The Evolution of the Key Terms “Consumer” and “Avatar” and Associated Research Directions: A Bibliometric Analysis

In recent years there has been an increasing interest for new technologies implemented in several domains to boost or achieve a specific outcome. Augmented and virtual realities are such technologies that allow companies to build virtual worlds in which consumers can act, interact, or transaction goods and services. To create a digital presence, consumers create avatars to interact and communicate with others. A successful implementation of such technologies needs a good understanding by the research community, businesses and consumers. This article aims to show the current research status of the relationship between avatars and consumers and to identify future research directions. Research topics related to consumer avatars are recent. This type of technology sparked interest starting with 2018 and they had a steady and exponentially increasing trend in published papers ever since. The bibliometric analysis presented in this paper focuses more on theoretical aspects, such as research directions, rather than concrete implementations of interaction between avatars and users. In order to achieve this, VOS Viewer was used to generate clusters of interests based on associated words in relation to our two key items, avatar and consumer. In this paper a total of 6 clusters were defined and described, each cluster showing its own particularities through unique items. Through this we proved the existence of interest in this domain and its applicability in multiple industries such as retail, gaming, hospitality, tourism, healthcare or education.