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We investigate the impact of immersive experiences on sommeliers' learning in the wine industry, specifically examining the role of immersion and social presence. With the growing prevalence of digitally enhanced wine experiences, such as virtual reality (VR), understanding the effects of immersion and social presence on sommeliers' learning outcomes becomes crucial. Drawing upon research on immersive technologies like VR headsets and cave automatic virtual environments (CAVEs), the study explores their potential in creating immersive wine tasting experiences for sommelier learning. It addresses the limited research on the impact of VR on sommeliers' learning and training. An experimental study is conducted with sommelier training students, yielding results that are discussed in relation to the wine industry's workforce training and customer engagement strategies. The paper concludes by acknowledging limitations and suggesting future research directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms increasingly seek to improve the online shopping experience by enabling customers to exchange product recommendations through social augmented reality (AR). We utilize socially situated cognition theory and conduct a series of five studies to explore how social AR supports shared decision making in recommender-decision maker dyads. We demonstrate that optimal configurations of social AR, that is, a static (vs. dynamic) point-of-view sharing format matched with an image-enhanced (vs. text-only) communicative act, increase recommenders' comfort with providing advice and decision makers' likelihood of using the advice in their choice. For both, these effects are due to a sense of social empowerment, which also stimulates recommenders' desire for a product and positive behavioral intentions. However, recommenders' communication motives impose boundary conditions. When recommenders have strong impression management concerns, this weakens the effect of social empowerment on recommendation comfort. Furthermore, the stronger a recommender's persuasion goal, the less likely the decision maker is to use the recommendation in their choice., Author(s): Tim Hilken [sup.1] , Debbie I. Keeling [sup.2] , Ko de Ruyter [sup.3] [sup.4] , Dominik Mahr [sup.1] [sup.5] , Mathew Chylinski [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.5012.6, 0000 0001 [...]

The "imagination gap" is experienced by customers when they struggle to envision product benefits or service outcomes. It continues to be a significant challenge across industries. This gap often leads to delayed or abandoned purchases, resulting in substantial revenue losses for companies. Businesses are increasingly turning to extended reality technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to address this issue. AR projects digital content into physical environments, allowing customers to visualize products in their surroundings and make more informed purchase decisions. VR, on the other hand, transports users to digital environments, creating immersive experiences that enhance learning, healthcare and other applications. Both AR and VR technologies have the potential to bridge the imagination gap and provide value to businesses and consumers. Strategic considerations include assessing the bottom-line impact of purchasing decisions, selecting the appropriate technology for specific objectives, deciding at what stages of the customer journey to deploy AR and VR and addressing privacy and falsity concerns. Looking ahead, neuro-enhanced reality, enabled by brain-computer interfaces, holds the promise of even more immersive experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the proliferation of augmented reality (AR) technologies, many firms are pursuing a strategy of service augmentation to enhance customers' online service experiences. Drawing on situated cognition theory, the authors show that AR-based service augmentation enhances customer value perceptions by simultaneously providing simulated physical control and environmental embedding. The resulting authentic situated experience, manifested in a feeling of spatial presence, functions as a mediator and also predicts customer decision comfort. Furthermore, the effect of spatial presence on utilitarian value perceptions is greater for customers who are disposed toward verbal rather than visual information processing, and the positive effect on decision comfort is attenuated by customers' privacy concerns., Author(s): Tim Hilken [sup.1] , Ko de Ruyter [sup.2] , Mathew Chylinski [sup.3] , Dominik Mahr [sup.1] [sup.4] , Debbie I. Keeling [sup.5] Author Affiliations: (1) Department of Marketing and [...]

This position article on augmented reality (AR) advertising offers a conceptual framework of recent scholarship on the intersection between AR technologies, advertising, and marketing metrics. The framework identifies theory-based building blocks for this domain alongside relevant recent examples. It proposes a conceptual case for contextualization of advertising content through AR technology. Finally, an agenda for future research in AR advertising is specified, incorporating multiple conceptual perspectives and empirical directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reality‐enhancing technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality are rapidly becoming a part of everyday life. Seizing this moment, we set out a research agenda for studying the psychological mechanisms underpinning consumer experiences with these new technologies, structured around four application areas: (1) delivering innovative offerings, (2) supporting sustainability and consumer well‐being interventions, (3) balancing value cocreation and privacy concerns, and (4) achieving new modes and means of impact. For each area, we identify research directions that can guide the development and use of reality‐enhancing technologies for the realization of next‐generation consumer experiences. We explicitly balance potential advantages and disadvantages, thus encouraging researchers and practitioners to prioritize developing the "purpose" of these technologies, by focusing on the psychological mechanisms that underlie their use, over the technological development of their "pixels." In this way, we guide the impactful development of reality‐enhancing technologies for applications with significance for consumers and firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the promise of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to help experiential retailers align online and offline experiences, guidance on choosing or combining these technologies is lacking. In three experiments, we address this research gap by investigating the individual and combined impact of AR and VR on key marketing objectives. First, we establish that AR is more effective in stimulating purchase intentions than VR, due to its ability to support customers in fluent product‐focused mental imagery. Second, we demonstrate that VR is better suited for improving brand attitudes than AR, as it helps customers to form fluent context‐focused mental imagery. Third, we show that AR and VR, in combination, can improve both purchase intentions and brand attitudes, but only when the order of deployment is sequenced as AR then VR. This is due to greater alignment with the customer's online‐to‐offline journey in experiential retail. When deployed the other way around, we observe a detrimental impact on purchase intentions and a potential harmful impact on brand attitudes. Our research offers a nuanced theoretical perspective of AR and VR in marketing and provides experiential retailers with evidence‐based guidelines for leveraging AR and VR within their online retailing strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of augmented reality (AR) technology, which overlays digital content to alter customers' views of a physical service setting, using mobile and wearable computing, drives the digital automation of physical services. In particular, it promises to achieve tangibility even in service encounters delivered in digital formats. However, customer engagement with AR is falling short of expectations. Managers lack an integrated framework of AR service automation and therefore tend to focus on the technology rather than on the process of customer engagement with AR service automation. To address this problem, the current study proposes a technology-enabled engagement process that integrates multiple stages of customer engagement, as a service-centric process. To establish that engagement with AR service automation requires the inclusion of service tangibility, as part of the process, the authors decompose the steps of interactive service engagement, the spatial presence of the service, customers' emotional and cognitive engagement with the service, and perceived value-in-use, which lead to emergent behavioral forms of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]