Marketing robot services in hospitality and tourism: the role of anthropomorphism

By Jamie Murphy, Ulrike Gretzel, Juho Pesonen. Future of Tourism Marketing, 2019

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT Humanoid robots should play an increasing role in hospitality and tourism services. Anthropomorphic – human like – characteristics seem critical component to consumers accepting robotic service (rService). This conceptual manuscript advances rService research by drawing on services marketing, Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and the Uncanny Valley Theory to explore anthropomorphic characteristics’ range, role and impact on rService experiences. The paper proposes eleven robot capabilities that influence anthropomorphism and consequently shape HRI, three Uncanny Valley marketing outcomes, theoretical concepts, and a rich future research agenda. Hospitality and tourism literature and examples highlight the service context’s importance when researching, adopting, implementing and marketing rServices.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13ad5b0f05922b41ae9753c515cc06cbf53532f9

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Citations in the corpus

Service robots in hotels: understanding the service quality perceptions of human-robot interaction (2019, background): “An increasing number of recent studies have attempted to conceptualize service robots in hospitality (Murphy, Gretzel, & Pesonen, 2019; van Doorn et al., 2017; Wirtz et al., 2018), understand hotel employees ’ awareness of robotics and AI (Li, Bonn, & Ye, 2019), and examine customers ’ perception…”
Examining the effects of robots' physical appearance, warmth, and competence in frontline services: The Humanness‐Value‐Loyalty model (2021, background): “Differently from research on robot adoption which frequently focused on customers' attitudes and acceptance of service robots (Gnambs & Appel, 2019; Murphy et al., 2019), the HVL model investigates how an increase in the different dimensions of robot humanness may affect customers' value…”
A review of research into automation in tourism: Launching the Annals of Tourism Research Curated Collection on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Tourism (2020, background): “Theories underlying technophobia (Brosnan, 1998) and the uncanny valley theory (Mori, 2012) should be consulted to better understand consumers’ and employees’ attitude toward intelligent machines in tourism service settings (Murphy et al., 2019).”