A FRAMEWORK FOR ENHANCING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE THROUGH MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY ADVERTISING

The proliferation of mobile devices in the past decade has made it an attractive platform for advertising. Various marketing strategies and techniques have been explored and implemented to tap into this increasing huge number of potential customers, the mobile device users. Augmented reality (AR) refers to the augmentation of the physical real world with virtual objects. Recently, due to its unique interactive interface and features, augmented reality technology has been gaining attention and adopted as part of the marketing or advertising approaches to attract and engage customer. In this paper, a conceptual framework for enhancing customer experience through advertising using mobile augmented reality is described. The main concept behind this framework is interactive advertising through customer virtual interaction with the company. As such, the proposed framework is based on two forms of interactions: interaction with the company’s website and interaction with the AR games. A prototype system based on chocolate advertisement was developed to illustrate the concept. Both sides of the chocolate wrappers were used as a medium for the AR advertising. The front part of the wrapper is used for interaction with company’s website, whereby the company can take advantage of by providing information such as product promotion, news and gather customers’ feedback. The back part is for playing the AR games. There will be only one game for each wrapper. Several games can be developed and this will encourage customer to repeatedly purchase the chocolate to get all the different games, thus increasing overall sales performance. The prototype system, which deviates from the current static conventional physical advertisement, creates an attractive and interesting advertising approach through an interactive combined real and virtual presentation of advertisements.