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Virtual reality (VR) refers to immersive, interactive, multisensory, viewer-centered, three-dimensional computer-generated environment (Mandal, 2013; Toshniwal & Dastidar, 2014). Though VR was first introduced to target entertainment and gaming, recent studies have shown its potential use for educational purposes (see Choi et al., 2016 for review). With the advent of smartphone devices and free VR apps available for download (e.g., Google apps and Apple stores), VR technology has become more affordable and accessible than what it used to be a few years ago. For instance, students can use their smartphones (androids or iOS) to download free apps and slide them into the cardboard.
In fact, there is a great potential in using smartphone-based VR as a teaching tool that would complement and improve the teaching effectiveness and the overall students' learning experience (Jensen & Konradsen, 2018). In particular, many studies in management education have reported opportunities for using VR in teaching retailing principles (Drake-Bridges et al., 2011), social marketing (Dietrich et al., 2019), tourism marketing (Hassan & Jung, 2018), and brand management (Belei et al., 2011).
One of the most important courses in the marketing curriculum is marketing research. For many instructors, teaching marketing research depends heavily on concepts drawn from consumer behavior (Bridges, 2020). While many students recognize the psychological complexities of consumer behavior, they often find it challenging to integrate the learned concepts into a coherent framework that facilitates learning (Lincoln, 2016). For instance, the concepts of hedonic shopping (i.e., the enjoyment and pleasure that consumers may experience while shopping), psychological time (i.e., the sense of the passage of time when purchasing a product), and the flow state (i.e., the sense of playfulness and distorted sense of time) are experiential by nature. They would be better taught if they are integrated within a comprehensive framework related to the consumer's shopping experience. As VR enables simulating shopping experiences, the relevance of VR to teach these concepts becomes instrumental.
Hence, the purpose of this paper is to highlight some merits of using smartphone-based VR to teach marketing concepts. This article reports on the results of a VR simulation activity used in a marketing research class to teach students a few consumer behavior (CB) concepts before setting up experimentations.
The paper is organized as follows. First, the opportunity of using smartphone-based VR as an immersive teaching tool is highlighted. Second, the paper explains how the proposed VR innovation relates to the marketing curriculum objectives. The paper also describes the VR simulation and positions its novelty with regard to learning taxonomies. Thereafter, the paper reports some findings from assessing the VR effectiveness and conclude with some challenges and the potential adaptability of the VR simulation to other marketing courses.