1. Jonas Heller | School of Marketing
Let me imagine that for you: Transforming the retail frontline through augmenting customer mental imagery ability
Jonas Heller | School of Marketing
Summary
The rapid development of augmented reality (AR) is reshaping retail frontline operations by enhancing the offline and online customer experience. Drawing on mental imagery theory, this paper develops a conceptual framework to reflect how AR emulates customer’s cognitive processes offloading those to the technology.
Consequently, AR-enabled frontline improves decision comfort and motivates positive WOM. The underlying mechanism is a sequential mediation via improved processing fluency and decision comfort. The findings also demonstrate boundary conditions of customers’ visual processing styles and product contextuality.
Object-visualisers benefit more from AR induced imagery processes, and the effect of processing fluency on customer decision comfort is moderated by product contextuality. We discuss implications for theory and practice of AR-enabled frontline retailing.
Conceptual Framework:
Study 3:
Independent variables
Processing fluency
Decision comfort
WOM
Constant
4.845***
3.341***
1.340**
Imagery Transformation
1.1995***
-0.140
-0.027
Processing Style
0.181
0.198
0.153
Imagery Transformation x Processing Style (H4)
-0.707*
0.053
-0.130 -
0.363***
0.347***
0.450*** R2
0.374
0.186
0.403
MSE
1.553
0.927
0.945 F
12.677***
26.775***
52.664*** df
234
233
232
Study 3 - Unstandardized coefficients are shown. Significance based on two-tailed tests. *** < ** p < .01. * p < .05
Hypothesis Development
There is a pertinent need for retailers to develop a better understanding of how AR-supported buying decisions instigate communication among retail customers, who share their experiences with others to accelerate awareness and acceptance of this frontline technology.
To address this need, we draw on emerging theorizing on mental imagery and a argue that AR enables customers to offload mental imagery generation and transformation processes onto a device which results in marketing outcomes:
Interaction:
H1: There will be a significant positive interaction effect between imagery generation and transformation on WOM intentions.
Serial Mediation:
H2: The significant positive interaction effect between imagery generation and transformation on WOM intentions will be mediated by processing fluency.
H3: The positive interaction effect of imagery generation and transformation on WOM intentions will be sequentially mediated by processing fluency and decision comfort.
Boundary conditions:
H4: The positive interaction effect between imagery generation and transformation on processing fluency will be stronger for object visualizers.
H5: The positive relationship between processing fluency and decision comfort is moderated by product contextuality, such that it will be stronger for contextual products.
Study 1:
Study 4:
Independent variables
Processing fluency
Decision comfort
WOM
Constant
4.778***
5.750**
0.816
Embedding
0.542
-0.296
-0.994
Imagery Transformation
1.022***
0.501
0.357
Product contextuality
-1.502***
-1.842**
-.291
Embedding x
Imagery Transformation x
-1.342*
0.078
-0.163 -
0.285
-0.037
Product contextuality x Processing fluency (H5)
.241**
0.137
0.834** R2
0.398
0.281
0.433
MSE
1.074
0.578
0.944 F
19.443**
7.188**
10.087** df
206
202
198
Table 3: Study 4 - Unstandardized coefficients are shown. Significance based on two-tailed tests. *** < ** p < .01. * p < .05
Study 2:
Implications
Our theorising posits that by allowing customers to offload a substantial part of cognitive tasks involved in purchase decisions, customers gain a sense of processing ease and decision comfort, which trace a path to WOM intentions. The explicit association between mental imagery and decision comfort has been identified as a pertinent factor in our studies, which contributes to the literature about decision comfort in consumer-retailer interactions (Spake et al. 2003). Our results show that for web-stores and restaurants, the utilization of AR facilitates WOM intentions, which in turn, can be expected to stimulate a more extensive uptake of the technology and enhance a retailer’s reputation (Overby and Lee 2006).