Investigating the Impact of Virtual Experience on Consumer Learning

for a grant to initiate this research and Theresa Cai and Harshavardhan Gangadharbatla for their invaluable help during the data collection. Consumers learn about products from the experience of interacting with people, objects and the environment. However, an experience is more than simply the passive reception of external sensations or subjective mental interpretations of a situation. Rather, an experience is the result of an ongoing transaction that gains in quality, intensity, meaning, and value integrating both psychological and emotional conditions (Mathur, 1971). These conditions are ultimately accomplished via the generation of thoughts and/or sensations brought together creating the experience (Hirshman, 1984). A product purchase is in many ways not the purchase of a physical good itself but of an experience that the product affords (Pine II and Gilmore, 1998). Thus, the role of consumer learning about a product prior to the purchase is mainly to assess what consumption experience the product can offer and how well it can meet the expectations of the anticipated experience (Hoch and Deighton, 1989). Research has documented that consumers learn about products through indirect experience, such as advertising, and via direct experience, such as product trial it has been speculated that the type of medium may limit the effect of advertising and a more powerful medium for communicating the details and experiences of a product, such as the Internet, could have a stronger impact on consumer learning (Moore and Lutz, 2000). Three-dimensional (3-D), multiuser , online environments constitute a new revolution of interactivity by creating compelling virtual experiences (Waller, 1997). McLuhan and McLuhan(1988) suggest that within any medium there is a connection between the human mind, the technology, and the environment that serves to immerse users. It is the interactive nature of the Internet that immerses consumers and offers the greatest potential to marketers because of the ability to offer user-controlled product interactive experiences (Schlosser and Kanfer, 2001). Since most products are 3-D objects that are experienced with the senses, the use of dynamic 3-D visualization in ecommerce is increasing as companies seek to give users a virtual experience of the product. The implications are that a 3-D virtual product experience is a simulation of a real or physical product experience and can be construed to be located between direct experience and indirect experience within the spectrum of consumer learning. To fully understand the impact of a virtual experience and the use of 3-D product …