Building customer loyalty with augmented reality: current and future trends

Augmented reality (AR) is heralded as a next-generation technology that offers firms the opportunity to reinvent their marketing strategies. While research on AR marketing is rapidly emerging, scholars and managers still lack insight into how AR might help firms to achieve the key marketing objective of building customer loyalty. With this chapter, we seek to break ground on this subject and guide academic and managerial perspectives on AR as a loyalty-building technology. We first outline a framework with four driving forces of customer loyalty (satisfying journey and product/service experiences, inspiration, re-triggering and rewarding, and habituation). On this basis, we then review current AR literature and applications to: 1) take stock of what we know about AR's loyalty-building potential, 2) look ahead towards future trends, and 3) provide implications for research and practice.