Ana Javornik - room A34 - 16:30-18:00

Impact of augmented reality on brand's events through interactivity, telepresence and vividness
Relationship marketing perspective and service-dominant logic both emphasize the importance of customer orientation as the basis for the changed marketing paradigm that replaced transactional marketing (Vargo & Lusch, 2004; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995; Gummesson 2002; Gummesson & Mele 2010; Grönroos, 2013). Underlying premises of this approach to marketing are: focusing on understanding the customer, articulating a value through value proposition, developing relevant relationships with customers and perceive and involve them as co-producers and co-creators of the value (Vargo & Lusch, 2004; Payne & Frow, 2005; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004; Grönroos & Voima, 2013). These shifts happened in the context of evolvement of the goods-oriented economy to the service marketing and the experience-oriented economy (Pine & Gilmore; 1999), where intangible assets, service and experience have acquired high importance in terms of their perceived value (Grönroos, 2007). In the macro perspective or in grand theory as it is also being called (Gummesson & Mele 2010), the markets-as-networks approach investigated interactions and relationships taking place among actors through resource integration and activities (Gumesson,  2010; Håkansson & Snehota, 1995), while the service-dominant logic emphasized the process of value creation and also customer experience (Vargo & Lusch 2004; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004).
Communication aspects significantly contribute to marketing goals of creating the value for customer (Duncan & Moriarty, 1998; Fidler, 1997) as they represent an important part of consumer journey, customer-brand interactions (Payne & Frow 2005) and relationship building process. Computer-mediated environments importantly evolved and transformed the communication process between customers and brands (Hoffman & Novak, 1996; Yadav & Varadarajan, 2005). Marketing processes and outcomes are thus heavily influenced by these changes that have been taking place since the evolution of Internet, web 2.0 and web 3.0. Various digital environments such as social media, online platforms, mobile and augmented reality represent an important milestone for marketing communication due to their interactive nature. It is thus highly relevant to investigate how these computer mediated environments re-articulate the marketing process in terms of interactions between customers and brands and how the value for the customer is being re-defined (Yadav & Varadarajan, 2005). 
Embedded in the context of relationship marketing theory with a special emphasis on the value co-creation paradigm and customer experience in the B2C context, the aim of this study is to investigate augmented reality as applied and used in brands' events as an exemplary of touchpoints where the brand and the customer simultaneously take part in the experience and create the value-in-use due to the high interactivity of the digital environment. Furthermore, the technology of augmented reality provides a specific environment and context for diverse types of interactions and for augmenting both the reality and the customer experience. The underlying basis of the research is the following question: Do the brands that use augmented reality in the events improve their brand performance by providing superior customer experience due to the increased perceived interactivity, telepresence and vividness?
In order to gain the understanding of the larger context of the perceived interactivity, vividness and telepresence in customer-brand interactions in computer mediated environments, we follow the research stream proposed by Hoffman and Novak in 1996, further developed by the same authors in 2000 and 2009 and largely adopted by other academics (Yadav & Vardarajan 2005; Luna et al. 2002; Mollen & Wilson, 2009).
From the point of view of research priorities that have been proclaimed by Marketing Science Institute (Deighton et al., 2012), this research is aligned with the following two. Firstly, it aims at generating consumer insight with regards to the novel technologies of augmented reality. In the empirical part, it aims to contribute to the understanding of the research methods that are valid for investigating the dimensions of consumers' experience in that specific consumption setting. Perceived interactivity, telepresence and vividness are considered as the central variables for that purpose. Secondly, it focuses on studying the customer value in the event experience, attempts to analyze it through separate steps of the customer's embeddedness in the experiential setting of augmented reality and evaluates its effects on brand performance.