On the effectiveness of using virtual reality games in social marketing

Social marketing aims to influence behaviors that would be beneficial to individuals and communities. To achieve this goal, it is based on various interventions. Such interventions need to include all four P’s of marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. Among all these elements, promotion is assumed to be the most important and associated with common understanding of social campaign. Although, interventions which only use the promotion are not considered to be social marketing, social advertising is very essential for the success of the campaign as it plays a key role in terms of its perception and draws attention of a wide audience to the problem. Thanks to the occurrence of advertising in the media it can reach the larger number of recipients and initiate many positive changes. Recently, next to the traditional communication channels, like TV and press, relatively new media have occurred (mobile phones, social media, etc.). Apart of that, social marketing campaigns may also use advertising in games. This type of entertainment is widely popular and provides a deep recipient’s engagement, especially when the game is presented in virtual reality. Therefore, it can significantly increase the effectiveness of social advertising. The aim of the article is to present an experiment that allows to study the efficacy of virtual reality game in social advertising. The research is designed to gather data from two different sources - survey and cognitive neuroscience tools. The study proposal is based on the simple action game that aims to raise players’ awareness of healthy eating. The application of virtual reality for this purpose is very promising since it is quite novel technology and because of its features allows for much deeper immersion into game’s world that traditional computer or video games.