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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]

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]