Signaling Product Quality with Virtual Reality? An Interpretation with Consumer-Perceived Marketing Media Innovativeness: An Abstract

The overabundance of new digital marketing media creates a challenge for marketing managers to identify effective options to differentiate and educate consumers about their offerings. Firms may use marketing tools to signal to consumers the quality of the offering. While literature conceptualizes that innovative marketing technology influences consumers’ quality and value perceptions (Grewal et al. 2003; Parasuraman and Grewal 2000), empirical research is limited. Specifically, past research has not addressed how marketing can act as a signal simply because it is perceived as innovative by consumers. This study offers an explanation as to why the implementation of innovative marketing media may not always be successful in driving purchase intentions. Conceptualizations of innovativeness vary, including firm innovativeness, brand innovativeness, product innovativeness, and consumer innovativeness (Calantone et al. 2006; Garcia and Calantone 2002; Kunz et al. 2011; Szymanski et al. 2007). This paper presents marketing media innovativeness (MMI) as a new conceptualization to expand our understanding of implementing optimal digital marketing. The following research question is addressed: How do consumer perceptions of an innovative marketing medium influence product perceptions and purchase intentions? The proposed model tests the influence of product promotion with virtual reality tours, an industry-perceived innovative marketing medium, and still-photography, a non-innovative marketing medium as a means to signal a product’s quality to consumers. Results from two studies support that while industry-perceived innovative marketing media may not positively influence product quality perceptions, consumers’ perception of the innovativeness of marketing media can positively affect the product quality perceptions of the offering and increase purchase intentions. The study contributes to digital marketing (Lamberton and Stephen 2016; Yadav and Pavlou 2014) and signaling theory literature (Biswas and Biswas 2004; Ho-Dac et al. 2013; Kozlenkova et al. 2017; Li et al. 2009; Mitra and Fay 2010; Wells et al. 2011) by offering a lens of consumer-perceived marketing media innovativeness. Furthermore, this study evaluates usage of innovative marketing media in consumers’ purchase journey, providing a consumer-based strategic approach that has been called for in our literature (Dahl 2016; Deighton 2016; Hamilton 2016).