Virtual reality along the customer journey: Thinking, feeling, doing, and experiencing

Recently, brands have moved past simple visual-based virtual reality (VR) experiences to engage with and create value for consumers. VR scholarship has followed suit with recent work beginning to explore the psychological processes and downstream brand consequences of multi-sensory VR experiences, albeit without a unifying systematic framework. To address this issue, in this paper, we systematize recent research by delineating how VR experiences help consumers engage cognitively (think), affectively (feel), behaviorally (do), and sensorially (experience) at each stage of the customer journey. This framework forms the basis for introducing and proposing how VR scholarship and practice in marketing and related fields will evolve in the future.