Virtual reality of some kind would seem to be a natural tool for market research. It has the potential to help the marketing decision maker in that it can allow him to model what people do rather than rely simply on what people say they will do. The marketing decision maker is surrounded by experts advising him on what to do; the design expert who tells him new packaging will refresh his brand, the agency expert who tells him new advertising will increase brand share, the pricing expert who tells him that if he drops his price it will result in increased sales and increased profits overall and the marketing research expert whose job is to convince him as to the best course of action. With all of these experts often with different agendas, sometimes offering conflicting advice, it is no wonder he has a healthy scepticism. We now have new tools at our disposal. It is up to us to be proactive, to change, to try new technology. If we want the marketing decision maker to use research fully we need to convince him that we have the means to get at the truth. And if at first we dont succeed then we should try, try, try again. In the ideal world, Marketing will trust all research results implicitly and have full confidence in anything that we propose. To achieve that goal we must have amongst other things the right tools. Researchers within a marketing organisation cannot rely only on suppliers to provide those tools. We have to understand the needs, then if the tools are not available, develop them ourselves and find a supplier who can work with them. Then and only then will market researchers on the client side gain the confidence of marketing decision makers leading one hopes to the ultimate goal of increasing profits for our companies.
The great development of the multimedia technologies in this decade scams to impose a real revolution on our environment and on the relationships among manufacturers, retailers, and consumers. New frontiers arc opening in front of us due to the tied links in the world of telecommunications, electronics and computer technologies. A few years ago. Virtual Reality was confined to laboratories, amusement arcades and science fiction novels and was rarely taken seriously in the business world, Today, however, it is entering the mainstream of corporate computing and is being used for everything from complex engineering design work to medical training, retailing and data visualisation. In 1994 in Europe of the 800 virtual reality projects in existence, more than 600 were in areas not associated with entertainment. These applications have been developed using the technology evolution that has allowed the system manufacturers to reduce the costs, which have been the real barrier for a massive implementation.
Marketing researchers are constantly attuned to the methodology of data collection, understanding this facet of research on a number of dimensions: collection procedure validity, demand characteristics, length of field execution, and research cost. Todays marketing efforts require researchers to operate faster, better, and at a lower cost than we do now. MarketWare has commercialized a technology for collecting consumer purchasing data which addresses the issues of speed, validity, and expense. Using a virtual reality computer simulation, the Visionary Shopper® research service puts consumers in a laboratory type setting where consumers are asked to shop as they would normally on a 3-dimensional virtual reality computer system. Consumers can maneuver around store shelves, pick up, examine, and purchase products. The computer system automatically records what they choose to pick up and look at and what they choose to buy. This technology has been used in many parts of the world to investigate the impact of pricing, promotion, packaging, shelf set, and shelf assortment on consumer purchasing behavior. As a simulation, Visionary Shopper provides the consumer with the ability to realistically interact with realistic products in a familiar context. The system is predictive, in that it relies on measures of consumer behavior (not intent) and does not require back data or norms to have the data be understood. Compared to in-market tests, the system is fast (usually 03-Apr weeks per test), flexible (changes are to a computer program, not a store), and relatively inexpensive. The system is confidential, both to the client, who does not expose marketing strategies to the world, and to the respondent, who interacts with a computer rather than an interviewer, avoiding demand characteristics This paper will discuss virtual reality in relation to marketing research, specifically the Visionary Shopper system, presenting its advantages and comparing its use to other technologies.
This paper illustrates the appropriateness of computer graphics for the creation of realistic representations of products that are not (yet) available, for the benefit of market research applications, particularly concept tests. An experiment is conducted to study the effect of the realism of computer-created product representations on the validity of consumer evaluations. We varied the degree of realism of representations of a shaver and a picture telephone. These representations as well as the actual products are evaluated by samples of respondents. The validity of consumer evaluations increased with an increasing degree of realism, particularly for the picture telephone. That means that it may be worthwhile to invest in additional degrees of realism to get more valid consumer evaluations. Particularly, the amount of detail of the products form affected the validity of consumer evaluations. Investments in additional CAD options, such as a ray tracer or a mapper to provide a more natural impression of the products' material properties, tended to be less relevant. The improvement in validity was small in comparison with the costs. Investments in a modeller that supports an efficient and effective description of the product's form was considered to be more relevant than investments in additional CAD options, such as ray tracing and mapping.