دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی واقعیت تقویت شده بازاریابی تلفن همراه و روابط نام تجاری و تاثیر آن بر مصرف کننده - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to reshape the mobile shopping experience and create more meaningful consumer-brand relationships. Yet, the broader experiential and brand-related impact of AR remains unclear, as much existing research adopts an app-centric perspective focused on consumers’ motivations for and reactions to using AR applications. The current article takes a more holistic approach to examine what consumerbrand relationships can be facilitated through augmented reality. Through an ethnographic study of how consumers use Sephora's mobile AR shopping app in their own homes, we find that a close and intimate (rather than transactional) relationship can emerge due to how the branded AR app is incorporated into consumers’ intimate space and their sense of self. This study thus broadens the focus of AR research from the immediate physical context into which virtual information is embedded, to the wider spatial-symbolic context of where consumers use AR apps, as well as to the inner context of how self-augmentations are integrated into consumers’ selfconcepts.

5. Discussion

Our research examines how consumers incorporate a branded app into their intimate space and into their sense of self. Both aspects are important for understanding how the AR app can foster a close and intimate consumer-brand relationship, rather than the transactional and utility-oriented relationship that might be more dominant when using AR in shopping centers and other public environments (e.g., Dacko, 2017; Olsson et al., 2013). The intimate, familiar, casual, and relaxing atmosphere of their own homes allows consumers to interact with a brand in ways that feels personal and supportive of self-expression and self-experimentation (Theme 1). This ‘outside-in’ effect of the wider context is matched by an ‘inside-out’ effect of the inner context. The integration of branded content with consumers’ own facial features, as well as other embodied interactions with the app and the media object (e.g., touch ID), collapses the distance between both relationship partners. In the resulting consumer/brand fusion, consumers’ interests come to the foreground, while the brand recedes into the background (Theme 2). Both ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ effects open a hedonic, personal space that allows for fluid self-experimentation and self-expression, enactment of social relationships, as well as play, relaxation, and escape. We indicate this open, fluid, and consumer-centric space through the shaded area that fluidly connects the inner, immediate, and wider context on the left side of Fig. 2.

While consumers are prepared to defend the consumer/brand fusion, it is not guaranteed to endure because it relies on consumers’ perceptions that the brand really cares about them (Theme 3). If the brand's economic and commercial interests come to the fore, or if the AR content is perceived as a wholly artificially layer that does not correspond to one's real face, the consumer does not incorporate the AR content into their self (i.e., the consumer/brand fission in Fig. 2). More than just a breakdown of the app, this constitutes a breakdown of the brand/consumer fusion as boundaries between oneself and the brand are made re-evident. This shifts the dynamics of the relationship to a transactional existence, in which the consumer reverts to treating the branded app as a task space to interact with a commercial outsider. Our findings have implications for augmented reality, and mobile marketing more generally.