Seeing eye to eye: social augmented reality and shared decision making in the marketplace

Tim Hilken*, Debbie I. Keeling, Ko de Ruyter, Dominik Mahr, Mathew Chylinski

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)143-164
Number of pages22
JournalJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science
Volume48
Issue number2
Early online date30 Aug 2019
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2020

Keywords

  • Customer-to-customer communication
  • Online shopping
  • Shared decision making
  • Social augmented reality
  • Socially situated cognition
  • RETAIL
  • ONLINE
  • STRATEGIES
  • CHOICE
  • WORD-OF-MOUTH
  • CUSTOMER EMPOWERMENT
  • IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
  • OMNICHANNEL
  • CONSUMERS
  • COMMUNICATION

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