2. Virtual Reality in Marketing: Consumer and Product Research

This chapter explores Virtual Reality (VR) as a marketing platform and research environment, defining core constructs and mapping key elements relevant to consumer and product studies. It outlines VR’s growth and applications, especially in retail and shopping, where immersive, interactive experiences can shape evaluation and choice. The review synthesizes how VR has been used to study consumers and products, detailing definitions, methodological options, and implications. It then evaluates VR’s role in empirical research, as a stand-alone tool or in hybrid designs, and contrasts VR with alternative experimental conditions, highlighting advantages and practical constraints. Evidence from product and shopping studies indicates that VR can elicit consumer responses broadly comparable to those observed in physical settings, despite current limitations (e.g., limited haptics), supporting its validity as a setting for consumer research and product evaluation. The chapter closes with a summary of selected literature and the implications for the volume’s study design, establishing the conceptual and methodological foundations for the subsequent chapters comparing packaging evaluations in VR and physical reality across structural, haptic, and visual cues.