Engaging with intelligent voice assistants for wellbeing and brand attachment

Abstract

The study draws upon the theories of self-determination and motivation of expectancy to examine how intrinsic motives drive consumers to engage with artificial intelligence (AI) powered intelligent voice assistants (IVAs). The study also explores how consumer engagement leads to their wellbeing and attachment to these AI gadgets and their associated brands. Engagement in this study refers to consumers’ usage and involvement with IVAs. Subject wellbeing was modeled as a mediator between consumer engagement and brand attachment. The research was conducted in the USA with respondents who had owned and used at least one type of IVAs (e.g., Siri, Google Home, Alexa). A range of statistical procedures including structural equation modeling were undertaken to assess the proposed relationships. The results show that the consumer’s need for autonomy, sense of competence, and relatedness are significantly related to IVA engagement. Consumer wellbeing also had a significant mediation effect on the relationship between engagement and brand attachment. The study is the first to link consumer engagement, individual wellbeing, and brand attachment. The study contributes to positive psychology and branding research by integrating mental health and branding effects. The findings have implications for marketing and psychology practitioners.

Explanatory factors for problematic cybersex behaviour: the importance of negative emotions

“…The hypotheses proposed in this paper were evaluated by means of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). This method was chosen mainly due its ability to estimate complex models with many variables, indicators, and structural paths, without imposing distributional assumptions on the data (Prentice et al, 2023). In this way, to examine the quality of the structural model, we assessed the coefficient of determinants (R 2 ), the predictive relevance (Q 2 ) and the magnitude and significance of the path coefficients (Sciarelli et al, 2022).…”

Consumer engagement with AI‐powered voice assistants: A behavioral reasoning perspective

“…Furthermore, psychological and design-specific factors impact smart voice assistant usage and word-of-mouth according to Mishra et al (2022). Also, Aw et al (2022) (Kautish et al, 2023), consumer-brand relationships, and consumers' well-being (Kang & Shao, 2023), the well-being and emotional connection that users have with both AI devices and their associated brands (Prentice et al, 2023), and the relationship between customer experience, satisfaction and recommendation (De Oliveira et al, 2023).…”

“…After performing a statistical power analysis via G*Power 3.1, a minimum target of 388 survey responses was adopted (effect size = 0.5; a = 0.10; power = 0.90; df = 621; critical χ 2 = 680.08) (Faul et al, 2007). Empirical data were collected from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (mTurk) in November 2020. mTurk is a very common instrument for social and behavioral sciences for collecting high-quality and cost-effective data from a trustworthy resource (Prentice et al, 2023).…”

“…Furthermore, Maroufkhani et al (2022) focused on the effect of brand credibility and the hedonic, utilitarian, and social presence factors on brand loyalty and continuous intention in voice assistant context. Recently, studies have examined what motivates users to adopt voice assistants for different purposes such as enhancing fashion shopping (Kautish et al, 2023), consumer–brand relationships, and consumers' well‐being (Kang & Shao, 2023), the well‐being and emotional connection that users have with both AI devices and their associated brands (Prentice et al, 2023), and the relationship between customer experience, satisfaction and recommendation (De Oliveira et al, 2023).…”

“…To date, only a few studies that have investigated the fundamental reasons‐for consumer engagement with voice assistants (McLean & Osei‐Frimpong, 2019; Moriuchi, 2019; Prentice et al, 2023). Market predictions indicate that digital voice assistants will likely exceed 8.4 billion units by the year 2024—even greater than the global population (Laricchia, 2022).…”