The persuasion effect of sociability in the design and use of an augmented reality wedding invitation app

With the popularization of smartphones and the associated increase in the use of mobile applications (apps), the effect of mobile advertising apps on consumers should not be overlooked. Some apps include augmented reality capabilities in an attempt to bring some novelty to their users’ experience. Previous studies examining the use of AR in advertising and marketing are scarce. Additionally, there are currently several business owners and advertising agencies with reservations about the efficacy of using AR in advertising, making further research into the effect of AR on consumer awareness, attitudes, and behaviors especially necessary. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to design an augmented reality wedding invitation app and to investigate the effectiveness of this app. This paper uses the attention, interest, search, action, share (AISAS) advertising model as its theoretical foundation and adds sociability to derive the new attention, interest, search, sociability, action, share (AISSAS) model to further verify the usage behaviors of the AR wedding invitation app. This study applies structural equation modeling (SEM) to the data to analyze, compare, and verify the model. The results reveal that there are significant and positive direct effects of attention on interest, of interest on search, of search on sociability, of sociability on action, and of action on share. This indicates that the AISSAS model is suitable for explaining the transmission process of AR apps. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the inclusion of sociability in the AISSAS model results in a better fit and prediction than the conventional AISAS model.