Promoting smart wearable devices in the health-AI market: the role of health consciousness and privacy protection

Abstract

PurposeConsumers interacting with smart wearable devices is on the rise in the current health-AI market, which offers a great opportunity for companies to execute interactive marketing. However, this opportunity is mainly reliant on consumers' use of smart wearable devices. This paper aims to develop a model considering health and privacy factors to elucidate consumers' use of smart wearable devices for unleashing their full potential in interactive marketing.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected 250 samples via an online survey to validate the smart wearable devices usage model that elucidates factors that stimulate consumer usage, including privacy concerns, health consciousness and consumer innovativeness. The authors used structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis to test the hypotheses.FindingsPrivacy concerns of consumers have a negative effect on smart wearable devices usage, while health consciousness positively impacts consumers' usage of smart wearable devices. Consumer innovativeness indirectly affects smart wearable devices usage via effort expectancy. Experienced consumers are less sensitive to the performance expectancy but more affected by effort expectancy regarding smart wearable devices.Originality/valueThe present study contributes to the literature stream of health-AI usage by unraveling the impacts of privacy concerns and health consciousness and examining the moderating role of prior experience. The findings suggest marketers in the health-AI industry should endeavor to build transparent and sound privacy protection mechanisms and promote smart wearable devices by fostering health awareness of potential consumers.

Artificial intelligence in interactive marketing: a conceptual framework and research agenda

“…McLean et al (2021) found that voice-based digital assistants' AI attributes of social presence, perceived intelligence and social attraction are all influencers of consumer-brand engagement. Zhu et al (2023) investigated the importance of social presence and performance expectancy in promoting wearable health-related smart devices and found that social influence and performance expectancy positively impact consumers' willingness to use wearable smart devices in a health-related setting. McLean et al (2021) conducted a series of studies that uncovered the AI in interactive marketing key drivers of consumer-brand engagement through VAI devices.…”

“…Innovativeness is the degree to which an individual is willing to accept new information technologies compared to others; individuals with high innovativeness adopt new devices early (Akdevelioglu and Kara, 2020). Consumer innovativeness has been found to positively affect VAI assistants (Zhu et al , 2023), along with smart wearable device usage and usage of VAI assistants (Hasan et al , 2021). Furthermore, Cui et al (2022) identified the positive effect of consumers' innovativeness on the adoption of AI-enabled checkouts, a finding supported by McLeay et al (2021).…”

“…Kowalczuk (2018) found that privacy concerns strongly affect the acceptance of VAI assistants. Zhu et al (2023) found that privacy concerns of consumers have a negative effect on wearable smart device usage. Lucia-Palacios and Pérez-López (2021) found that consumers view home voice assistants to be intrusive.…”

“…Marketplace dynamics and industry trends are also likely to have significant effects on consumers' experienced value and the proliferation of AI-enabled strategies marketers seek to employ to remain competitive (Patti et al , 2020). Furthermore, existing research has explored how AI applies in a variety of service industry contexts, including financial services (Hildebrand and Bergner, 2021; Lourenço et al , 2020; Manser Payne et al , 2021a; b), health care (Longoni et al , 2019; Puntoni et al , 2021; Zhu et al , 2023), retail (Shankar et al , 2021; Zimmermann et al , 2023), and sales (Barney-McNamara et al , 2021; Singh et al , 2019), among others.…”

“…This transformation has coincided with an increased ability of firms to convert consumer data into automated and personalized interactive experiences (Grewal et al , 2017; Manser Payne et al , 2021a). Consumers can now seek personalized advice from recommendation agents (Manser Payne et al , 2018, 2021b), interact with chatbots to answer service-related questions (Jin and Eastin, 2023; Tsai et al , 2021), ask voice assistants on their smart devices wide-ranging questions (Beeler et al , 2022; Kowalczuk, 2018), utilize augmented virtual reality apps for managing personalized, in-store experiences (Guha et al , 2021; Zimmermann et al , 2023), use smart wearable devices to track fitness and health (Zhu et al , 2023) and receive personalized marketing communications and promotions (Nunan and Di Domenico, 2022) and a host of other AI applications for value co-creation activities (Gao et al , 2023; Manser Payne et al , 2021a). From the firm side, sellers use AI technologies for predictive analytics, pricing, lead scoring and customer acquisition, market segmentation and targeting, personalizing communications, purchase likelihood rankings, guided selling, social listening and social selling, customer churn and retention marketing (Iveson et al , 2022; Kopalle et al , 2022; Latinovic and Chatterjee, 2022) and other data-driven interactive marketing efforts useful for value co-creation along the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customer journey process (Roggeveen and Sethuraman, 2020; Rusthollkarhu et al , 2022).…”