Signs of Marketing in Virtual Reality

Abstract Interactivity provides marketers with the means to deliver virtual realities custom designed for and by each consumer. With the help of computer-assisted marketing, consumers can form virtual societies and cultures. Consumers can be the architects of their virtual realities by selecting attributes. However, computers can assist the design of custom virtual realities, filling in details according to consumers’ outlines and generating details according to the probabilities of consumer experience. In actual reality, objects do not occur isolated from other objects. Knowing the simultaneous occurrences of attributes, one can construct a virtual reality that evokes a sense of actual reality when it is imaginary. Marketers can calculate conditional uncertainty to discover which attribute signs have common preference among consumers and which have limited or idiosyncratic preference. This measure reveals predictability of one sign given a previously selected sign or assortment, and predictability of consumer characteristics from sign choice within assortment contexts. With this information, marketers can construct targeted virtual realties of signs that include consumption object icons or brands.