Playful Recommendation: Sales Promotion That Robots Stimulate Pleasant Feelings Instead of Product Explanation

Successful cases of robot sales promotions have been increasing. Users tend to make purchases when robots properly interact with users. Most robot interactions/recommendations are created using specific products and locations within the context. Therefore, developers have to prepare a new recommendation interaction each time with each new product, which creates difficulty in responding smoothly to store's requests. In this study, we propose Playful Recommendation, which is a situation-independent sales promotion method. This method stimulates pleasant emotions instead of presenting product information to the user, and the proposed method is less product-and location-dependent than other methods. Playful Recommendation was effective in two fieldworks. In both cases, the Playful Recommendation by the robot resulted in higher sales than the normal condition. Furthermore we have shown that the proposed method can be applied to a variety of robots and has the possibility of promoting products even when the recommended products change.