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1. Introduction
Artificial intelligence (AI) has displayed the power and potential to shake up the status quo in various fields, including digital marketing (Bolton et al., 2018; Davenport et al., 2020). Many applications equipped with AI technology such as personal assistant (e.g. Alexa, Siri and Cortana), streaming music (e.g. Pandora) and financial planning (e.g. Olivia) for personal uses, as well as digital marketing (e.g. Sentient), process automation (e.g. Amazon MTurk) and facial recognition (e.g. Haystack) for business uses are widely adopted in different industries such as finance, electronics and media (Kumar et al., 2019; Chan-Olmsted and Wolter, 2018). While human factors embedded in branding such as the experience and intuition of marketing practitioners and the psychological analysis of consumers continue to play a vital role, AI offers a new way to acquire, process, analyze data, as well as to generate insights and deliver personalized results (Jarek and Mazurek, 2019). Such applications can fundamentally change how marketers engage the consumers (Kumar et al., 2019).
With the advancement in AI technology, it is much more convenient for marketers to obtain not only a large amount of consumer data but diverse types of data efficiently in the sense that machines can now take visual, auditory or language input directly without human involvement and in a speedy way (Dhar, 2016; Jarek and Mazurek, 2019). While businesses have used AI in a variety of ways, academic research seems lagging behind. Previous research on AI in marketing mainly focuses on how companies and marketers can leverage AI to enhance their marketing practices (Campbell et al., 2020; Davenport et al., 2020). Consumers’ experience and perception of AI applications in marketing communication are rarely examined. Only a couple of studies examined consumers’ perception and receptivity of AI-enabled personalized advertising copy (Deng et al., 2019) and AI-powered virtual assistants (Bergman and Sundin, 2019). However, consumers’ perception not only to a large extent determines the effectiveness of AI applications but also help companies improve their AI marketing communication practices by generating insights, informing strategies and developing better engagement approaches. Furthermore, at this stage of the AI evolution characterized by more defined, functional implementations, a better understanding of how consumers are responding to this initial introduction of AI would...