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The adoption of augmented reality (AR) settings represents an extraordinary opportunity to enrich the value of the omni-customer brand experience, especially in fashion retail. AR enhances the brand of extra-contents, both informational and sensorial, amplifies its significance toward consumers and inflects its commercial and emotional charm through new dimensions in the store. In this light, the purpose of this paper is to verify whether AR affects customer behavior toward brands in the retailing system.

By means of a qualitative approach, a preliminary research question linking technological settings of the store/brand and customer informational eagerness has been analyzed in a fashion retailing chain store. To frame the research question, the omni-customer segment perspective has been assumed, taking into consideration two main dimensions as follows: implementation of in-store AR settings; and affective/cognitive/functional structure of the experiential brand value.

Preliminary findings suggest that AR can create extra brand value by simplifying the decision-making process and engaging customers. In the sum four “realms” in terms of augmented brand experience can emerge and be managed by retailers.

Even though the contribution of AR is easily understood in selling activities from a marketing perspective, very few retail applied studies can be found to-date. The present analysis aims to narrow this gap. It also contributes to brand management, stimulating the integration of the AR dimension as an additional facet of a brand tool kit in the “project” for value co-creation.

The 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.

The authors conduct a literature review and present a conceptual framework of AR/VR contributions on experience.

The 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.

Whereas 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.

Augmented reality (AR) has received massive attention in online retail. Therefore, the paper aims to review the state-of-the-art literature on AR in online retailing, by identifying the antecedents, drives, outcomes, theoretical lenses, typology and methodological approaches. The study further aims to identify the critical avenues for future research.

To advance the conceptual and managerial understanding of AR, the study synthesizes the literature through a systematic literature review approach by reviewing 53 articles.

Several AR characteristics significantly influence utilitarian, hedonic, perceived risk and experiential value, ultimately resulting in a positive attitude, decision-making assistance and behavioural intentions, wherein customer experience (flow, spatial presence, mental imagery and immersion) plays a mediating role in the process. The study also lists the top authors, articles, journals, countries, theories and methodology used.

The study provides a comprehensive framework on consumer behaviour towards AR in online retailing. Further, the study proposes the future research agenda in the social side of AR, the dark side of AR, customer engagement, use of AR for experiential value and AR marketing domain.

This study aims to construct an integrated retail customer experience framework with a single view across platforms and to suggest a new conceptualisation of the customer experience term.

A qualitative approach was adopted. Thirty participants were asked to simulate their customer journey in an established UK department store retailer. Their experience was captured through focus groups and analysed by thematic analysis.

The findings indicate that the existence of personalisation and emotional attachment will enhance the customer experience. A new integrated retail customer experience framework is offered incorporating the traditional “7Ps” of marketing and a proposed eighth “P”, which is conceptualised as personal connection.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical study to use the notion of personal connection as a dialectic relationship between emotional attachment and personalisation as the central discussion in developing customer experience within a retail setting. This study captures this experience through a unique method of replication of the retail customer journey across multiple channels.

Experiential marketing is a technique through which companies enhance their promotional marketing with extensive sensory and imagery appeal in order to intensify consumers' experience. The purpose of this current empirical study is to address this strategy and suggests a conceptual framework to explain consumer attitude and behavior toward the promoted brand and the retailer store. Consumers' psychographic characteristics were added to enhance the novelty of the study.

An experiential stimulating environment was created in a real retail store location. The study employs data collected during the experiential demonstration.

The path model suggests that the intensity of the experience evokes an affective response toward the promoted brand and an indirect response toward the hosting retailer. Psychographic characteristics, such as the tendency to socialize and extrinsic cues, were found to moderate the effect of experiential marketing.

Product manufacturers and suppliers can use experiential marketing techniques to improve affective and cognitive responses toward their products and brands. Experiential promotion should also be strategically encouraged by retailers because it creates a recreational shopping experience that enhances the retailer's image.

The study is among the few empirical works that examine real-life settings and the double impact of experiential marketing on brand image and the retailer's store image. The study contributes to the existing literature by suggesting a path analysis model toward brand and store images, which combines the effect of experiential marketing with psychographic characteristics.

This study aims to understand customer equity and loyalty using augmented reality (AR) and employee services in a physical retail environment. The current study investigated how customers’ experiences with AR-based and employee service affect their satisfaction, equity and loyalty.

A conceptual framework was developed by reviewing AR and employee services literature. The Smart PLS-SEM technique was used to test the responses of 620 Chinese respondents empirically.

The findings provided valuable insights into AR and employee services in a physical retail environment. Customers are more inclined to use AR services in the current business climate.

This study’s sample was drawn from a single city, with a total of 620 respondents, which may not be a complete representation of China as a whole. As a result, the results may not be generalizable to a single city.

Retail brand managers should emphasize implementing innovative technologies in the physical retail environment to retain and attract customers. Pandemic consumers are opting for innovative technologies as part of their shopping experience due to changes in business models.

The researchers recognized AR and employee services as innovative domains in physical retail stores because they can increase sales, customer equity and loyalty. As a result, the framework results are precious to practitioners interested in implementing such innovative technologies for retail stores.

While innovative service systems may create substantial value for certain stakeholders, they often destroy value for others. This value paradox frequently leads to unsustainable service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the use of multiple theories to pinpoint and explain these value paradoxes, build a framework allowing potentially more sustainable value configuration of service systems and develop an agenda for future research. The framework is illustrated with examples from the hospitality industry.

The paper draws on prevalent theories and approaches, including service-dominant logic, business modeling, transaction cost economics, stakeholder theory, configuration theory and set theory, to develop a value configuration framework.

In a service system, the configuration of resources and relationships between these resources (i.e. the set of value propositions for various stakeholders of the system) determines which stakeholders will gain and which will lose and to what extent. For that reason, insight into the range of possible service configurations – or business models – will help decision makers consider the effects on various stakeholders, and, where possible, set their priorities right and make their businesses more sustainable. The research produces a rich research agenda.

Examples from hospitality allow an in-depth examination of a range of dynamic configurational and technological innovations, but some idiosyncratic characteristics of the context may impede the wider applicability of the conceptual framework. Future research could complement this work by studying other service sectors.

The paper aims to provide decision makers in the service industry with a conceptual tool to explore, diagnose and, if needed, adjust the value configuration of their service operations. In practice, this tool may help explicate the service system configuration, thus helping managers determine their organizations’ desired positioning in terms of value creation and destruction, and to choose strategic directions by adapting configurations.

Legislation and regulations are being adapted to various new service configurations. This paper attempts to – at least conceptually – distinguish different service configurations, allowing policy makers to identify the value trade-offs between stakeholders, including society at large.

Previous research focused primarily on value creation by innovative services and business models. Value creation for one stakeholder, however, could lead to value destruction for another. Taking this paradox into consideration may result in more open service ecosystems that explicitly consider sustainability and value implications in multiple dimensions and for a broader group of stakeholders.

The aim of this paper is to study and describe the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) concept in the retail industry by identifying the technology enablers, the benefits and the challenges involved in adopting these technologies.

The work is built on a systematic literature review (SLR) about the I4.0 concept within retail studies through the enablers codified by the Industry 4.0 literature.

The concept of Industry 4.0 within the retail context is presented through three relevant technology enablers I4.0 emerges as a latent concept represented by technologies adopted to study customer behaviour and manage customer relationships and, partially, to optimise retail management. Furthermore, the paper highlights the benefits and challenges stemming from the adoption of I4.0 technology enablers in the retail industry.

The use of a SLR to describe the I4.0 concept in the retail industry identifying the relevant technology enablers and their relations. The article lays the foundations for future studies on the integrated effects of the contemporary actions of multiple technologies on retail management.

This study assesses the capability of artificial intelligence integrated customer relationship management (AI-CRM) technology for sustaining family businesses in times of crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also investigates the moderating role of strategic intent in sustaining family businesses in times of crisis.

The authors used dynamic capability view theory and related literature on family business and technology adoption to develop a conceptual model. This model has been validated using the structural equation modeling technique considering 332 usable responses from people of India involved in family businesses and technology adoption. The study also uses multigroup analysis to examine the moderating role of strategic intent.

The study finds that adoption of AI-CRM technology significantly and positively impacts dynamic capabilities of the family businesses, such as sensing, seizing and transforming capabilities, which in turn positively and significantly influences their sustainability during crises. The study also highlights the significant moderating impact of strategic intent for sustaining family business firms in uncertain times.

This study has highlighted the importance for family businesses to adopt AI-CRM technology and its influence on their dynamic capabilities. The study also provides important inputs to the management of family businesses regarding adoption of new technologies and their significance during crises. The study also documents that strategic intent could help family businesses to survive during such times. The study is conducted in India and thus cannot be generalized.

This study table is unique in that it investigates the influence of AI-CRM technology and the moderating role of strategic intent on family business sustainability in times of crisis. Moreover, the proposed theoretical model is a unique model with explanative power of 71%.

Metaverse, that is extended reality (XR)-based technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), are increasingly believed to facilitate fundamental human practice in the future. One of the vanguards of this development has been the consumption domain, where the multi-modal and multi-sensory technology-mediated immersion is expected to enrich consumers' experience. However, it remains unclear whether these expectations have been warranted in reality and whether, rather than enhancing the experience, metaverse technologies inhibit the functioning and experience, such as cognitive functioning and experience.

This study utilizes a 2 (VR: yes vs no) × 2 (AR: yes vs no) between-subjects laboratory experiment. A total of 159 student participants are randomly assigned to one condition — a brick-and-mortar store, a VR store, an AR store and an augmented virtuality (AV) store — to complete a typical shopping task. Four spatial attention indicators — visit shift, duration shift, visit variation and duration variation — are compared based on attention allocation data converted from head movements extracted from recorded videos during the experiments.

This study identifies three essential effects of XR technologies on consumers' spatial attention allocation: the inattention effect, acceleration effect and imbalance effect. Specifically, the inattention effect (the attentional visit shift from showcased products to the environmental periphery) appears when VR or AR technology is applied to virtualize the store and disappears when AR and VR are used together. The acceleration effect (the attentional duration shift from showcased products to the environmental periphery) exists in the VR store. Additionally, AR causes an imbalance effect (the attentional duration variation increases horizontally among the showcased products).

This study provides valuable empirical evidence of how VR and AR influence consumers' spatial bias in attention allocation, filling the research gap on cognitive function in the metaverse. This study also provides practical guidelines for retailers and XR designers and developers.