Augmented Reality and Customer Experiences in Retail: A Case Study

This paper exposes the contingent implications of Augmented Reality (AR) on customer experiences in retail. We investigate how an AR application commissioned by the Danish designer house Louis Poulsen affects the customer experience in retail. Our study shows that AR provides possibilities to engineer the conditions influencing the customer experiences as well as to redistribute control of touchpoints in the customer journey. Consumer’s perception of the experience is exposed to a widening of the consumer-to-consumer influence, changing demographics, new event sequences and less manageable service recovery. Yet, these effects are contingent causalities where the effective harnessing of AR’s experience-enabling capacities require deep transformation of the existing structures by which customer experiences are formed. We therefore advance the argument that broad diffusion of AR in the retail setting will only happen in relation to a reformation of the retail industry, to which AR can contribute but not single-handedly motivate.