(Press-News.org) Researchers from University of Texas-Arlington, University of Virginia, Sun Yat-Sen University, and University of Washington published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that seeks to advance the discipline of avatar-based marketing.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "An Emerging Theory of Avatar Marketing" and is authored by Fred Miao, Irina Kozlenkova, Haizhong Wang, Tao Xie, and Robert Palmatier.
In 2020, Samsung's Star Labs brought digital avatars to CES 2020. However, this promotion was burned by its own fanfare. The avatars looked realistic and successfully answered some questions, but only when they were heavily controlled. As this example illustrates, avatar-based marketing is still in its nascent stage.
A pressing question is "How to design effective avatars?" Given the considerable amount of ambiguity about the definition of avatar, the researchers first identify and evaluate key conceptual elements of the term avatar and offer this definition: digital entities with anthropomorphic appearance, controlled by a human or software, that have an ability to interact.
Based on this definition, they present a typology of avatar design to isolate elements that academics and managers can leverage to ensure avatars' effectiveness for achieving specific goals (e.g., providing standard vs. personalized solutions). Design elements affect avatars' form realism and behavioral realism. Form realism refers to the extent to which the avatar's shape appears human, while behavioral realism captures the degree to which it behaves as a human would in the physical world. Form realism includes design elements such as spatial dimension (2D/3D), movement (static vs. dynamic), and human characteristics (e.g., name, gender), whereas behavioral realism captures the avatar's communication modality (e.g., verbal), response type (scripted vs. natural response), social content, and its controlling entity.
The study reveals a key limitation in avatar design: lack of consideration of the alignment between form and behavioral realism of avatars. As Miao explains, "If the levels of form and behavioral realism are mismatched, the consequences for avatars' effectiveness may be profound and can help explain inconsistent avatar performance."
Integrating form and behavioral realism, the study features a 2 x 2 avatar taxonomy that identifies four distinct categories of avatars: simplistic, superficial, intelligent unrealistic, and digital human avatars. A simplistic avatar has an unrealistic human appearance (e.g., 2D, visually static, cartoonish image) and engages in low intelligence behaviors (e.g., scripted, only task-specific communication). For example, in the Netherlands, ING Bank's 2D, cartoonish-looking avatar Inge responds to simple customer inquiries from a set of predetermined answers. In contrast, a superficial avatar has a realistic anthropomorphic appearance (e.g., 3D, visually dynamic, photorealistic image), such as Natwest Bank's Cora, but low behavioral realism in that it is only able to offer preprogrammed answers to specific questions. An intelligent unrealistic avatar (e.g., REA) is characterized by humanlike cognitive and emotional intelligence, but exhibits an unrealistic (e.g., cartoonish) human image. These avatars can engage customers in real-time, complex transactions without being mistaken for human agents. Finally, a digital human avatar such as SK-II's YUMI is the most advanced category of avatars, characterized by both a highly realistic anthropomorphic appearance and humanlike cognitive and emotional intelligence, and is designed to provide the highest degree of realism during interactions with human users.
Based on observations of relative effectiveness of these avatars in practice, the researchers present propositions that predict outcomes of avatar marketing. In particular:
-As the form realism of an avatar increases, so do customers' expectations for its behavioral realism.
-Differences between the avatar's form and behavioral realism have asymmetric effects, such that customers experience positive (negative) disconfirmation when an avatar's behavioral realism is greater (less) than its form realism.
Recall the avatar of Samsung's Star Labs, which is high in form realism but low in behavioral realism. Kozlenkova says that "Our analysis indicates that Samsung's avatar sets audience expectations too high, which may have led to a negative disconfirmation, thereby resulting in an unfavorable customer experience."
Avatars' effectiveness may be highly contingent on the level of perceived uncertainty users experience during their interactions with avatars as well as choice of media channel (e.g., smartphones vs. desktops). Finally, design efforts should take the customer relationship phase into account because the relative effects of customers' cognitive, affective, and social responses differ across relationship stages.
The framework generates practical implications that urge firms to consider five interrelated areas: (1) when to deploy avatars, (2) avatar form realism, (3) avatar behavioral realism, (4) form-behavioral realism alignment, and (5) avatar contingency effects for optimal avatar-based marketing applications.
INFORMATION:
Full article and author contact information available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242921996646
About the Journal of Marketing
The Journal of Marketing develops and disseminates knowledge about real-world marketing questions useful to scholars, educators, managers, policy makers, consumers, and other societal stakeholders around the world. Published by the American Marketing Association since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline. Christine Moorman (T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University) serves as the current Editor in Chief.
https://www.ama.org/jm
About the American Marketing Association (AMA)
As the largest chapter-based marketing association in the world, the AMA is trusted by marketing and sales professionals to help them discover what is coming next in the industry. The AMA has a community of local chapters in more than 70 cities and 350 college campuses throughout North America. The AMA is home to award-winning content, PCM® professional certification, premiere academic journals, and industry-leading training events and conferences.
https://www.ama.org
Electronic textiles offer revolutionary new opportunities in various fields, in particular healthcare. But to be sustainable, they need to be made of renewable materials. A research team led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, now presents a thread made of conductive cellulose, which offers fascinating and practical possibilities for electronic textiles.
"Miniature, wearable, electronic gadgets are ever more common in our daily lives. But currently, they are often dependent on rare, or in some cases toxic, materials. They are also leading to a gradual build-up of great mountains of electronic waste. There is a real need for organic, renewable materials for use in electronic textiles," says Sozan Darabi, doctoral student at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering ...
The efficiency of solar cells can be increased by exploiting a phenomenon known as singlet fission. However, unexplained energy losses during the reaction have until now been a major problem. A research group led by scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, has discovered what happens during singlet fission and where the lost energy goes. The results have been published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.
Solar energy is one of the most important fossil-free and eco-friendly sustainable sources of electricity. The silicon-based solar cells currently in use can at most use approximately 33% of the energy in sunlight and convert it to electricity. This ...
(LOS ANGELES) - Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the most prevalent chronic liver disease worldwide. It is found in 30% of people in developed countries and occurs in approximately 25% of people in the United States. Risk factors for the disease include obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol and poor eating habits, although this does not exclude individuals without these risk factors.
There is normally a small amount of fat found in the liver; however, if the amount of fat makes up 5% or more of the liver, this is considered to be NAFLD and it must be managed ...
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - New contact lens technology to help diagnose and monitor medical conditions may soon be ready for clinical trials.
A team of researchers from Purdue University worked with biomedical, mechanical and chemical engineers, along with clinicians, to develop the novel technology. The team enabled commercial soft contact lenses to be a bioinstrumentation tool for unobtrusive monitoring of clinically important information associated with underlying ocular health conditions.
The team's work is published in Nature Communications. The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization helped secure a patent for the technology and it is available ...
Armando Collazo Garcia III got more than he expected from a graduate course he took last spring. He developed a new understanding of the physics of transonic shocks produced across a laminar flow airfoil with boundary-layer suction and added a published paper to his resume.
"When I got the assignment to do a research project, I realized I already had a good data set from my master's thesis that I could use in a new way," Collazo Garcia said. "I was able to apply linear algebra techniques to manipulate the flow field data and decompose the information into modes. The modes provided a snapshot of various aspects of the flow and were ranked by their energy contribution, ...
Scientists have used modern genetic techniques to prove age-old assumptions about what sizes of fish to leave in the sea to preserve the future of local fisheries.
"We've known for decades that bigger fish produce exponentially more eggs," said the lead author of the new study, Charles Lavin, who is a research fellow from James Cook University (JCU) and Nord University in Norway.
"However, we also found while these big fish contributed significantly to keeping the population going--they are also rare."
Co-author Dr Hugo Harrison from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies ...
New international research published in Anaesthesia (a journal of the Association of Anaesthetists) concludes that surgery should be delayed for seven weeks after a patient tests positive for SARS-CoV-2, since the data show that surgery that takes place between 0 and 6 weeks after diagnosis is associated with increased mortality.
The study is by the COVIDSurg Collaborative: a global collaboration of over 15,000 surgeons working together to collect a range of data on the COVID-19 pandemic. This study's lead authors are Dr Dmitri Nepogodiev (Public Health) and Dr Aneel Bhangu (Surgeon) of the University of Birmingham, UK.
While it is known that infection with SARS-CoV-2 during surgery increases mortality and international guidelines recommend ...
Over the summer and fall, paper after paper revealed that mothers are one of the demographics hardest hit by the pandemic. From layoffs and leaving careers to do caretaking, to submission rate decreases and additional service projects, the data were clear, but the follow up less so. Many of the problems are not new and will remain after the pandemic. But a new paper, published this week in PLOS Biology, outlines methods to help solve them.
"In the spirit of the well-worn adage 'never let a good crisis go to waste,' we propose using these unprecedented times as a springboard for necessary, substantive and lasting change," write the 13 co-authors, led by researchers from Boston University and hailing from seven institutions, ...
Language difficulties and cultural barriers keep an "alarming" number of Chinese Americans from asking for cancer screenings that may protect their health, according to a new University of Central Florida study.
Su-I Hou, professor and interim chair of UCF's Health Management & Informatics Department, said her results show that physicians and members of the Chinese community need to improve their communication about the importance of cancer screenings. Her study was recently published in the Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention.
Hou surveyed 372 ...
PHILADELPHIA (March 9, 20201) - The PhD degree prepares nurse scientists to advance knowledge through research that improves health, translates into policy, and enhances education. However, as the role of the nurse has changed, and health care has grown more complex, there is a need to re-envision how PhD programs can attract, retain, and create the nurse-scientists of the future and improve patient care.
To begin the dialog about the future of PhD education in research-intensive schools, the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) invited 41 educational, governmental, professional, and philanthropic institutions to ...
