VR in customer-centered marketing: Purpose-driven design

Despite the annual growth of the virtual reality (VR) market, many businesses—especially small and medium-sized ones—have been slow to adopt VR in their marketing. As many forms of VR exist, it is important to understand how they can be used to achieve specific marketing objectives. Unfortunately, minimal guidance related to VR production for marketing purposes exists. To address this, our article proposes guidelines for strategically deploying VR marketing in customer-centered businesses. This research also builds on extant VR marketing literature to consider VR marketing objectives for each stage of the consumer journey and offers concrete recommendations for selecting and designing appropriate VR applications. The proposed guidelines are further exemplified by two small-scale cases from the Scottish tourism industry.