Impact of augmented reality and consumer psychology on buying behaviour

Abstract

Online shopping is something that we all are familiar to, and it has also become quite a norm, especially during COVID-19 pandemic. Online shopping gained traction almost a decade ago, and since then it has been growing by leaps and bound. However, shopping for furniture online is something that people do not completely trust, while this perception has also changed in the past couple of years. This was enhanced by the technology called Augmented Reality which lets you superimpose images in your actual surrounding giving you a visual sense of whether the object (furniture) fits or not and if yes how does it look. AR thus enhances the customers’ experience while shopping for furniture online. The adoption of technology or trying something new varies from person to person. This behaviour determines what type of decisions an individual take. Based on this so-called risktaking ability, the individuals are recognised as Promotion focused and Prevention focused individuals. Promotion focused individuals are those who are confident and have a positive outlook, whereas prevention-focused individuals are the ones who are over-cautious with anything that they do. Based on the data that we have collected and the type of an individual the respondent is, i.e. Promotion/Prevention focused and what mode they use like Online furniture purchase/ Furniture purchase using AR we have had the following results. 1)Purchase intention of an individual was higher when they are shopping for furniture using AR than in traditional online mode. Moreover, the shoppers are more convinced about the attributes like fit, design, colour, quality when using AR. This also instils a level of trust in the individual about the product they are viewing through AR. 2) Based on the regulatory focus of an individual, we found that Purchase intention of a promotion-focused individual is more than a prevention-focused individual. This also led to the validation of the hypothesis that the purchase intention of the promotionfocused person is more than prevention-focused while using AR. 3) One interesting finding was that the purchase intention of even the prevention-focused individuals came out to be higher when using AR as compared to traditional online shopping. Thus, from the above results, we can conclude that AR would change the way consumers make a perception about the products, and it has given more power to them in terms of decision making. Moreover, brands can leverage the use of AR to build brand experiences and add utility for customers, that would foreseeably bring revenue for them.