As the fourth industrial revolution unfolds and the use of digital humans becomes more commonplace, understanding digital humans' potential to replace real human interaction or enhance it, particularly in storytelling marketing contexts, is becoming evermore important. To promote interaction and increase the entertainment value of technology-enhanced storytelling marketing, brands have begun to explore the use of augmented digital humans as storytelling agents. In this article, we examine the effectiveness of leveraging advanced technologies and delivering messages via digital humans in storytelling advertisements. In Study 1, we investigate the effectiveness of narrative transportation on behavioral responses after exposure to an interactive augmented reality mobile advertisement with a digital human storyteller. In Study 2, we compare how consumers respond to augmented digital human versus real human storytelling advertisements after conducting an exploratory neurophysiological electroencephalography study. The findings show that both types of agents promote narrative transportation when the story fits the product well. Moreover, a digital human perceived as more human-like elicits stronger positive consumer responses, suggesting an effective new approach to storytelling marketing.
DOCUMENT
There is an emerging interest in understanding the cognitive, emotional and motivational processes that drive tourists’ behaviour using neuroscientific research methods. This chapter briefly reviews the main methods of interest to tourism researchers, to then focuses on electroencephalography, which reflects electrical activity from the brain. Event-related potentials or electroencephalography oscillations reflect cognitive and affective processes. Components of the former can index emotional brain responses, and alpha oscillations are related to attention and approach/withdrawal. Existing tourism literature/using electroencephalography are reviewed. This is a promising tool for studying a range of phenomena that are of interest to tourism scholars, but require careful use of methods and interpretation.
LINK
It is commonly assumed that TV commercials successfully influence affective tourism destination image by coupling positive emotions to a destination. In this study we record emotional responses to destination pictures before and after viewing a destination TV commercial from participants’ brains using electroencephalography (EEG). A control group of participants watched the same destination pictures, and an unrelated TV commercial. Emotion-related event-related potential (ERP) components, the P2 and LPP, were derived from the EEG. For the participants that watched the destination TV commercial, the P2 and the LPP were larger in response to destination pictures after compared to before having watched the TV commercial. This effect was not observed in the control group. In a behavioral version of the same experiment, we did not observe any effects in the self-report data. It is concluded that ERP methodology is a useful tool to complement the toolbox of tourism marketing researchers
LINK
