

Bridging Imagination Gaps on the Path to Purchase with Augmented Reality
Many firms use augmented reality (AR) that projects lifelike product holograms into the physical environment to assist customers in bridging so-called “imagination gaps,” which can arise on their path to purchase. However, research has not yet studied whether and how AR might help customers address two pertinent sources of such imagination gaps: (1) increased cognitive load when evaluating multiple products together (e.g., in a bundle) and (2) extended physical distance to th


How to strategically choose or combine augmented and virtual reality for improved online retailing?
Through three experiments, Tim Hilken, Mathew Chylinski , Debbie Keeling, Jonas Heller, Ko De Ruyter and Dominik Mahr investigate the individual and combined impact of AR and VR on key marketing objectives. They found that #AR is more effective in stimulating purchase intentions than #VR, while VR is better suited for improving brand attitudes than AR. Finally, they show that AR and VR, in combination, can improve both purchase intentions and brand attitudes, due to greater a


Too Real for Comfort: Measuring Consumers’ Augmented Reality Information Privacy Concerns
Privacy concerns are an often cited obstacle to consumer adoption of augmented reality (AR) technology, but research has not yet developed a specific measurement scale to capture these concerns. We address this need by drawing on AR and privacy literature to develop a ten-item Augmented Reality Information Privacy Concerns (ARIPC) scale. We follow a systematic scale development process that includes an empirical application of the scale. We offer novel and practically useful

New publication on AR as an enabler for service engagement by Heller et al. (2021)
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 t

Call for paper: Special issue on Augmented Reality in Psychology & Marketing
We invite authors to submit to our special issue "Disrupting marketing realities: The sensory, emotional and cognitive mechanisms transforming customer experiences with reality-enhancing technologies" (Deadline: March 15th 2021). Consumers and firms have recently witnessed the emergence of a veritable ecosystem of reality-enhancing technologies. Most notably, Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), as well as the developing Mixed Reality (MR), are being embraced as disruptiv