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This article presents a consumer-psychology model of brands that integrates empirical studies and individual constructs (such as brand categorization, brand affect, brand personality, brand symbolism and brand attachment, among others) into a comprehensive framework. The model distinguishes three levels of consumer engagement (object-centered, self-centered and social) and five processes (identifying, experiencing, integrating, signifying and connecting). Pertinent psychological constructs and empirical findings are presented for the constructs within each process. The article concludes with research ideas to test the model using both standard and consumer-neuroscience methods.

PurposeThe paper focuses on extended reality technologies and their potential contribution to the improvement of services. First, it identifies extended reality technologies (AR/VR) as the most promising interfaces to enable an experiential consumption of the services. It then summarises their properties and discusses similarities and differences. Last, it maps these technologies onto a consumer psychology framework of experience to derive possible areas of future research.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conduct a literature review and present a conceptual framework of AR/VR contributions on experience.FindingsThe study provides an up-to-date literature review including AR and VR applications for consumer and service experience, as well as recommendations for possible research directions.Originality/valueWhereas previous contributions adopted the same, experiential approach but focused on different technology (e.g. AI) or considered multiple interfaces and their impact on the consumer journey (mostly transactions), this paper aims at digging deeper into AR/VR, while retaining an experiential view on consumption that best serves the contextualisation of AR/VR.

Consumer robots are predicted to be employed in a variety of customer-facing situations. As these robots are designed to look and behave like humans, consumers attribute human traits to them—a phenomenon known as the “Eliza Effect.” In four experiments, we show that the anthropomorphism of a consumer robot increases psychological warmth but decreases attitudes, due to uncanniness. Competence judgments are much less affected and not subject to a decrease in attitudes. The current research contributes to research on artificial intelligence, anthropomorphism, and the uncanny valley phenomenon. We suggest to managers that they need to make sure that the appearances and behaviors of robots are not too human-like to avoid negative attitudes toward robots. Moreover, managers and researchers should collaborate to determine the optimal level of anthropomorphism.

Using text-mining, the authors develop version 1.0 of the Relevance to Marketing (R2M) Index, a dynamic index that measures the topical and timely relevance of academic marketing articles to marketing practice. The index assesses topical relevance drawing on a dictionary of marketing terms derived from 50,000 marketing articles published in practitioner outlets from 1982 to 2019. Timely relevance is based on the prevalence of academic marketing topics in practitioner publications at a given time. The authors classify topics into four quadrants based on their low/high popularity in academia and practice —\"Desert,\" \"Academic Island,\" \"Executive Fields,\" and \"Highlands\"—and score academic articles and journals: Journal of Marketing has the highest R2M score, followed by Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Research. The index correlates with practitioner judgments of practical relevance and other relevance measures. Because the index is a work in progress, the authors discuss how to overcome current limitations and suggest correlating the index with citation counts, altmetrics, and readability measures. Marketing practitioners, authors, and journal editors can use the index to assess article relevance, and academic administrators can use it for promotion and tenure decisions (see www.R2Mindex.com). The R2M Index is thus not only a measurement instrument but also a tool for change.

Brand experience is conceptualized as sensations, feelings, cognitions, and behavioral responses evoked by brand-related stimuli that are part of a brand's design and identity, packaging, communications, and environments. The authors distinguish several experience dimensions and construct a brand experience scale that includes four dimensions: sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral. In six studies, the authors show that the scale is reliable, valid, and distinct from other brand measures, including brand evaluations, brand involvement, brand attachment, customer delight, and brand personality. Moreover, brand experience affects consumer satisfaction and loyalty directly and indirectly through brand personality associations.

Marketing academics and practitioners have acknowledged that consumers look for brands that provide them with unique and memorable experiences. As a result, the concept of brand experience has become of great interest to marketers. The present field study, conducted with actual consumers, addresses the question whether different consumers prefer different experiential appeals and whether experiential types moderate the relationships between brand attitude and purchase intention. We find that there are five types of consumers: hedonistic, action-oriented, holistic, inner-directed, and utilitarian consumers. Moreover, the relationship between attitudes and intentions is strongest for holistic consumers and weakest for utilitarian consumers.

Consumers are widely adopting Artificially Intelligent Voice Assistants (AIVAs). AIVAs now handle many different everyday tasks and are also increasingly assisting consumers with purchasing decisions, making AIVAs a rich topic for marketing researchers. We develop a series of propositions regarding how consumer decision-making processes may change when moved from traditional online purchase environments to AI-powered voicebased dialogs, in the hopes of encouraging further academic thinking and research in this rapidly developing, high impact area of consumer-firm interaction. We also provide suggestions for marketing managers and policymakers on points to pay attention to when they respond to the proposed effects of AIVAs on consumer decisions.

We comment on Gilovich and colleagues' program of research on happiness resulting from experiential versus material purchases, and critique these authors' interpretation that people derive more happiness from experiences than from material possessions. Unlike goods, experiences cannot be purchased, and possessions versus experiences do not seem to form the endpoints of the same continuum. As an alternative, we present a consumer-experience model that views materialism and experientialism as two separate dimensions whose effects on consumer happiness, both in the form of pleasure and in the form of meaning, depend on the type of brand experiences evoked. Thus, a good life in a consumerist society means integrating material and experiential consumptions rather than shifting spending from material to experiential purchases.

Abstract In this article, we argue that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) challenge established marketing understanding of digital ownership, uniqueness, and value; authenticity, status, and sharing; and branding and distribution. We propose a set of preliminary research questions rooted in these areas, in hopes of offering entry points to future programmatic investigation of the broader field of “crypto-marketing.” This emerging subdiscipline offers opportunities to expand our understanding of consumer behavior, pricing, and product design and may be crucial in predicting the future of our discipline as NFTs further evolve.