Augmented reality marketing: A technology-enabled approach to situated customer experience

Recent advances in Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have led to a growing interest in their appli-cation for marketing strategy and practice - what we term Augmented Reality Marketing (ARM). However, despite emerging publications on the subject, managers and academics struggle to articulate how ARM delivers experiences that are valuable to customers in a way that is different from other marketing approaches. In this article, we review the emerging literature, and define ARM as a customer-facing interface for the application of digital marketing technologies in physical settings. Rooted in a class of 'situated cognition' theories from social psychology, we identify a unique set of digital affordances which ARM offers beyond extant marketing approaches in traditional media. By drawing on the key conceptual building blocks of situated cognition theory, we develop a framework of ARM experiences to synthesize current research and applications, and to suggest directions for future research. (c) 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Australian and New Zealand Marketing Academy.