As if the Product is Already Mine: Testing the Effectiveness of Product Presentation via Augmented Reality versus Website and Real World: An Abstract

Abstract

Since customer journeys take increasingly more place in the online sphere, the optimization of the digital product presentation becomes focal for scholars and practitioners alike. In terms of sensory richness, the reality offers the best potentials for an effective brand experience (Petit et al. 2019). For that reason, the reality-based product presentation should be considered as the benchmark for evaluating digital types of product presentation (Porter and Heppelmann 2017). However, multi-sensory brand experiences are difficult to evoke online (e.g., Beck and Crié 2018; Pantano et al. 2017; Yoo and Kim 2014).

Against this background, we investigate Augmented Reality’s (AR) effectiveness on consumers’ decision confidence and purchase intention. For this purpose, we develop a conceptual model identifying psychological ownership and customer inspiration as mediators. We apply the conceptual model in a series of two confirmatory studies using lab experiments. The model shows strong explanatory power and provides evidence for AR’s superiority over the website-based product presentation. We also find evidence for the AR-based product presentation to be similarly effective as the reality-based product presentation. By determining the effectiveness of the AR-based product presentation compared to alternatives, we answered the call for comparative studies investigating AR’s performance differential (e.g., Dacko 2017; Yaoyuneyong et al. 2016). The work of Dacko (2017) and Yaoyuneyong et al. (2016) suggested future research to conduct comparative studies in the field of AR. We are first in investigating the effectiveness of the AR-based product presentation compared to the website-based and reality-based alternatives.

By means of a longitudinal study, we are able to show that AR-effects are stable over time and not affected by a novelty effect. Our study did not provide any evidence for the presence of a shiny new object syndrome promoting a short-lived overvaluation of AR which other scholars theoretically assumed (e.g., Bulearca and Tamarjan 2010; Hilken et al. 2017; Owyang 2010). In contrast, we found support for the classification of AR’s components as not being novel for consumers anymore. Hence, we conclude that the reality-like effectiveness of the AR-based product presentation is of a durable nature.