Virtual technologies in supporting sustainable consumption: From a single-sensory stimulus to a multi-sensory experience

It is nothing new that the production, processing, packaging, transport, and consumption of consumer goods require the use of natural resources and that they pollute the environment. Indeed, human consumption has a direct impact on the environment, but it is also a major force for change through consumption choices (e.g., Halder, Hansen, Kangas, & Laukkanen, 2020). The human senses play a key role in consumption choices (Biswas, 2019) and these sensations can influence decision-making unconsciously (Krishna & Schwarz, 2014). Consequently, retailers can nudge consumer decisions by altering sensory cues (Biswas, Szocs, Krishna, & Lehmann, 2014; van Kleef, Vrijhof, Polet, Vingerhoeds, & de Wijk, 2014) and have significant managerial implications (Biswas, 2019). In fact, the most pleasurable experiences in life involve the simultaneous stimulation of multiple senses (Krishna, 2012; Tynan & McKechnie, 2009). However, consumption today increasingly takes place in digital environments that are limited in providing sensory cues to consumers and in practice provide only single-sensory stimulus. Does this deficiency put our ability to influence consumer experiences and choices at risk? Virtual reality (VR), is the main representative of emerging digital technologies and has shown its advantages at mimicking real-world environments, providing lifelike multimodal and multisensory stimuli (Bonetti, Warnaby, & Quinn, 2018) and creating another new reality (Xi & Hamari, 2021). Multisensory technologies and sensory devices provide more opportunities for consumers to interact with digital objects in multiple ways, to receive sensory feedback, and communicate with others. Given that much sensory information regarding a product and the shopping environment can be substituted and re-created in virtual reality, VR will be able to affect consumer perception, judgment, and behavior in virtual environments, and create novel experiences (Xi & Hamari, 2021). Indeed, Gartner (2020) predicts that multisensory experiences will be among the most promising technological trends of the future.