Social Robots as a Brand Strategy

Abstract

Social robots are physically embodied robots designed to interact with humans and in human environments following social behaviors. These robots are starting to be adopted by companies for customer service. In this chapter, we explore the reasons behind this implementation. To do this, we conducted an exploratory study to identify the most relevant existing cases of social robots in the service sector worldwide and the countries with major concentration of experiences. We focused our search on the areas in which the robots are in direct contact with customers, in particular, retail, hospitality, financial services, transportation, and entertainment. The final analysis contains 178 cases. We argue that the principal motivation behind the adoption of social robots for customer service responds to branding strategies rather than to functional purposes.