Immersive Retail Technologies and Customer Experiences: A Multi‐Study Experimental Design

ABSTRACT In‐store technologies are reshaping retail experiences by changing how consumers evaluate, engage with, and extend their interactions with products and brands. This research examines how virtual reality (VR)‐based store displays influence three experiential outcomes: experience evaluation, experience intensification, and experience extension. We distinguish between contextual and imaginative VR displays and examine their effects across product‐category and brand origin contexts. Drawing on the Stimulus‐Organism‐Response framework, we also test whether experience evaluation and experience intensification sequentially mediate the relationship between VR display type and experience extension. Across four study sets, using direct‐effect and sequential‐mediation designs, the findings show that contextual VR displays generally produce stronger experiential responses than imaginative displays across jeans, perfume, local‐brand, and foreign‐brand conditions. The results further show that display type is associated with experience extension directly in some contexts and indirectly through experience evaluation and experience intensification. These findings contribute to retail technology and customer experience research by showing that the effectiveness of VR displays depends not only on technological immersion but also on the design logic through which products and brands are presented. For managers, the findings suggest that contextual VR displays can strengthen consumer experiences by making products and brands more concrete, interpretable, and use‐relevant within the retail environment.