Immersion in an Online Merchant Environment: Are consumers ready to feel their presence in such environment?

Abstract In order to facilitate experiential online shopping for consumers, more and more immersive techniques are applied to companys websites. Little is known about how consumers perceive the companys attempt to immerse them in such interfaces. This paper focuses on the consumers perception about the influence of spatial and social immersion on the consumer behavior. The results from focus groups show that social immersion is better accepted than spatial immersion for influencing consumers responses. Consumers are far from ready to accept immersion when navigating websites in a marketing context. Keywords: immersion, presence, internet embodied virtual agent, consumer behavior online, approach behaviors Track: New Technologies and E-Marketing

Immersion in an Online Merchant Environment: Are consumers ready to feel their presence in such environment?
Internet shopping is clearly recognized as offering many opportunities to facilitate consumers utilitarian shopping through information search (e.g. greater product information availability and access) and product purchase (e.g. home shopping, 24h/24 and 7d/7 shopping) (Alba et al., 1997; Szymanski & Hise, 2000; Wind & Mahajan, 2002; Mller, 2005; Diesbach, 2006). In this framework, a satisfying customer experience is logically assumed to be created by online convenience, merchandising, site design, and financial security (Szymanski & Hise, 2000; Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003; Evanschitzky, Gopalkrishnan, Hesse, & Ahlert, 2004). However, the more immersive, hedonic aspects of Internet could play at least an equal role than its instrumental ones, in predicting online shopping attitudes and perceived value (Childers, Carr, & Peck, 2001; Mathwick, Mahlotra, & Rigdon, 2001). Today, technological advances in interactive techniques considerably broaden the extent to which Internet could also be used for experiential shopping (Helm-Guizon, 2001; Jeandrain & Limbourg, 2002; Diesbach, 2003). For instance, webatmospherics such as audio/video streaming are likely to stimulate the consumers who will come to such commercial or branding websites for their entertainment value as well as their functional value (Eroglu, Machleit, & Davis, 2001; Menon & Kahn, 2002; Diesbach & Midgley 2006b). If there are numerous possibilities with online cues to create compelling webatmospherics, all of them (e.g. high fidelity sound, 3D object manipulation, (embodied) virtual agent on internet) seem to follow the same pattern, that is: to reach media transparency and thus generate immersion, called the feeling of presence. In other words, the individual must have the perceptual illusion of non-mediation, in order to reach media usefulness and profitability (Lombard & Ditton, 1997). If facilitating presence is an explicit purpose for entertainment through new media, designing such experience for business-related purposes also becomes more and more an important goal. However, to our knowledge only few pieces of research have investigated in an experiential perspective, how the consumer deals with immersive interactive interface. It could be possible that not all consumer-related tasks necessarily require this state. For instance, if the individuals goal is searching for a product in a virtual commercial environment, then being immersed and absorbed within this environment could distract him/her from his/her shopping objective. On the other hand, if consumers are conscious of the companys attempt to immerse them in the website, they could negatively react and perceive this attempt as a way of companys illegitimate manipulation, which in turn lead to hinder the consumers feeling of presence and thus the benefits of perceiving such a state. For instance, presence is positively related to higher product knowledge and brand attitude (Li, Daugherty, & Biocca 2002; Klein 2003) and purchase intentions (Li, Daugherty, & Biocca 2002; Schlosser, 2003; Fiore, Kim, & Lee, 2005). Therefore, our research aims at (1) confronting the contribution of spatial and social presence to consumers reactions in the specific case of merchant website and (2) introducing the notion of autonomous agent as an ambient cue, in order to deeper analyze the social counterpart of presence. For doing so, we will first specify the notions of spatial and social presence, internet virtual agent, and merchant website. Then, a model will be proposed and deepened, inspired from previous research on the role of presence in an online marketing context by Diesbach and Jeandrain (2004). For testing our theoretical propositions, we conducted two focus groups. Results from this exploratory research are presented in a third section of this paper. We will conclude by suggesting insights for future research.

1. Conceptual framework 1.1 Spatial and social presence The concept of presence is crucial for understanding individuals behaviour in a mediated environment, such as Internet (Steuer, 1995; Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Ijsselstein, 2004) in the sense that this notion captures a global subjective experience. More precisely, it refers to a psychological state in which even though part or all of an individual's current experience is generated by and/or filtered through human-made technology, part or all of the individual's perception fails to accurately acknowledge the role of the technology in the experience (ISPR, 2003). Two kinds of presence may be encountered in a mediated environment: spatial presence and social presence (Lombard & Ditton, 1997). Spatial presence is defined as "the extent to which a person feels his/her existence as rather located in the mediated space than in the real environment". At lowest levels of presence, the individual is partially conscious of the actual role of technology in the navigation or humanmachine-interaction experience. As the individual mentally generates a spatial representation of the mediated environment, the extent to which the individual feels him/herself transported in this mediated place will progressively amplify. S/he is more and more attentive to stimuli from the mediated environment and less and less to those from the real environment (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 1997, 2000). Highest levels of presence will then occur, when a person totally fails to acknowledge the media existence and responds as s/he would if the media was not there. S/he rather behaves as an actor than as a spectator, inside the mediated environment. As real stimuli have disappeared from the persons consciousness, individuals respond to mediated stimuli just as they would do in the reality (Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Li, Daugherty, & Biocca 2002; Ijsselstein, 2004). For instance, they could have the impression of really manipulating a product in a 3D store and would thus adopt the same behaviors as in physical stores. If individuals could be self-included in a mediated environment, when feeling spatially present (Witmer & Singer, 1998), they could also perceive this presence when communicating with other beings (living or synthetic ones). Social presence is thus considered as the sense of being together with another, implying perceptual awareness of another entity, a greater sense of access to intentional, cognitive, or affective states of the other and a shared sense of the intersubjective interaction (Bickmore, 2002, 2003; Biocca, Harms, & Burgoon, 2003; Bickmore & Picard, 2003). Meaning, the individual in social presence will perceive the presence of an intelligent other which/who is able to interact with him. S/he does not anymore differentiate between human-human interaction and human-virtual being interaction. The other or virtual being is perceived as part of the mediated world, and as being able to interact with humans, which leads to the creation of (as if social, or) para-social relationships (Lombard & Ditton, 1997; Donath, 2001). That is, presence feeling deals with the way we feel and manage the relationship with an other, whether real or virtual. 1.2 Internet virtual agent In this research, we consider the specific case of an Internet Embodied Virtual Agent (IEVA) as the other being. An Internet Virtual Agent or IEVA is a virtual agent, that is a piece of software, accessible via a website on internet, that is embodied (i.e. it is made visible), and that interacts with and particularly, speaks to the user. It can make movements (e.g. illustrative movements), move inside the site, listen to the instructions of the user (written

ones, clicks, or sometimes oral instructions), in order to perform a number of predetermined tasks that helps the user during his/her navigation. As this software is embodied in a mediated interface, e.g. a PC screen, it could give the user the feeling s/he is interacting with a being, living or synthetic one. 1.3 Merchant website If we consider the navigation on the site as a period of time in which the customer directly interacts with the firm or the provided service, through its capacity to deliver information and generate emotions in a marketing perspective, a merchant site will work like a service encounter in the meaning conceptualised by Bitner (1990), and deepened by Mohr and Bitner 1990, Bitner (1992) and Meuter, Ostrom, Roundtree, and Bitner (2000). More precisely, a website may be considered as a merchant website even if it does not sell, as soon as it helps making the consumer enter in a process that will prepare him/she to a possible, future purchase such purchase can therefore take place on-line, or off-line or even if it takes part into a process of information search, products comparison, or loyalty enhancement, postpurchase problem resolution, etc., that is, any functionality that could normally be performed by employees and contact persons in a traditional outlet or service encounter (Babin, Darden, & Griffin, 1994; Babin, Babin, & Boles, 1999; Bitner 1990, 1992). The fact that a transaction is not proposed, or not realized online, does not exclude the electronic interface from the purchase process. For instance, if giving advices for making a present may be considered as a first step towards purchasing (Babin, Darden, & Griffin,1994; Sirieix & Dubois, 1999), so is it in an online context (Diesbach, 2003). The site also prepares future purchases in building a relationship between the brand and the user (Diesbach & Midgley, 2007), an approach which is consistent with a thorough understanding of marketing (e.g. Kotler & Armstrong, 2007) and of branding (Aaker, 1991; Kapferer, 2002, 2003). 2. Research propositions Our research propositions are mainly based on the literature on service marketing and on human-machine interaction, and deepen the model developed by Diesbach and Jeandrain (2004). In a second step, these propositions will be confronted to consumers reactions by the way of focus groups. 2.1 Spatial presence and service encounter In order to be immersed in a space, an environment a real space as well as a virtual one the user has to appropriate such space, i.e. to transform and personalize it (Belk, 1988; Boulaire & Mathieu, 2000; Car & Cova, 2003). For doing so, three steps have to be followed (Car & Cova, 2003): nesting (i.e. the user makes his nest in isolating a part of the space which results more familiar), exploring (i.e. the user locates more places and thus increases his territory) and marking (i.e. the user personalizes the space in symbolically labelling it). Therefore, we could formulate this proposition: P1: Online navigation may positively impact spatial presence. Numerous studies have demonstrated the predominant positive influence of the interface physical properties on the sense of presence, such as the screen size (e.g. Reeves, Detenber, & Steuer 1993). However, the content of the environment is also supposed to play an important

role in contributing to spatial presence. Results show that vivid animation is positively associated with presence (Coyle & Thorson, 2001). Baos et al. (2004) demonstrate that emotional environment enhances the feeling of presence. Therefore, we could formulate this proposition: P2: Emotional cues, particularly surprising or stimulating design elements of a website, may reinforce the feeling of spatial presence. Consumers experimenting spatial presence are more likely to consider such experience as entertaining, and sometimes very compelling (Green, 1998), which could lead to more exploration of the mediated space, that means more time spent in the virtual store (Lombart & Jeandrain, 2003; Diesbach, 2003). The more the individual is present on a website, the more s/he is likely to stay and desire to be in contact with the company and/or the service. For instance, Boulaire and Mathieu (2000) identify the concept of presence as one of the hedonic dimensions of affective engagement to a website. E-surfing, often associated to presence in a website (Helm-Guizon, 2001), is also linked to positive affect, and more specifically to surprise and arousal (Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2001) or to pleasure and dominance (Diesbach & Midgley 2007a, 2007b). Therefore, we could formulate this proposition: P3: Spatial presence should positively influence approach behaviors towards a merchant site. 2.2 Social presence, internet virtual agent and service encounter A rich literature in consumer behavior shows that the nature and quality of the interaction with salespeople or service personnel has an important impact on consumer beliefs and on the formation of the company or store image (Mohr & Bitner, 1990; Bitner, 1992; Baker, Grewal, & Levy, 1992; Babin, Darden, & Griffin, 1994; Babin, Babin, & Boles, 1999; Mller, 2006). Empirical results also show how the interface is perceived as more attractive and persuasive when inhabited by an agent (Cassel, Bickmore, Campbell, Vilhjalmsson, & Yan 2000; Takeuchi & Naito, 2002; Diesbach, 2003). That is, the same way as it occurs with a humanhuman interaction, an IVA is likely to generate more (or less) involvement, positive (or negative) emotional reactions, which may in turn strongly impact stickiness or positive emotion and time spent (Cassel et al., 2000; Diesbach, 2003) on the interface, and even influence choices (Takahashi, Takeuchi, & Katagiri, 2002; Bengtsson et al., 2001; Bickmore, 2003, 2007). Such phenomena, observed in a non merchant context, are very likely to also occur in a marketing context. Therefore, we could formulate these two propositions: P4: A virtual agent enhances feelings of social presence on a merchant site. P5: Social immersion should positively influence approach behaviors towards a merchant site. 3. Methodology In order to test the above propositions, two focus groups of 15 persons in total (women and men, from 20 to 25 years old) were conducted. Indeed, focus Group is a typical qualitative research method that offers neither control of a study nor replication of results but can render a deep understanding of the problematic (Morgan, 1998a, 1998b). A qualitative inquiry in general, and focus group interview in particular, were chosen because of their ability to precise research proposals, which do not have the same degree of preciseness as do research

hypothesis, to increase our understanding of a problem setting and to obtain consumer insights about new product or services or services encounters-related concepts (Malhotra, 1999). Moreover, focus groups are particularly adapted for their ability to point out emotional reactions, to mobilize imaginative capacities of interviewed subjects (Evrard, Pras, & Roux, 2003). The organization of the interviews followed the rules as proposed by Malhotra (1999), and Jolibert (2006). 4. Results The informants are quite mitigated by the fact of reaching high levels of spatial presence when navigating in a merchant website. They recognize as possible (even normal) real presence in a retail store, due to for instance pleasant atmosphere, but they reject the possibility of their online full spatial presence. The consumers psychological resistance to immersion is so high that it could lead to only moderate (even low) levels of online spatial presence. In other words, people could have huge difficulty to really enter in the website. Therefore, it is unlikely that just online navigation will generate intense levels of spatial presence. Nevertheless, they recognize that if spatial presence does occur, it will strongly influence approach behaviors, in particular staying and exploring. Therefore, if proposition 1 is rather rejected, proposition 3 could be not. As mentioned above, spatial presence is not yet accepted among people, especially when navigating through merchant website. When respondents speak about possible artifacts to facilitate spatial presence, they spontaneously consider as necessary both atmospheric cues and the content itself. Indeed, the atmosphere is taken as part of the whole virtual experience. Nonetheless, interactive cues are seen as minimal requirements of spatial presence. To be involved in such websites, these have to provide for instance a storyboard, such as the one in video games, for guiding the player in a specific engaging-sequence. Merchant website has to rethink the way of website informational architecture (i.e. a kind of storyboard) in order to facilitate spatial immersion. Each task is not considered to be a facilitator of spatial immersion. Therefore, proposition 2 is not rejected. It appears that virtual agents might be seen as too much obtrusive by Internet experts (i.e. who are familiar with Internet use) in comparison with current interactive tools on the web. These tools are more reacting to consumers responses than really acting. However, novices could find IVA as useful in the sense that these tools could welcome and guide them through the site. Even if they (users or novices) do not totally reject the fact of socially interacting with a virtual agent, they insist on the artificial character of such relationships. The term social when speaking of human-IVA interaction, is totally rejected. As a consequence, the perceived obtrusiveness of IVA could have a major, negative impact, on social presence. On the other hand, to accept an IVA and to feel positive emotions while interacting with it, do not mean the user is socially immersed (i.e. s/he doesnt necessarily forget s/he is interacting with an artificial agent). It is clearly highlighted that an agent has to be perceived as integrated, consistent, that is congruent (Galan, 2003; Heckler & Childers, 1992; Lee & Mason, 1999; Lynch & Schuler, 1994), with the brand environment. That is, the agent must be perceived as consistent with the displayed products or services brand values. Respondents could be seduced by the virtual agent and be conscious of the attempt to persuade. They seem to quite accept it, if the fakeness is not consciously hidden (for instance, IVA as cartoons), but they identify the IVA as a manipulator it if this tool is conceived to influence other human emotions. For these reasons, proposition 4 is rejected.

If the respondents dont perceive the IVA potential persuasiveness, this tool is likely to impact positive reactions and to actually be persuasive. Otherwise, fear of manipulation and thus rejection might occur. We highlight that we assess here the perceived persuasiveness not the actual influence and persuasion, which is another construct, as shown by, e.g. Burgoon et al. (2000). Moreover, as social presence is much better accepted, such state could potentially lead to approach behaviors, which means that proposition 5 is not rejected. 5. Conclusion The objective of our paper was to analyze the perceived role of (spatial and social) presence in an online merchant context. First, we have differentiated spatial versus social presence, and introduced a broad concept of merchant website as well as the Internet Virtual Agent as potential facilitator of online social presence. Second, all those concepts have then been integrated into a global framework. These five research proposals were confronted to consumers reactions through two focus groups. We have arrived at some expected, and some other counter-intuitive findings: on the one hand, spatial presence and social presence are likely to enhance positive reactions; on the other hand, people are likely to better perceive (and thus accept) social presence with virtual agents than spatial presence. The main contribution of our research is to underline the fact that consumers are not ready to accept the feeling of spatial presence as a legitimate marketing practice. Practitioners or researchers who want to facilitate such state are to be conscious that online navigation or stimulating content may not be enough to generate high levels of spatial presence. It seems that such levels could be more easily generate through interfaces integrated sophisticated artifacts such as bigger screen. Nonetheless, if such interfaces could be found in some laboratory, this technology is not available for the consumers everyday online experience, which reduces the appeal of facilitating presence in merchant website. On the other hand, our paper pinpoints a paradoxical result, that is: if consumers are reluctant to be present, once they are, they accept the possibility to appreciate such state. Such findings need to be deepened in future researches.

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