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.