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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore the negative consequences of ubiquitous connectivity enabled by personal IT ensembles (PITEs) usage; and second, to investigate the gender differences in the adverse effects of ubiquitous connectivity.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a socio-technical approach to identify the technical and interpersonal dimensions of PITE-enabled ubiquitous connectivity and develops a theoretical model to investigate their stress-inducing effects based on the framework of technostress. Furthermore, the moderating role of gender is examined based on the social role theory. The authors test the model on a sample of 439 Chinese netizens.FindingsUbiquitous technical and interpersonal connectivity induce four stressors: information overload, communication overload, life invasion and privacy invasion. These stressors further lead to psychological exhaustion and reluctance to try new ITs. The ubiquitous technical connectivity exerts stronger effects on stressors for female users than male users, and interpersonal connectivity exerts a stronger effect for male users than female users.Originality/valueThis study primarily contributes to the small amount of research on PITE-enabled ubiquitous connectivity by considering ubiquitous connectivity from a socio-technical perspective and examining the stress-related effects and outcomes of both technical and interpersonal dimensions of ubiquitous connectivity. This study also provides valuable insights into the gender differences in the stress-inducing effects of the two dimensions of ubiquitous connectivity.

Purpose
As the social media platform becomes an ever more important communication channel between company and customer, companies are learning how they can best utilize social media to better communicate their brands with customers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the communication tactics adopted by the enterprise microblogs using a communication framework. Further, the authors hope to find out how these communication tactics influence customer brand experience (BE) and subsequently brand loyalty.


Design/methodology/approach
First, to identify the communication tactics used by enterprise microblogs, the authors recruited six active microblog users and listed all possible characteristics of enterprise microblogs that could increase customers' fondness for the brand. Second, based on the listed 19 characteristics and existing theories, the authors pre-classified and conceptualized the content and style tactics categories. The authors also followed a sorting procedure to verify our classification. Finally, based on the sorted characteristics and previous research, the authors designed a questionnaire and 459 sets of valid data were collected from enterprise microblog users.


Findings
The communication tactics are classified into two dimensions, namely content tactics and style tactics. The content tactics include content diversity, content accuracy and content timeliness, and the style tactics include impression enhancement style and interactivity enhancement style. The results reveal that the communication content and style tactics significantly enhance overall customer BE and further brand loyalty. The study results also show that style tactics exert more influence on BE than content tactics.


Originality/value
This paper highlights the company's important role in company-customer communication on social media, and categorizes the effective communication tactics used by the enterprise microblog within a communication framework. Companies could build brand loyalty by enhancing users' BE using effective communication. The communication perspective and measures of the communication tactics in this study provide an ideal background for future research on IT-based company-customer interaction.

Purpose
Mobile appstores have fast sprung up during the last few years. The large number of apps in these appstores results in increased search effort for the customer as well as fierce competition leading to poorer revenues for both appstores as well as developers. Therefore, appstores allow developers to resort to bundling apps so as to increase the revenues and improve customer loyalty. Since an app-bundle is a mix of two or more apps, it may induce both positive and negative emotions simultaneously in the consumer. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of app-bundling strategy from consumers' perspective, and help developers design app-bundles.


Design/methodology/approach
Based on ambivalence theories, this research investigate different antecedents and influence of positive attitude and negative attitude on purchase behavior, and derives seven key app-bundles attributes through an exploratory study. The data were collected from 930 consumers of app-bundles in China and analyzed using SEM approach.


Findings
The findings indicate that positive attitude and negative attitude are two separate concepts and the identified seven app-bundling attributes have distinct effect on shaping consumers' positive and negative attitude.


Originality/value
This study makes three key contributions to theory and practice. First, this study identifies the specific attributes of app-bundles using exploratory study. Second, this study addresses the challenges involved in examining bundles using ambivalence theory. In doing so, it characterizes attitude as positive and negative and treats them as separate constructs. Third, as called forth by previous studies, this study establishes the co-existence of positive attitude and negative attitude.