Augmented Reality Marketing: A Technology-Enabled Approach to Situated Customer Experience

Abstract

Recent advances in Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have led to a growing interest in their application for marketing strategy and practice – what we term Augmented Reality Marketing (ARM). However, despite emerging publications on the subject, managers and academics struggle to articulate how ARM delivers experiences that are valuable to customers in a way that is different from other marketing approaches. In this article, we review the emerging literature, and define ARM as a customer-facing interface for the application of digital marketing technologies in physical settings. Rooted in a class of ‘situated cognition’ theories from social psychology, we identify a unique set of digital affordances which ARM offers beyond extant marketing approaches in traditional media. By drawing on the key conceptual building blocks of situated cognition theory, we develop a framework of ARM experiences to synthesize current research and applications, and to suggest directions for future research.

Customer Experience in Fintech

“…Fintech companies (fintechs) create new value to consumers by focusing on technology-driven customer experience [26]. Academia is turning its attention to the factors that shape the customer experience along the digital customer journey [24,[27][28][29][30].…”

Tangible Service Automation: Decomposing the Technology-Enabled Engagement Process (TEEP) for Augmented Reality

“…Specifically, it would be interesting to identify when, why, and how AR outperforms face-to-face service encounters. Scholars should investigate how AR creates completely new and situated customer experiences (Chylinski et al 2020) and elevates services beyond what was possible before service automation.…”

The Sharing Economy: A Marketing Perspective

“…a mass market for producers and a right to access for consumers). To a large degree, the sharing economy also adds to the technology aspects of marketing (Chylinski et al, 2020; Esmaeili et al, 2019; Filho et al, 2020; Gupta et al, 2019; Lim, 2018b, 2018c; Moriuchi et al, 2020; Smith, 2020; Taghizadeh et al, 2019; Taillon and Huhmann, 2019; Taylor et al, 2020; Zadeh et al, 2019; Zare et al, 2019), by providing an understanding of how technology can be used to democratise and facilitate the production and consumption of sharing practices. More important, the sharing economy extends marketing thought in the co-creation and co-innovation branch of the marketing literature (Abdul-Ghani et al, 2019; Crick, 2020; Fernandes and Remelhe, 2016; Mostafa, 2016; Whalen and Akaka, 2016), by helping marketers understand how producers and consumers can collectively innovate, create value, and engage in sustainable marketing exchanges in a profitable but inclusive way.…”