 “Too true to be good?” when virtual reality decreases interest in actual realityXiaoyan Deng, H. Rao Unnava and Hyojin Lee Journal of Business Research, 2019, vol. 100, issue C, 561-570 Abstract: Virtual Reality (VR) technologies enable marketers to design websites that simulate experiential consumption (e.g., museum visits, leisure travel) closely. While the motivation for employing VR-style websites is to attract people to consume the experience in real life, we proposed and found that VR-style (vs. traditional) websites may dissuade them from future consumption (Study 1). We argued that perceived similarity between virtual and real experiences mediates this negative effect. Study 2 suggested that because people's enduring involvement with a product determines their ability to discriminate well between episodes of product experience, it causes variation in both perceived similarity and consumption intention, with the former mediating the latter. Study 3 showed that this negative effect reversed in experiences in which perceived similarity was low. Study 4 demonstrated that this negative effect disappeared when perceived similarity is irrelevant to the consumption decision, for example, when the decision is whether or not to recommend the experience to a friend. Keywords: Virtual reality; Similarity; Experiential consumption; Art; Museum; Leisure travel (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:100:y:2019:i:c:p:561-570 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2018.11.008 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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