Semester 2, academic year 2023/2024
By Yilan Wang
Conversational agents, with the application of advanced Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies, are becoming increasingly accessible and prevalent in real life. Over the past few years, they have undergone phenomenal progress. The progress has further brought a massive, promising prospect for online marketing practices, because it satisfies the consumer need of being involved in conversational marketing activities.
Although the field of developing and employing conversational agents is emerging rapidly, there is not much communication research examining the relevant media effects. The following research aims to bring insights into the persuasive effects of conversational agents from the perspectives of consumer psychology and marketing practices. Particularly, it tests how distinct types of decisional guidance (suggestive guidance: providing direct advice about purchase decisions vs. informative guidance: only providing pertinent product information) provided by a conversational agent will influence the purchase intention of consumer decision making. Additionally, the research investigates the moderation role of consumer scepticism in this persuasion process.
The research is conducted through a lab experiment with 2x2 between-subjects factorial design in the university lab. Participants are recruited from students at the University of Amsterdam. They are instructed to interact with one of two chatbots in a scenario of exploring restaurants that are worth visiting in Amsterdam, which is innovative since interactivity brings more reality than pure scenario designs. The chatbots are trained with pre-determined datasets with the same codes, and the experimental conditions only differ in the text output (i.e., whether explicit recommendation is provided).