Is Virtual Reality for Retail Marketing Research? Research Opportunities and Methods

Abstract

Despite of popularities of virtual reality (VR), there has been limited studies adopting VR to investigate consumer behaviors in retail marketing settings. Thus, the objective of this paper is to propose two key areas of opportunities for VR research in the retail marketing discipline: 1) research with VR as a tool to examine consumer behaviors in VR replicas of physical stores and 2) research for VR as a new retail marketing context to investigate virtual consumption behaviors within entirely virtual worlds. Further, this study proposes using advanced VR-comparable or VR-based behavioral tracking technologies to measure consumer behavior and experience by capturing immediate, unintentional, and natural human responses, such as eye movements, facial expressions, and head motions. These direct measures can provide deep insights into consumer emotions, attention, and reactions, potentially uncovering the nature and process of consumer behavior and experience that have not been discovered by self-report methods alone.

Keywords: Virtual reality, VR, Retail, Consumer behavior, Metaverse, Virtual Consumption

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005733