VR in customer-centered marketing: Purpose-driven design

Despite the annual growth of the virtual reality (VR) market, many busi-nessesdespecially small and medium-sized onesdhave been slow to adopt VR in their marketing. As many forms of VR exist, it is important to understand how they can be used to achieve specific marketing objectives. Unfortunately, minimal guid-ance related to VR production for marketing purposes exists. To address this, our article proposes guidelines for strategically deploying VR marketing in customer -centered businesses. This research also builds on extant VR marketing literature to consider VR marketing objectives for each stage of the consumer journey and of-fers concrete recommendations for selecting and designing appropriate VR applica-tions. The proposed guidelines are further exemplified by two small-scale cases from the Scottish tourism industry.(c) 2022 Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

Despite the growing VR market, many small and medium-sized businesses have been slow to adopt VR in their marketing. This article proposes guidelines for strategically deploying VR marketing in customer-centered businesses and provides concrete recommendations for selecting and designing appropriate VR applications, supported by small-scale cases from the Scottish tourism industry.