Abstract

In recent years, traditional e-commerce has been complemented by voice commerce where interaction between the user and the information system takes place by means of a voice assistant (VA) instead of written text-based conversation. The audible interaction results in an altered consumer behavior during the customer journey which can impact final product and brand choice. The study at hand acknowledges the higher perceived difficulty of interacting in voice commerce. Against this background, we investigate in what way a VA’s brand recommendation impacts a consumer’s purchase decision in voice-based interaction compared to text-based interaction and how this decision is moderated by prior brand preferences. The results obtained from an online survey with a quasi-experimental design show that a brand recommendation alone does not increase likelihood of brand choice, however a recommended brand is more likely chosen in a voice-based interaction than a text-based one. A priori brand preferences moderate the impact of the voice-based recommendation in case of the recommended brand. The findings imply that voice commerce can strengthen but not replace existing brand preferences in the purchase decision-making process.

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