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THE ROLE OF LUXURY BRAND’S CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS: COMPARISON BETWEEN FACE-TO-FACE AND CHATBOT
While the luxury goods market has shown a slow growth, brands are becoming devoted when developing strategies optimized for customer’s needs in order to survive in a competitive environment. Face-to-Face (FtF) service is one of the differing strategies that luxury brands pursue in their offline in-store environment. With the advance of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, this service is expanding also to online. Chatbot is an emerging online communication tool that offers to customers a new, unique and personalized digital service. The traditional way of measuring communication between a luxury brand and the luxury customer has been through face-to-face (FtF) interactions that customers can experience directly at the store. However, there is a lack of researches on chatbot, a new conversational agent. The aim of the present study is to identify the effects of conversational agents marketing efforts on communication outcomes. Second, within this context, the study clarifies how the service provided in-store (FtF) differs from the service provided through online store (chatbot). Last, it verifies how communication outcomes differ according to the customer’s personal traits. Online questionnaires were distributed among individuals aged 20-30 residing in Korea; thereafter, SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 18.0 were used to verify the proposed model and research hypotheses. Results show that luxury brand’s conversational agents marketing efforts have a positive effect on communication outcomes. In addition, communication outcomes that customers experience have difference for both FtF and Chatbot, as well as according to customer’s personal traits. The findings of the study provide meaningful implications for marketers, thus the conversational agents marketing efforts that customers experience in the brick-and-mortar store is also of some value in the digital context.
