Investigating metaverse marketing-enabled consumers’ social presence, attachment, engagement and (re)visit intentions

Abstract

Although the substantial body of research on tourism-technologies has examined the use of virtual reality and web/mobile-based technologies, the potential of destination-marketing via metaverse is yet to be explored. Due to little empirical understanding about the use of metaverse tours in tourism service marketing, we develop a metaverse-based theoretical model integrating consumer's amount-of-time-spent, number of friends, use of virtual places, social presence to metaverse, attachment to metaverse, engagement to metaverse, and (re)visit intentions among Generation-Z adopting stimulus-organism-response perspective. Using multi-study approach, we conducted experiments with Generation-Z metaverse-respondents. Study 1 findings exposed that young users' amount-of-time-spent in metaverse, number of friends in metaverse, and use of virtual places promotes their social presence and attachment to metaverse. Study 1 findings also recognized that the social presence and attachment to metaverse in-turn increasing (re)visit intentions. Study 2 findings revealed the mediating effects of social presence and attachment to metaverse in the proposed relationships. Further, Study 2 findings exposed a positive moderating interaction effect of engagement to metaverse between social presence/(re)visit intentions and attachment/(re)visit intentions. Finally, the findings supplement existing theoretical knowledge of customers' metaverse-based social presence, attachment, engagement and provide practical insights for marketers on the advancement of metaverse tourism.