Augmented Reality in grocery retailing : strategic value for companies?

• Autor(a) principal: Serrador, Vera Raquel Alves de Vasconcelos Raimundo
• Data de Publicação: 2012
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/11873
• topic: Augmented reality; Grocery retailing; PromoPad; Dynamic contextualization; Persuasive information systems; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The purpose of this dissertation is to shed a light on whether Augmented Reality (AR) can be a source of strategic value for grocery retailing companies. PromoPad, an AR-based device that provides context-sensitive shopping assistant as well as personalized advertising, was chosen to embody the functionalities AR can add to the grocery shopping experience. To understand if PromoPad’s functionalities were valued by customers, an online questionnaire was conducted as a way to collect empirical data. With the results of the questionnaire it was possible to understand the functionalities that were valued the most, and that privacy issues, user-friendly concerns and/or fashion concerns were not an impeditive for customers to use PromoPad. From this, it was concluded that customers value the extra functionalities AR can bring to the shopping experience in grocery retailing. Finally, it was assessed if AR could be used strategically. In this regard, by applying RBV theory, it was concluded that the information PromoPad enables companies to gather was the needed “raw material” to derive valuable, unique, non-substitutable and inimitable customer knowledge, being therefore, a source of company’s sustainable competitive advantage. Hence, the implementation of AR can indeed be strategic if properly integrated with a CRM strategy from which customer knowledge can be derived. This dissertation concludes that the customer knowledge, derived from the information PromoPad collects and the use of CRM, can have a strategic relevance for companies. As so, this means that indeed AR can bring strategic value for grocery retailing companies.