Web Systems Design and Online Consumer Behavior [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Introduction

Much literature on the topic of e-marketing and
virtual reality concerns the concepts of interactivity, vividness, involvement and presence.
According to the literature, these and other concepts are important to success in e-marketing.
However, the literature has not adequately addressed what some scholars see as a shortcoming of the
research in traditional marketing communication media: researchers have not paid enough attention
to the social and cultural contexts of consumption and marketing communication. As e-marketing
becomes more competitive, understanding context may be the difference between success and
failure.

Ritson and Elliott (1999) pointed out that advertising research tends to employ methodology
specifically designed to eliminate social context as a variable. Then, using ethnographic methods,
they demonstrated how consumers use advertising in socially oriented rather than purchase-oriented
activities. That finding should hardly surprise those who recognize that consumption itself is a
socially oriented rather than purchase-oriented activity. One would expect the communication
surrounding the activity to reflect the nature of the activity.

Much e-marketing research adapts methodologies used in traditional marketing communication
research. The adapted methodologies, because of their designs, remove social and cultural contexts
as variables. Studies of 3-D product demonstrations (Daugherty, Li & Biocca, 2001; Li,
Daugherty & Biocca, 2002), for example, examine product attributes and functional consequences
using methods that prohibit subjects from interacting with each other. The use context of products
is largely ignored even though that context, social and cultural, may give the product its real
meaning and, therefore, its social value. In other words, like much traditional marketing
communication, e-marketing and virtual reality research often fails to consider product
concept.

This chapter discusses social and cultural context in e-marketing and virtual reality. The
research concepts of presence, along with its antecedents vividness and interactivity, are critical
to creating social and cultural context in virtual reality. The concept of affordance is the
foundation of context since the value of any social or cultural context resides in what that
context affords participants.