Research Seminar Marketing - "When Virtual Reality (VR) Backfires on Reality: Virtual Experience Can Reduce Desire for the Experience in Real Life" - Youjung Jun, Yonsei University, Korea

This paper explores an unintended downside of Virtual Reality (VR) in marketing practice. Firms often use VR that targets specific consumers, such as offering stimulating VR (e.g., cliff jump) to sensation seekers so they will further increase their interest in the firm’s products (e.g., outdoor gear). We test this expectation that VR is a gateway experience to consumption and find that VR can, instead, substitute for physical experiences and reduce real-world consumption among target consumers. Two field studies—one at a VR theme park and another at the National Museum of Korea—and three controlled lab experiments including physiological measures corroborate this finding. We show that the expected advantage of VR over traditional media disappears among individuals with strong dispositional needs (e.g., sensation seekers) because they heighten their engagement with VR, satisfying the very needs in VR that they would have otherwise sought in reality. This effect is robust among consumers who are driven by high, but not low, needs. Our findings suggest that firms using VR to promote real-world consumption should reconsider their strategy and beware of this substitution effect. We suggest alternative ways that firms can employ VR to trigger, rather than reduce, real-world consumption.