The Effectiveness of Self-Recommending Agents in Advancing Purchase Behavior Steps in Retail Marketing

Robot agents are increasingly used for user services, and society is becoming increasingly familiar with such robots. Most robots are of the humanoid type, which are easy to recognize as interaction partners. By interacting with a user, these agents may be able to generate user interest in a product and successfully sell it. However, according to previous studies, it has been suggested that users who are interested in the movement and appearance of the agent may focus only on these aspects and not listen to the recommendation. Therefore,we hypothesized that by making the product the agent, which we call a Self Recommendation Agent(SRA), the attention of the user would be focused on the product itself. Hence, if a user is interested in the agent, it is the same as paying attention to the product. Therefore, we expect that such an agent will be able to gain more attention from users than conventional agents while providing recommendations. To investigate the effectiveness of this agent, we set up a store in a shopping mall and conducted sales experiments. In this field study, we conducted an experiment to compare sales between a SRA and a robot agent.As a result, the SRA was able to make recommendations to many more users than the robot agent, and the users who received recommendations from the SRA remembered more about the recommended product than those who received recommendations from the robot agent.Based on these results, we confirm the possibility that the SRA is effective for advertising.