Reconsidering consumer need for touch: Latent class analysis and purchase experience in a 360-virtual store

Consumers differ regarding need for touch, and for some consumers haptic exploration plays a more important role in shopping. While online shopping lacks in haptic exploration, we focus on the possibilities of a 360-virtual store in compensating this deficiency. Using latent class analysis and a sample of 300 responses, we first identify four subgroups based on the need for touch scale, with two groups at the high and low ends of the need for touch continuum. Additionally, we identify a group that has a neutral need for touch and a group that is negative regarding autotelic need for touch, and positive regarding instrumental need for touch. To illustrate between-group differences, we examine how consumers with different levels of need for touch differ in the relationship between hedonic / utilitarian shopping experience and purchase intention stimulated by a 360-virtual store visit

Consequences of personalized product recommendations and price promotions in online grocery shopping

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Haptic Sensory Perception and Customer Experience in a 360-Virtual Store: Does Time Spent Play a Role?

Building on stimulus(S)-organism(O)-response(R) theory, this research examines the effects of haptic sensory perception on user experience and satisfaction in a 360-virtual store. We postulate that time spent in a 360-virtual store reinforces the effects in the S-O-R model. The results support the theory that haptic sensory perception triggered by a 360-virtual store (stimulus) improves customer experience (organism) and that the experience further enhances virtual store satisfaction (response). We find that the time spent in a virtual store reinforces the former effect, but not the latter effect. The results of an experiment involving 587 respondents further suggest that this finding only holds true to users who are merely browsing, but not to users tasked with searching for a specific product in the 360-virtual store. We encourage management to create sensory cues in virtual stores to improve user experience and satisfaction, and virtual in-store stimuli to increase time spent in the store

Virtual technologies in supporting sustainable consumption : From a single-sensory stimulus to a multi-sensory experience

Virtual technologies will change the way we consume in the digital environment in the future. Such technologies can provide consumers with a multi-sensory experience in contrast to the single-sensory stimulus in the conventional online environment. As human senses play a key role in consumption choices, we argue that virtual technologies provide greater opportunities to influence consumer decisions than the present digital environment. Consequently, we suggest that virtual technologies can potentially be used to nudge consumers towards sustainable consumption. We discuss technology-assisted sensory marketing, present the cognitive and emotive aspects of virtual reality, and propose applications of virtual reality technologies to encourage sustainable consumption. Our opinion paper concludes that virtual technologies are likely to change many aspects of human life and can have significant positive effects on the environment and climate change.© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).This work has been supported by KAUTE Foundation under Grant No. 20190003 and No. 20200531; OP Ryhmän Tutkimussäätiö ounder Grant No. 20200040, Academy of Finland under Grant No. 311346, Academy of Finland SRC CULT Programme under Grant No. 327241 (Digiconsumers) and Academy of Finland Flagship Programme under Grant No. 337653 (Forest-Human-MachineInterplay (UNITE)).fi=vertaisarvioimaton|en=nonPeerReviewed

How Individual Technology Propensities and Organizational Culture Influence B2B Customer’s Behavioral Intention to Use Digital Services at Work?

This study examines how individuals’ technology readiness in conjunction with organizational culture impacts on B2B customers’ behavioral intention toward using digital services in their procurement processes. We test our hypotheses with 755 B2B customers of a large Finnish supplier of furniture and interior solutions. We find that the propensity of individuals towards the use of technology, measured by the technology readiness of the buyers, has a significant effect on the behavioral intention toward using digital services at work. In addition, the customer organization’s strategic emphasis – cost containment and revenue enhancement – have significant effects, while coping resources – task control and organizational support – do not affect the buyers’ behavioral intention to use digital services in their procurement processes. \

Immersive Virtual Reality in Experiential Learning - A Value Co-creation and Co-destruction Approach

Immersive Virtual Reality (later VR) has its potential in enabling learning experiences. Several studies adopt experiential learning as a key concept to understand the outcomes of VR. This study consists of two parts – the first part conducts a systematic literature review on VR experiential learning and suggests seven main dimensions for the concept identified by the existing literature: engagement, sociability, contextual information, physical sensation, interactivity, cognitions, and presence. The second part adopts a value co-creation and co-destruction approach to empirically test the construction underlying VR experiential learning. The findings indicate 33 value co-creation and 19 value co-destruction constructs contributing to the seven dimensions. The suggested seven value construct dimensions combined with our own empirical findings and the theory of experiential learning, our research results build understanding about the experiential learning in the VR context and further encourages future VR learning research to test and validate these propositions