How would you summarize your research?

Now I am working on virtual reality (VR) and consumer behavior. My dissertation is about how VR can bring benefits to different companies, who are trying to use VR to let customers have a different experience. Previously, I studied in Taiwan, working on international studies and tourism marketing. We want to bridge that relationship between Taiwan and Japan, so we can attract Taiwanese people to Japan, and we also want to bring some Japanese tourists to Taiwan.

My work is about user experience and user social psychology. Now, I am working every day on destination marketing. So if you go to different websites, they provide VR tours to potential tourists. So my research is about how this VR experience before a person goes to a destination will affect their behavior, intentions, or attitude. Do they enjoy just the technology-related engagement or do they prefer the information from VR kind of engagement?

We want to compare the difference between VR advertising and picture or video. Does VR interactivity affect engagement? This is the first step because I always want to know the difference between the virtual tour and the real tour. Right now, I can't do lots of VR experience because it's not mature enough, so it's just used as marketing or advertising. But in the future, maybe there will be a mix between true experience and VR experience.

What makes virtual reality different from other types of digital media?

There are two key differences between VR and video. The first is interaction. With VR, you can click and look around. The second difference is that VR provides a different feeling of senses, like audio or 3D, so that you can have the most real experience. This kind of engagement about different materials and interaction will affect your experience. It's about interactivity. Interactivity could be just a 360-degree view and you can move around and now we have a lot of embodied equipment so that you can wear something so that you just move your body and you can feel that you are really in this kind of experience.

This term is presence or immersion. So are you just 100% immersed or present in this kind of experience? We can also use lots of different objective measures to detect it, like your heart rate or eye movement or we have an EEG helmet. We can detect users' enjoyment or their anxiety or their interactivity or curiosity.

One key term is cognitive absorption. It can also be seen as technology engagement. This engagement has different dimensions such as enjoyment, curiosity, control, immersion. These kinds of things will let you have a deeper engagement with VR technology. The second term is immersive experience. Will you ingest the information deeply? This is consumer engagement.

How did you get started with this kind of work?

The first thing I want to say is that my first research actually started from my undergraduate studies, and I also got funding from the Chinese government. I was excited at that time to get funding. My first research was about how to help local fitness camps have a long term relationship with their customers. I visited some of the best fitness camps in Wuhan to ask general managers about strategies and I took surveys of different class members to see what their experience was. The key concept was customer education.

For my masters degree I focused more on how to activate or engage managers and employees in large arenas that are overseen by the government. My third big project was my research in Taiwan. We collaborated with the biggest travel agency in Taiwan and with a university in Japan to determine how we can build a relationship between Taiwan and Japan. We created a website and design classes. We designed an interaction between academia and industries in Japan and Taiwan to exchange the experiential creations so that we can promote destination marketing for both sides.

What are the ethical implications of your research?

At one time, I worked for a company where we wanted to think about how to add VR to live NBA games. Augmented reality: a mix between reality and virtual reality. But I wasn't sure if we could bring good impacts of advertising and effectiveness. We could not detect it. There wasn't a lot of previous surveys or research to support potential results. So I want to see if VR can bring benefits to industry and to customers by focusing on understanding customer experiences. Researchers can bridge the relationship between industry and customers.

I always wonder whether VR is in competition with the real world or is it beneficial to the real world. So for example, I want to ask if VR feels more true, will you still want to go outside? At some point, people might totally immerse themselves in VR where they find it hard, or impossible, to get back to real life. That could be an ethical problem in the future. These are still questions we cannot answer, and that's how my research engages ethics of technology and marketing.

If you could give a piece of advice to a student interested in studying marketing or management, what would that advice be?

You don’t always know if what you see, on a website or elsewhere, is true or not. So research is important because you can find answers best with your investigation. You can control the whole procedure, rather than listen to just anyone who is telling you results. So I hope when you have questions, try to do a little research about that so that you know which answer is the right answer. Have your own critical thinking to find the answers based on your own research.

Published on: Nov. 29, 2022

By: Dominique Stringer