2025 Theses Doctoral

Immersive Technologies in Marketing: A Spatial Framework

Park, Sanghyeok

This dissertation examines how established and emerging immersive technologies shape consumers’ perceptions of spatial characteristics in virtual and physical environments and the consequences relevant to various stakeholders in the marketing field.

To begin, I propose a framework that aims to clarify how consumers, as users of immersive technologies such as monitors or AR glasses, may view their interactions with the content in a spatial perspective. Then, across two essays, I apply the framework to two immersive technologies—monitors and augmented reality (AR)—and provide evidence of consumers processing their virtual experiences with spatial characteristics.

The first essay addresses a key question: Do consumers infer spatial characteristics in screen-based media, particularly in livestreams? Drawing from theories of crowdedness in the physical world, I propose that viewers process cues such as the scrolling speed of the chatting interface as a spontaneous cue of crowdedness, even for livestreams—a virtual experience—which influences their judgments of the streamer’s popularity. Across nine studies (including experiments with real viewers, streamers, and managers and field data from Twitch), I show that a faster-moving chat interface increases the degree of inferred crowdedness, mediating perceptions of streamer popularity. This process is robust to alternative explanations such as visual density, inference of others’ engagement intensity, and the viewer’s own engagement. It also remains consistent across variations in chat content, interface design, and viewer familiarity. These findings demonstrate that consumers use spatial characteristics, like crowdedness, even in virtual environments devoid of clear spatial dimensions, to make social judgments.

The second essay explores augmented reality’s (AR) unique ability to manipulate the spatial position of virtual content. I theorize that AR uniquely repositions virtual content into the user’s personal space—what I call egocentric spatial repositioning (ESR). Grounded in construal level theory, social presence, and egocentric categorization, I argue that AR’s ability to anchor virtual content in one’s own physical space increases the perception that users share their space with the virtual object, and relatedly, categorizes the target as part of the user. I apply this theory to the domain of prosocial behavior, as intuitively, this idea of distance seems most relevant for domains that require empathy. Three experimental studies using various AR platforms (e.g., Snapchat) replicate the result that AR increases the sense that the virtual content shares the user’s personal space, and consequently, increases prosocial behavior (e.g., charitable donations). Analyses confirm that this effect is driven by ESR rather than familiarity with AR or privacy concerns.

Together, these essays show that spatial cognition—how consumers represent spatial characteristics—is a critical but overlooked dimension of consumer experience with immersive technologies. By introducing a spatial perspective into theories of virtual consumption, this dissertation offers novel insights into how consumers process virtual experiences and a framework that can drive future research on consumer cognition and behavior in increasingly virtual worlds.