Creating a mobile urban tourism storytelling application presents several interactivity challenges on how to convey an engaging multimedia experience on-site. This article describes a methodology for fast prototyping of a multimedia mobile applications dedicated to urban tourism storytelling. The application can be a game that takes advantage of several locationbased technologies, freely available geo-referenced media, and augmented reality for immersive gameplay. The goal is to create serious games for tourism that follow a main narrative but where the story can automatically adapt itself to the current location of the player, assimilate possible detours and allow posterior out-of-location playback. Adaptable stories can use dynamic information from map sources such as points of interest (POI), elevation or virtual buildings. The main focus is for these locationbased storytelling games to create more engagement between the tourists and the urban environment. To explore this concept, an application was designed for the city of Porto: Unlocking Porto. This location-based game with a central, yet adaptable, story engages the player into the main sights following an augmented reality path while playing small games. The article discusses and presents solutions for media acquisition, interactive storytelling, game-design interface and multi-disciplinary coordination for mobile app development.
Although it appears increasingly important yet potentially challenging to attract customers to physical stores, location-based messaging, i.e., delivering mobile phone messages using data about the recipient's location when that recipient is near the sender, has been said to enable such attraction. Still, existing studies offer very limited insight into which particular location-based persuasion approach retailers should use. Drawing on persuasion theory, this exploratory study aims to investigate and compare the potential of two discrepant persuasion techniques (scarcity and social proof) to influence customers' experiences and thereby stimulate them to visit the retailer's physical store. A factorial survey design was applied to test the research model. Data were collected from a sample of actual customers of a Dutch fashion retailer (n = 579). The results suggest that scarcity is a more effective persuasion technique in the studied context than social proof; scarcity-focused messages appear to be experienced as more informative, more entertaining and less irritating, seem to be valued more because of this, and are thus more likely to incline customers to visit the store. We discuss these findings and their implications for theory as well as for practice.
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Although it appears increasingly important yet potentially challenging to attract consumers to physical stores, location‐based messaging has been said to enable such attraction. Still, existing studies offer very limited insight into which particular location‐based persuasion approach retailers should use. This study aimed to establish and compare the potential of two discrepant persuasion strategies to influence consumers’ experiences and thereby stimulate them to visit the retailer's physical store. Drawing on persuasion theory and construal level theory, and using a vignette‐based online survey method, we determined that scarcity is a more effective persuasion strategy in the studied context than social proof; scarcity‐focused messages are experienced as more informative, more entertaining and less irritating, are therefore valued more, and are thus more likely to induce store visits. We discuss these findings and their implications for theory as well as for practice.
