Avatars are becoming increasingly popular in contemporary marketing strategies, but their effectiveness for achieving performance outcomes (e.g., purchase likelihood) varies widely in practice. Related academic literature is fragmented, lacking both definitional consistency and conceptual clarity. This article makes three main contributions to avatar theory and managerial practice. First, to address ambiguity with respect to its definition, this study identifies and critically evaluates key conceptual elements of the term avatar, offers a definition derived from this analysis, and provides a typology of avatars’ design elements. Second, the proposed 2 × 2 avatar taxonomy suggests that the alignment of an avatar’s form realism and behavioral realism, across different contingencies, provides a parsimonious explanation for avatar effectiveness. Third, the authors develop an emerging theory of avatar marketing, by triangulating insights from fundamental elements of avatars, a synthesis of extant research, and business practices. This framework integrates key theoretical insights, research propositions, and important managerial implications for this expanding area of marketing strategy. Lastly, the authors outline a research program to both test the propositions and insights as well as advance future research.
The overwhelming objective of terminal design is to maximize the various demands of passengers, which means people-oriented design. Thus, it is important to conduct in-depth studies on the characteristics and behaviors of passengers in terminals, which are highly dependent on their psychology. All people are both rationally and irrationally complex, so are the passengers in terminals. This paper reveals the group psychology, loss aversion psychology, expectation psychology and anchor psychology of passengers in terminals through a comprehensive questionnaire survey. The focus of this paper is on the group and anchor psychologies of passengers, and a series of operational management suggestions are proposed based on the characteristics and behaviors revealed.
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