The Effects of Virtual Experience on Attitudes Toward Real Brands

Introduction

Virtual experience, defined as the psychological and emotional states that consumers undergo while interacting with products in a 3D environment, ¹ is a relative newcomer to the range of consumer experience. Traditionally, consumer product experience can vary from indirect to direct, depending on the depth of possible interactions with the product. ² Listening to a product description or viewing product images are examples of an indirect experience, while hands-on product trails are typical of direct experience. ³

Although virtual experiences are similar to indirect experiences in that they are both mediated, ⁴ virtual experiences also contain characteristics of direct experiences by allowing for interaction with products (such as rotation, zooming, and in some cases virtual use, e.g., animations of product functioning). Virtual experience primarily takes place within virtual environments, or the digital spaces in which a user's movements are tracked, and his or her surroundings rendered, or digitally composed and displayed to the senses, in accordance with those movements. ⁵ Despite the emergence of virtual reality and specifically video games (by far the most common form of virtual environments) as entertainment ⁶ and advertising platforms, ⁷ there have been few studies exploring the capacity for virtual experience to affect attitudes. Virtual experience has been found to influence the product knowledge, brand attitude, and purchase intention of consumers, ⁸ and has also been shown to do so more effectively than traditional 2D and TV representations of products. ⁹

Most recently, a series of experiments by Daughtery et al. showed that participants report significantly higher levels of product knowledge, brand attitude, and purchase intention after a virtual experience (3D product visualization) when compared to indirect experience (magazine advertisement). Furthermore, they found that virtual experience did not differ significantly from direct experience on those measures, and that both direct and indirect product experience proved to be more effective at influencing brand attitudes when preceded by virtual experience. ¹⁰ While these results provide valuable insight into understanding the mechanisms of virtual experience, they were shown only in the context of novel product experience. The question of how virtual experience affects existing attitudes remains to be answered.

If virtual experience can influence brand attitude (as suggested by previous studies) and is in practice similar to direct experience, we expect that it should be similarly subject to attitude change along the lines of current theoretical frameworks and models. This study attempts to affect existing attitudes toward brand name products through experience with virtual representations of those products. By providing a virtual experience in which evaluations can be made, we expect to observe changes in attitudes explicitly measured before and after the experience. Our hypotheses are as follows:

H1: Virtual experience with brand representations will result in attitude change toward those brands as measured before and after the experiment.

H2: Attitude change will be moderated by qualitative manipulation of the virtual experience.

In order to test these hypotheses, we constructed an experiment in which participants test-drove real brand cars in a virtual environment. By manipulating the difficulty of this experience, we hoped to create a scenario where attitude change processes could occur and be clearly exemplified.

Method

Sixty Polish university students (29 male) participated, ranging in age from 19 to 32 years (M=23.52, SD=2.83). Monetary compensation was offered for participation.

A 2×2 (Easy/Hard Driving Difficulty Assigned to Brand×Pre/Post Experiment Attitude Measures) repeated measures design was used. Driving difficulty was manipulated using in-game settings that modified traction control, braking assistance, and handling characteristics. Attitudes were measured a minimum of 5 days pre and immediately post experiment. Additionally, mood was controlled for using an adjective-based mood scale ¹¹ after each driving session.

A desktop virtual reality system was used to provide a wide-angle viewing surface, with a Logitech force-feedback-enabled steering wheel and pedals as input devices. Need for Speed: Shift, a virtual racing simulator, was used as the testing environment. Game interface elements were eliminated, leaving participants with only those visual cues that they might find in a real car. In-game cars chosen for use in the experiment were the Honda Civic and the Ford Focus. These cars were chosen on the basis of their similarity in price, class, and popularity (as assessed by the Polish 2012 Automotive Industry Yearbook) (Fig. 1).

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FIG. 1.

A visual representation of the projected screen size and steering apparatus position. An Acer H5360 DLP projector at WXGA display resolution was used.

Results

All analyses were conducted using Bonferroni corrected mixed design analysis of variance (ANOVA) with pre and post attitude scores for each test brand as within-subject variables and driving difficulty condition as a between-subjects factor.

Discussion

All three of our attitude measures suggest a similar pattern: when driving difficulty is set to hard for the Honda and easy for the Ford, there is a decrease in attitude scores toward the Honda while scores for the Ford increase. In the context of the associative-propositional evaluation (APE) model, this result can be interpreted as an effect of our manipulation. According to the APE model, attitude change may result from the interplay of associative (implicit) and propositional (explicit) processes, which in turn produce changes to the associative evaluation of an attitude object. ¹³

The activation of congruent (easy difficulty) and incongruent (hard difficulty) associative patterns in response to virtual experience resulted in the attribution of affective reactions evoked by these patterns to the vehicles being tested. Such an interpretation is supported by the fact that pre-experiment attitude scores were significantly higher for the Honda on two of our three measures.

The Honda provided an incongruent experience in the condition depicting it as more difficult to control than Ford, leading to an associative evaluation that produced attitude change. In the reverse condition, the experience was congruent and therefore did not result in attitude change. While the attitude measures we used were explicit, the observed changes occurred in response to the implicit influence of driving difficulty manipulation.

Although these results are promising, a number of limitations should be pointed out. First, a comparison of both cars at the same difficulty condition was not included in our design. While this was not crucial for testing our hypotheses, including them could have provided a more complete understanding of our results. Second, there were many mediating/moderating variables specific to our test stimuli beyond those which we controlled for which could have been significant (e.g., driving accidents, brand experience). Finally, our sample of relatively young students may have decreased the relevance of our stimuli in terms of attitudes (but may have also minimized variables such as those described above).

Overall, the findings of previous research in which virtual experience was shown to be effective at influencing brand attitude^8–10 are supported by the results of this study. We move one step forward by showing that virtual experience can significantly affect existing attitudes, and that its manipulation produces attitude change in line with what can be expected according to models such as APE. Future investigations using a similar methodological approach are necessary in order to confirm the obtained results and improve our understanding of virtual experience and its potential applications.