital marketing strategy and capability development. The key factors used in the model are ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived cost, higher return, efficiency, digital service quality, digital information quality, digital system quality, attitude towards use, and actual use. The model and hypothetical relationships of critical factors are tested using structural modeling, reliability, and validity techniques using a sample of 279 Malaysian property development sector representatives. A quantitative approach is adopted, using an online questionnaire tool to investigate the behavior of respondents on the current digital marketing practices and capabilities of Malaysian property development companies. The results show that the sample property development companies are driven by the benefit of easily obtaining real-time customer information for creating and communicating value to customers more effectively through the company brand. Further strategies, such as creating real-time interactions, creating key performance indicators to measure digital marketing, personalization, and encouraging innovation in digital marketing are most preferred by local professionals. An adoption framework is provided based on the reviewed models and results of the current study to help transform the Malaysian property development sector into a smart and sustainable property development sector by facilitating the adoption of digital technologies. The results, based on real-time data and pertinent strategies for improvement of the local property sector, are expected to pave the way for inducing sustainable digital marketing trends, enhancing capabilities, and uplifting the state of the property development sector in developing countries.

Exploiting Cross-session Information for Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks

Different from the traditional recommender system, the session-based recommender system introduces the concept of the session , i.e., a sequence of interactions between a user and multiple items within a period, to preserve the user’s recent interest. The existing work on the session-based recommender system mainly relies on mining sequential patterns within individual sessions, which are not expressive enough to capture more complicated dependency relationships among items. In addition, it does not consider the cross-session information due to the anonymity of the session data, where the linkage between different sessions is prevented. In this article, we solve these problems with the graph neural networks technique. First, each session is represented as a graph rather than a linear sequence structure, based on which a novel F ull G raph N eural N etwork (FGNN) is proposed to learn complicated item dependency. To exploit and incorporate cross-session information in the individual session’s representation learning, we further construct a B roadly C onnected S ession (BCS) graph to link different sessions and a novel Mask-Readout function to improve session embedding based on the BCS graph. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two e-commerce benchmark datasets, i.e., Yoochoose and Diginetica , and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposal through comparisons with state-of-the-art session-based recommender models.

Digital Marketing for Sustainable Growth: Business Models and Online Campaigns Using Sustainable Strategies

In recent years, digital marketing has transformed the way in which companies communicate with their customers around the world. The increase in the use of social networks and how users communicate with companies on the Internet has given rise to new business models based on the bidirectionality of communication between companies and Internet users. Digital marketing, new business models, online advertising campaigns, and other digital strategies have gathered user opinions and comments through this new online channel. In this way, companies have started to see the digital ecosystem as not only their present, but also as their future. From this long-term perspective, companies are concerned about sustainability and the growth of their business models. There are new business models on the Internet that support social causes, new platforms aimed at supporting social and sustainable projects, and digital advertising campaigns promoting sustainability. The overarching aim of this Special Issue was to analyze the development of these new strategies as well as their influence on the sustainability of digital marketing strategies. Therefore, we aimed to analyze how companies adopt these new technologies in a digital environment that is increasingly concerned with the sustainability of business models and actions on the Internet.

Feedback Recommendation System Based on Structured Feedback Acquisition

Users’ feedback are increasingly becoming a vital factor during the software evolution process. Users’ feedback are widely considered to be an indication of how satisfied are the system’s users. It was found that large percentage of feedback represents problems reported by users who face problems in using the system. Users’ feedback are usually communicated in an ad-hoc manner with no defined structure. The ad-hoc nature of the feedback makes it difficult to study and analyse feedback. Also, it usually happens that similar problems are reported by different users, so engineers spend wasted time and effort in duplicate issues. In this paper we propose a recommendation system which recommends to the user reported problems that are similar to his from prevoius feedback threads to reuse existing solutions. We based our work on a structured feedback system to ensure we get better results. Structured feedback ensures minimum level of useful and meanigful information that helps enhance the analysis results. Initial evaluation was conducted and the results are promising.

Sustainability in Marketing through Customer Relationship Management in a Telecommunication Company

The idea of sustainable development links business, environmental and social objectives into one integrated effort aiming to meet a common goal. Due to the influence of current developments in customer behaviour companies revise their business strategies towards more sustainably oriented ways of production, business practices, resource efficiency, waste disposal, building partnerships, communication effectiveness etc. Market with telecommunication services is affected by technology development. Growing demands of customers result in re-evaluation of marketing routine. The main purpose of the research is to identify the change in customers’ approaches and satisfaction with offered products, enterprise processes, and business strategy as a result of implementing Customer Relationship Management in 2014 and subsequently in 2018 with the dependence on socio-demographic characteristics. Customers’ opinions were investigated using a questionnaire. Respondents were selected by direct sampling with contingent valuation. Sample set consisted of 3,282 respondents. Following the results, the fact that there are changes in approaches of customers in investigated areas in terms of gender and age as a result of implementing the Customer Relationship Management can be stated. The customers’ satisfaction with provided services improved. In order to serve the new and constantly evolving needs of the growing number of customers who care about social and environmental issues, the companies are required to permanently monitor their performance on the market and incorporate customer feedback as in input for evaluation of their internal processes. In terms of marketing, positive changes in approach, satisfaction with the quality of provided services and reduced service time were observed. In terms of business strategy, the changes in connection strategy, the effect of customer-driven strategy and services provided by call centres abroad are perceived in positive way. Keywords: sustainability, economical sustainability, marketing, Customer Relationship Management, telecommunication company.