The Reality of Virtuality (eBook)

Harness the Power of Virtual Reality to Connect with Consumers

Kirsten Cowan, Seth Ketron, Alena Kostyk (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023
169 Seiten
De Gruyter (Verlag)
978-3-11-098059-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Virtual Reality (VR) technology has become more sophisticated and widespread. Consumers embrace it for gaming and entertainment. New industries are using it to showcase their products and services, with VR experiences becoming more immersive and realistic than ever. Where does VR fit into your marketing strategy? How can your brand use it to leave a lasting impression on users or, at the very least, drum up excitement around the experience? And how can your brand utilize VR to interact with your target market to improve consumer engagement and loyalty? The Reality of Virtuality is both practitioner-oriented and evidence-based, showing marketing managers in the B2C and B2B sectors how to design a compelling VR marketing strategy and leverage it for their brand. This book discusses how to select the appropriate VR type dependent on resources, technology, and audience. It shows how to align the VR experience with marketing objectives (i.e., consumer engagement, brand building, attitude management, selling in VR, product co-creation, publicity, awareness building and more), and how to create a purpose-driven VR experience to ensure it is engaging and meaningful. Lastly, it shows how to incorporate VR into the consumer journey, the ways to reach consumers before the VR experience, and the long-lasting effects after it. The authors use examples, references, and industry expert opinions throughout to fully illustrate each lesson, giving marketers a solid foundation for their VR endeavours in the field today and in the future.

Dr. Kirsten Cowan (Senior Lecturer in marketing at University of Edinburgh) researches how immersive technologies engage consumers at each phase of the consumer journey. As such, VR has been the focus of her latest research. These projects review extant research on VR, investigate how consumer involvement in VR affects information processing, evinces how sensory marketing shapes consumer responses toward brands, and examines how virtual experiences differ from real experiences. Her publications on VR appeared in Journal of Business Research and European Journal of Marketing. One of her current projects with Dr. Ketron and Dr. Kostyk investigates sensory inputs in VR.

Dr. Seth Ketron is an Assistant Professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas, USA. His research interests are primarily in consumer behavior and retailing, specifically focusing on sensory marketing and information processing as well as VR. He has co-authored publications on virtual reality with Dr. Cowan in Journal of Business Research and European Journal of Marketing and, along with Dr. Cowan and Dr. Kostyk, won 'The Most Innovative' paper award at the 2019 Academy of Marketing Global Branding SIG.

Dr. Alena Kostyk is a Senior Lecturer in marketing at the University of Glasgow, UK. She has been long fascinated by consumers' response to technology-enhanced environments. She was awarded several grants for impact-focused collaborations that build on her VR research. She works with tourism organizations in Scotland to develop their VR marketing; engages with VR marketing content creators, and specialized industry groups. Her work appears in academic outlets such as Business Horizons, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research. Prior to academia, she spent nearly 10 years working in the private sector.

Textauszug

Part I: Selecting VR Type Based on Your Resources

Chapter 1 VR Technology

This chapter starts with an introduction of VR as compared to other, similar technologies. Next, we discuss different technical features important and relevant to VR, including field of view, degrees of freedom, interactive control features, and mono- versus stereoscopic view. Practical considerations address the fact that while high quality VR design might be an initial desire, it might not always be the best solution given your marketing goals and target audience.

The Concept of VR

With the buzz around the concept of the metaverse on the rise, marketers might find themselves contemplating the benefits of VR for their brands. This is not an easy undertaking: the multitude of technologies, hardware, and software solutions dubbed “VR” makes decision-making overwhelming. What exactly constitutes VR – and perhaps as importantly, what does not?

Imagine a continuum from the real to fully virtual world. Metaverse-related technologies are usually said to exist on this continuum. For example, augmented reality (AR) represents a set of technologies where some elements of the virtual world are overlaid on top of the real world. In AR, one can place a virtual sofa in a real living room or see a virtual Pokémon on a real street. In contrast with that, VR seeks to entirely replace real with virtual. Its goal is to take the participant to a completely different time and place, defying reality. For example, a potential car buyer can “test drive” a vehicle on a racetrack in the virtual world, all while sitting in the middle of a shopping mall in the real world.

If you search for “VR” online, you are likely to find images of people wearing HMDs, like Oculus or HTC VIVE (see Figure 1). However, many other solutions exist to “transport” participants into a virtual world. These solutions differ on their technical features.

Figure 1: VR Head-Mounted Display.

First, consider the field of view – in other words, the portion of the total participant’s view where the virtual world exists. For example, HMDs (e.g., helmets, goggles, or glasses) typically fully block out the real world, with the virtual environment encompassing the entire field of view. Such output devices do not need to be advanced: a simple Google Cardboard or an analogous plastic headset can accomplish the same effect by having participants insert their smartphone with VR content into a “box” that limits their field of view to that of the VR (see Figure 2). On the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, brands can use floor-supported displays or panoramic projections. In this case, the virtual world is depicted all around the participant, on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Parisian brand Atelier des Lumières (Studio of Lights), for instance, uses 140 projectors to immerse visitors in the artwork by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Kandinsky, and other artists.

Figure 2: Smartphone Viewers for VR.

However, not all VR applications take up the whole field of view. Instead, the virtual world might be presented on a computer or smartphone screen. For example, real estate agencies can generate a compelling customer experience by presenting their listings in VR, which is particularly relevant given the high level of competition in the real estate industry. As it would be unreasonable to expect all prospective clients to own and use a VR headset, the listings would likely be available to “visit” virtually using a simple computer or smartphone screen. In this case, screen size matters – the larger the screen and the associated field of view taken by the virtual environment, the more transported to the virtual place the participants are likely to be.

Next, VR solutions differ on their movement tracking, which varies by degrees of freedom. Virtual environments with 3 degrees of freedom can track all neck movements in VR (e.g., a user looking up or down, left or right, or tilting their head). Virtual environments with 6 degrees of freedom can do the same, plus track all positions of the body in space (one can move forward and backward, turn, duck, etc.). For example, VR CAVEs – Cave Automatic Virtual Environments – project the virtual world around the viewer and use sophisticated sensors to track participants’ movements within the room (see Figure 3). Through the use of these sensors, the virtual environment can continuously adapt and adjust to the participant’s perspective.

Figure 3: Under Armour “ice gym” CAVE.

Third, VR applications can feature different types of interactive control features. For example, advanced VR headsets (e.g., Samsung Galaxy Gear or Oculus) can be paired with hand-held controllers (see Figure 1) to allow user interaction with virtual objects (e.g., holding the objects, moving and rotating them). Typically, users increasingly feel like they really ARE in the virtual world when interactive control features are incorporated. In other types of VR, participants can interact using traditional controls such as computer keyboard or mouse. For example, a VR video displayed on a computer screen allows users to “look around” by dragging their mouse cursor. When a VR experience is viewed on a smartphone, simply moving and tilting the screen can enable participants to “explore” the virtual world.

Finally, virtual environments can be stereoscopic (vs. monoscopic) – that is, similar to human vision, such that the objects appear three-dimensional (3D). Creating 3D VR requires special equipment such as, for instance, stereoscopic cameras. The content is later presented in such a way that there is a view for the right eye and left eye, rather than a single screen for both eyes. Further, to view the virtual world in 3D, participants might need specialized devices. For example, depicting a 3D world in a CAVE typically requires users to wear stereoscopic eyewear (i.e., 3D glasses). Stereoscopy brings additional realism to the virtual environment because this is how a typical viewer experiences the real world.

Practical Considerations

• What kind of resources are necessary for creating a VR experience?

Given the wide range of possible VR solutions, it is unsurprising that they pose different budgetary constraints. For instance, VR with 6 degrees of freedom requires more resources to produce, as opposed to simpler VR with only 3 degrees of freedom. The more advanced applications (e.g., a 3D VR CAVE) are usually more cumbersome to use and require more initial calibration to function properly (e.g., to track movements correctly given the height of a participant). For many brands, producing and maintaining “the best” VR for marketing purposes is not possible, as it requires an extensive investment of time and money.

As with all marketing investments, it is important that you consider the return on investment (ROI) of the VR initiative. For example, VR has great potential for wine producers, especially for their promotional activities that are geographically removed from the vineyard site. However, wine producers might want to prioritize VR development in the marketing programs of their higher-end wines rather than inexpensive ones with typically lower profit margins.

In good news, “the best” VR is not always necessary for accomplishing strategic marketing goals. Instead, technical features should be carefully selected based on the specific marketing objectives, so that they help achieve these objectives in the most efficient manner. For example, some studies found that providing an advanced and interactive VR experience for tourism brands dissuaded participants from future consumption. In other words, when the VR was “too good,” study participants felt that it sufficiently replaced the real experience and were consequently less interested in visiting the tourism site in reality. On the other hand, if a tourism brand aims to “whet the appetite” of its potential visitors, creating a simpler, less advanced VR (e.g., the one viewed on a computer screen) could be more beneficial.

• What objectives can be achieved via VR marketing?

Overall, VR marketing can be helpful in a number of ways. If a brand is struggling to get into customers’ consideration sets, VR can help (1) build brand awareness and (2) improve brand attitude. When marketers wish to improve customer evaluations of their offerings, VR can (3) influence judgments of product/service attributes and quality. Given common objectives for marketing activities, VR can (4) increase conversions, or (5) improve the customer experience....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.4.2023
• Zusatzinfo: 4 b/w and 6 col. ill., 5 b/w tbl.
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• Schlagworte: Digitalmarketing • global AR and VR market • how to implement VR in your marketing strategy • Marketing • Marketing Kommunikation • Marketingmanagement • Virtual Reality • VR and AR reality marketing • VR marketing • VR marketing campaigns • VR marketing examples • VR marketing research • VR marketing solutions • VR marketing strategy • VR marketing, VR and AR reality marketing, how to implement VR in your marketing strategy, VR market trends, VR marketing examples, VR marketing research, global AR and VR market, VR marketing campaigns, VR marketing strategy, VR marketing solutions • VR market trends
• ISBN-10: 3-11-098059-2 / 3110980592
• ISBN-13: 978-3-11-098059-2 / 9783110980592