“I Am Here to Assist You Today”: The Role of Entity, Interactivity and Experiential Perceptions in Chatbot Persuasion

Online users are increasingly exposed to chatbots as one form of AI-enabled media technologies, employed for persuasive purposes, e.g., making product/service recommendations. However, the persuasive potential of chatbots has not yet been fully explored. Using an online experiment (N = 242), we investigate the extent to which communicating with a stand-alone chatbot influences affective and behavioral responses compared to interactive Web sites. Several underlying mechanisms are studied, showing that enjoyment is the key mechanism explaining the positive effect of chatbots (vs. Web sites) on recommendation adherence and attitudes. Contrary to expectations, perceived anthropomorphism seems not to be particularly relevant in this comparison

Cross-tools and cross-media effects

Effects of persuasive messages depend on the content of the message itself and on the media or tools that deliver the persuasive messages. Nowadays almost all campaigns make use of multiple media or multiple promotional tools. Therefore, it is important to study so-called cross-media (or cross-tools) effects. Cross-media effects and cross-tools effects are mainly studied in the field of advertising and marketing. In cross-media campaigns, marketers seek to maximize the effectiveness of their budgets by exploiting the unique strengths of each advertising medium (for example, advertising on television and on the Internet). In cross-tools campaigns, marketers combine multiple promotion instruments or marketing communication forms, such as advertising, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion. Cross-tools effects are an important part of the concept of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). The ultimate goal of cross-media or cross-tools campaigns is to induce synergy, whereby the combined effect of multiple marketing activities exceeds the sum of the individual effects. While cross-media and cross-tools effects are a hot topic in the advertising industry, academic theoretical and empirical literature is very scarce. This bibliography provides an overview of the existing academic literature and consists of two parts. The first part focuses on cross-media effects, the second part on cross-tools effects. The main streams of research within these two topics are distinguished and the most important citations are provided