Virtual brand experience in digital reality advertising: Conceptualization and measurement

Abstract

This study explores virtual brand experience (VBE), a new type of brand experience, and develops a corresponding measurement scale. The VBE scale includes five dimensions (social, intellectual, sensory, behavioral, and affective), and is validated by examining the sequential relationships among VBE, brand engagement, and consumer responses to digital reality ads. A path model shows that the social dimension is the most influential factor affecting consumer engagement with brands featured in digital reality ads. The findings indicate that VBE, given its multisensory interactive nature, can be considered equivalent to a direct experience despite it being a mediated one (i.e., indirect experience). This study contributes to the digital marketing literature and highlights the practical benefits of digital reality as a compelling branding tool in digital marketing.

Immersive technology and cause‐related marketing: The role of personalization and value co‐creation

“…Beyond Banik and Rabbanee's finding, we find the antecedents of value co‐creation, the personalized values—immersion and aesthetic appeal, both pertaining to architectural personalization. From the perspective of virtual brand experiences with VR technology (Lee & Cho, 2023), the sensory and behavioral dimensions are the more significant than the affective and intellectual dimensions in VR experiences. We also find that compared to immersion related to the sensory dimension, aesthetic appeal associated with the affective dimension has a less significant effect on purchase of cause‐related products through value co‐creation and sustainable behavioral intentions.…”

“…Instrumental personalization, which emphasizes the functionality of a technical system, can achieve technical control. For example, social media (Pelet et al, 2017) or websites (Skadberg & Kimmel, 2004) can provide flow experiences due to the sense of telepresence, making consumers have multisensory sense of interaction in digital reality environments (Lee & Cho, 2023). In the VR context, the stronger the sense of telepresence, the more elaborate the VR experience, resulting in more positive beliefs and attitudes toward the target in the VR environment (Klein, 2003).…”

“…Using similar reasoning, we can expand the mediating effect of value co-creation to the association between the foregoing perceived personalized values from the sustainable cause of the content using immersive technology and sustainable engagement when adopting the technology. According to the dimensions of virtual brand experience (Lee & Cho, 2023), immersion and telepresence represent the sensory and behavioral dimensions because both values enhance a real sense and encourage users to engage in specific behavior in an environment. Moreover, aesthetic appeal should belong to the affective dimension because it stimulates users' positive emotions in the virtual experience, while creative thinking is in the intellectual dimension due to the enhanced users' perception.…”

Can augmented reality impact your self‐perceptions? The malleability of the self and brand relationships in augmented reality try‐on services

“…Given that AR can effectively simulate wearing products (Javornik et al, 2021) and that AR allows for the quick swapping of items, a question arises: will observing successive and rapid changes in their appearance influence the consumers' perception of who they are? So far, consumer researchers have mainly focused on the role of AR as a tool to enhance business outcomes, such as consumers' evaluation of products and brands (Kim & Choo, 2021; Lee & Cho, 2023), rather than the user's internal psychological changes. While evidence from a small number of studies (Huang et al, 2019; Javornik et al, 2021; Javornik & Pizzetti, 2017; see Table 1) has established that trying on products using AR affects self‐concepts (i.e., self‐esteem, body image, and the discrepancy between one's ideal and actual self), these studies have only examined the effects of physically wearing a single clothing item in an AR context.…”