The Role of Embodiment and Presence in Metaverse’s Consumer Purchase Behaviour: A Systematic Literature Review
Abstract
Avatars enable consumers to disconnect from the physical world and immerse themselves in a digital representation within the metaverse, shaping their consumer experiences. The immersive nature of virtual environments has garnered significant attention from advertising researchers and practitioners, leading to a focus on the concept of embodiment and presence. However, existing research primarily emphasizes the conceptual understanding of the metaverse, its characteristics, challenges, and opportunities in advertising, while neglecting an in-depth investigation into the role of embodiment and presence in shaping consumer purchase intention. To clarify and emphasize the role of embodiment and presence in the metaverse in promoting consumer purchase intention, a systematic literature review was conducted following the PRISMA statement. A total of 14 articles from Scopus and WoS were selected by using the keywords “embodiment”, “presence”, “consumer purchase behaviour”, and “metaverse”. Beyond conceptualization and characterization of embodiment and presence, this study reveals that embodiment and presence are not only affected by vividness and interactivity but also positively promoted immersion, trust, enjoyment, engagement, brand love and so on, and subsequently influenced purchase intention in the metaverse. However, this study also discovered that the research on metaverse embodiment based on consumer contexts remains relatively underdeveloped and lacks a comprehensive survey of embodiment and presence together. Therefore, given the importance of embodiment and presence in metaverse environments, this study provides valuable suggestions to facilitate future research investigating embodiment and presence and contributes to the theoretical understanding of embodiment and presence in the metaverse and consumer behaviour context.
Keywords: Metaverse, embodiment, presence, consumer purchase behaviour, advertising.
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