From Premium to Mass: How Service Robots Shift Brand Premiumness

Service robots and other automation technologies are increasingly being deployed in premium retail and service establishments. While these technologies may signal a brand’s innovativeness and thus enhance its premium image, they can also lead to perceptions of standardization, which dilute the brand’s perceived premiumness. These opposing effects make it unclear whether premium brands should adopt automation technologies, specifically service robots. To address this gap, we conduct seven studies, including an experiment using a real-life service robot, and reveal that the negative effect of perceived standardization, induced by a brand’s adoption of service robots, overrides the positive effect of its perceived innovativeness, resulting in an overall dilution of the brand’s perceived premiumness. We further demonstrate that the diluting effect of robot adoption can be mitigated (1) when humans work alongside the robots or (2) when the robots are deployed by a brand that is viewed as innovative.