Too true to be good? when virtual reality decreases interest in actual reality

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies enable marketers to design websites that simulate experiential consumption (e.g., museum visits, leisure travel) closely. While the motivation for employing VR-style websites is to attract people to consume the experience in real life, we proposed and found that VR-style (vs. traditional) websites may dissuade them from future consumption (Study 1). We argued that perceived similarity between virtual and real experiences mediates this negative effect. Study 2 suggested that because peoples enduring involvement with a product determines their ability to discriminate well between episodes of product experience, it causes variation in both perceived similarity and consumption intention, with the former mediating the latter. Study 3 showed that this negative effect reversed in experiences in which perceived similarity was low. Study 4 demonstrated that this negative effect disappeared when perceived similarity is irrelevant to the consumption decision, for example, when the decision is whether or not to recommend the experience to a friend.