Exploring The Impact Of Digital Humans On Customer Experience

This ongoing work focuses on the virtual technology of digital humans, specifically on the potential impacts on customer experience. It starts by introducing the development of a believability framework for digital humans, emphasizing the interactions between behaviour, personality, appearance, and environment to enhance their realism. The framework aims to alleviate the "uncanny valley" effect and improve consumer interaction by making digital humans more lifelike and emotionally intelligent. The study employs a design science research approach, creating digital humans as student ambassadors in a university scenario, and has undergone three iterations, including interviews with university faculty and staff, co-creative workshops with students, and field experiments. The goal is to conduct empirical tests to refine the framework, thus enhancing customer experience in a virtual world environment.<br/

Materializing design fictions for metaverse services

As the state-of-the-art stands, our knowledge of designing Metaverse platforms is limited. In this paper we propose that design fictions are the first form of prototyping and explore how ‘materializing’ a design fiction can help cement or refute assumptions that drive the development of a software-based system toward a first Minimum Viable Product. Our context is a platform for trading music memorabilia in the Metaverse, integrating content sitting across archives, record labels, publishers, and private collections in an immersive and accessible manner. The design fiction provided both a means of exploring the businessassumptions of our industry partner and co-creating an experience of value to its intended audience. As key outcomes, the approach was of value in shapingbusiness assumptions, developing an enhanced understanding of the audience and allowing them to cocreate, shaping technology needs and identifying partners necessary for the development

Teaching what Society Needs:“Hacking” an Introductory Marketing Course with Sustainability and Macromarketing

Marketing classes are often focused on the micro level, failing to account for wider societal issues. In this article, we argue for the inclusion of a wider macro-sustainability focus, one that "hacks" marketing education. With that objective in mind, we developed and delivered an introductory marketing course that integrated both the micro and the macro, thus infusing the course with macro-sustainability. This was done through an "expanded voice" perspective that included alternate complementary micro and macro class sessions while using a traditional managerial marketing textbook supplemented by macro-sustainability materials. We also integrated a controversies approach to support discussion and learning. We taught this course to 150 undergraduate students and conducted both quantitative and qualitative assessments of the course, including comparing results with an "unhacked" marketing course. Findings indicated increased awareness of macro-sustainability topics and movement on appreciation of sustainability and the role marketing can have in achieving this awareness. Finally, we offer a model of how marketing classes at all levels can be "hacked" with a macro-sustainability approach