We ARe at home: How augmented reality reshapes mobile marketing and consumer-brand relationships

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to reshape the mobile shopping experience and create more meaningful consumer-brand relationships. Yet, the broader experiential and brand-related impact of AR remains unclear, as much existing research adopts an app-centric perspective focused on consumers’ motivations for and reactions to using AR applications. The current article takes a more holistic approach to examine what consumer-brand relationships can be facilitated through augmented reality. Through an ethnographic study of how consumers use Sephora's mobile AR shopping app in their own homes, we find that a close and intimate (rather than transactional) relationship can emerge due to how the branded AR app is incorporated into consumers’ intimate space and their sense of self. This study thus broadens the focus of AR research from the immediate physical context into which virtual information is embedded, to the wider spatial-symbolic context of where consumers use AR apps, as well as to the inner context of how self-augmentations are integrated into consumers’ self-concepts.