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Artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting the way of how customers interact with organisations by blending both physical and digital environments, thereby creating a new paradigm of customer-organisation relationship. The new relationship boundary driven by AI principally challenges as well as creates opportunities for relationship marketing theories and practices. The main objective of this chapter is to present a framework named ‘physical-digital space’ to demonstrate how AI can merge the physical and digital world. To broaden the understanding, this chapter uses the lens of customer experience in relationship marketing. The framework extends the existing understanding and provides managerial implications on how an organisation can develop strategies so that a customer consciously or subconsciously develops a positive relationship with the organisation.

Flow is an important yet under-utilized concept to examine extraordinary experiences in service encounters. An extensive review of extant literature revealed several conceptual concerns that have contributed to a blurred understanding of flow. The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptualization of flow that is complete yet parsimonious.

The paper includes a survey (Study 1, N=202) that covers gaming and online services and a field study (Study 2, N=448) covering a festival context. Structural equation modeling and regression-based mediation analysis are used to analyze the data.

Flow can meaningfully be conceptualized as the process from engrossment to enjoyment. Engrossment comprises loss of self-consciousness, transformation of time, concentration on the task at hand, and action-awareness merging. In service encounters with high achievement content (e.g. gaming or sports), challenge-skill balance, clear goals, unambiguous and immediate feedback, and sense of control serve as antecedents of engrossment. Yet flow also appears in service contexts without achievement content (i.e. where consumers have less control over the outcomes of their performance, such as when listening to music). Across service contexts, the enjoyment and engrossment (directly or indirectly) impact service loyalty.

In terms of improving loyalty or training outcomes service providers should have a clear interest in providing the utmost potential for creating flow experiences during the service encounter. Hedonic offers that allow engrossing in the activity seem particularly effective in this regard.

This paper offers a clear theoretical and empirical distinction of formerly treated facets of flow. It further contributes to extant literature by providing a revised conceptualization that regards flow as the process from engrossment to enjoyment. The revised conceptualization is void of unnecessary dimensions and can be applied and compared across various research contexts, including hedonic, nonachievement services. Moreover, the paper indicates that research streams on flow and immersion might be linked more closely.

The main objective of this chapter is broadening the understanding of anthropomorphic artificial intelligence (AI) (e.g. avatars, humanoid robots, chatbots) in both physical and digital environments. The chapter strives to demonstrate how organisations can curate relationship marketing and enhance customer experience by employing anthropomorphic AI. To achieve this, the chapter extends existing understanding in three ways. First, it explains the interconnectivity between relationship marketing and customer experience. Second, it presents anthropomorphic AI along with its different characteristics and technologies. Third, it offers some real-life uses cases and examples of such AI drawing from practical insights into five selected industries. Overall, the chapter provides some food of thoughts concerning the successful application and deployment of anthropomorphic AI in marketing practices.

Recent research on immersive experiences in online environments for higher education has attributed a fundamental role to two distinct yet connected psychological phenomena: the feelings of being virtually present in the education environment, often simply called presence, and peak episodes of flow. The authors conceptually delimitate these two psychological facets of e-learners’ experiences and examine their interplay. The authors show how flow episodes are elicited by students’ sense of control over the online education environment, their attention being focussed on the learning tasks, and their feelings of being physically placed in the online education setting. Also, the interactivity created by the online education environment evokes an e-learner’s imagery, which in turn triggers presence feelings and episodes of flow. The authors further show that, although presence and flow are triggered by some common antecedents, they differ in the object of the individual’s immersion, and that presence feelings facilitate flow. Moreover, the authors provide practical recommendations for higher education institutions, policy makers and the academic and information and communication technology community involved in e-learning, to make sure e-learner experiences reach their fullest potential.

Customer experience (CX) has become a major concern of business managers around the world and is considered a determinant factor of continuing corporate success. Despite the growing number of research studies focusing on the topic, knowledge remains underexamined in general, and specifically in terms of online users. Understanding how online platforms inspire travel experience is increasingly pertinent as visual contents acquire insignificance. This is especially relevant when travel is restricted such as during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nevertheless, there is a gap in the literature research on online CX in online visitor attractions. The study aimed to investigate the visitors' reviews of online visits during the lockdown. The research has followed the Netnography approach as modern qualitative research to understand the online CX of visiting virtually the attractions.

The results revealed three dimensions of cyber-tourist experiences related to the tourism-driven with its four subdimensions, the emotional reaction and expectation, and satisfaction and behavior intentions. The study adds to the better knowledge of the modern research methods dealing with the cyber-customer experience (CCX) by examining the Netnography method.

This research is a pioneering attempt to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on tourists' experience and to highlight the opportunities for tourism practitioners to profit from the online presence, to be more accessible, and to increase their traffic to guaranty their online visibility.

Anthropomorphism in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered devices is being used increasingly frequently in consumer-facing situations (e.g., AI Assistants such as Alexa, virtual agents in websites, call/chat bots, etc.), and therefore, it is essential to understand anthropomorphism in AI both to understand consequences for consumers and to optimize firms' product development and marketing. Extant literature is fragmented across several domains and is limited in the marketing domain. In this review, we aim to bring together the insights from different fields and develop a parsimonious conceptual framework to guide future research in fields of marketing and consumer behavior.

We conduct a review of empirical articles published until November 2021 in Financial Times Top 50 (FT50) journals as well as in 41 additional journals selected across several disciplinary domains: computer science, robotics, psychology, marketing, and consumer behavior.

Based on literature review and synthesis, we propose a three-step guiding framework for future research and practice on AI anthropomorphism.

Our proposed conceptual framework informs marketing and consumer behavior domains with findings accumulated in other research domains, offers important directions for future research, and provides a parsimonious guide for marketing managers to optimally utilize anthropomorphism in AI to the benefit of both firms and consumers.

We contribute to the emerging literature on anthropomorphism in AI in three ways. First, we expedite the information flow between disciplines by integrating insights from different fields of inquiry. Second, based on our synthesis of literature, we offer a conceptual framework to organize the outcomes of AI anthropomorphism in a tidy and concise manner. Third, based on our review and conceptual framework, we offer key directions to guide future research endeavors.

This quasi-experimental field study examines whether companies can improve the effectiveness of their sponsorship investments by creating a brand experience. Data were collected among participants of a sponsored marathon. During this event participants had the opportunity to engage in an experience orchestrated by one of the main sponsors of the event. We compare the data of participants who ran the marathon and also engaged in the experience with those who solely ran the marathon. The results reveal that participating in the experience increases top of mind awareness, brand recall and attitudes towards the sponsoring brand, compared to just running the marathon. Additionally, within the experience condition, brand experience and flow predict brand attitudes.

Drawing on the confirmation–disconfirmation paradigm and the elaboration likelihood model, this study builds and tests a conceptual model that examines the effect of perceived authenticity on affective and behavioural outcomes as well as the moderating role of consumer involvement on the link between authenticity and satisfaction. The model was tested on data collected from 224 members of a theatre audience using structural equation modelling. Results indicate that perceived authenticity associated with both the core arts product and the venue enhances audience satisfaction which is a strong predictor of intention to recommend. Audience involvement with theatre moderates the link between authenticity of venue and satisfaction, with this association being stronger for low-involvement consumers.