(AR)e These Products Making Sense? Resolving Product Schema-Incongruity with Augmented Reality

This paper investigates two distinct yet potentially complementary issues that when put together, may be able to solve each other. First, businesses are pressured to roll out innovative products to stay ahead of the competition, but product innovation is risky as it can sometimes violate consumer expectations due to schema incongruity. Second, while augmented reality (AR) technology has been examined in adoption studies in retail and advertising, and in practice, we have seen the occasional application of AR in marketing campaigns, AR remains a blackbox, in that both researchers and practitioners have little understanding of how the unique AR attributes can be maximised as well as in what contexts. Our study brings these two dilemmas together by examining how AR product presentations can be designed to improve consumer evaluations of innovative, yet schema-incongruent products. We propose the design of a field experiment that leverages two key attributes of AR, namely the superimposition of virtual items into real-life environments and the controllability of these virtual items. We propose to investigate how the styles of the virtual items (cartoon vs. realistic) and the levels of controllability (with control vs. without control) within an AR product presentation can facilitate incongruity resolution for schema-incongruent products, which could lead to positive product evaluations and behavioural intentions. We anticipate the findings of our experiment to provide novel insights into cognitive processes pertaining to the use of AR and to provide practical implications for the design of AR for incongruity resolution.