With technological progress, retail companies must understand how to make virtual channels and environments more interactive to enhance user engagement. In this study, we apply the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) paradigm and the Customer Engagement Theory to investigate the impact of various types of customer engagement on the connection amid interactivity and continuous metaverse-empowered marketing channel usage.
The analysis was conducted using PLS-SEM on data collected via a representative sampling approach from 300 respondents on prolific online (the UK was fed as the country with the sample representing people with AR/VR gear).
It has been found that cognitive, emotional and social engagement positively and significantly mediates the relation between the variables studied. Personalization had a significantly negative moderating influence on the association between cognitive engagement and continuous use.
Besides extending existing research in the area of metaverse-empowered channels, the study’s findings provide important guidelines for retail companies to enhance customer engagement in virtual environments effectively.
