The Conceptualization of “Presence” in Interactive Marketing: A Systematic Review of 30 Years of Literature

Interactive marketing has greatly benefited from advances in immersive technologies, like virtual reality, as they provide consumers with marketing experiences that transcend the constraints associated with more traditional media. Consumers’ feelings of being “there” in a mediated environment further increase the effectiveness of the immersive experience, making the concept of “presence” a central process of interest to researchers and practitioners in interactive marketing. In this chapter, the authors conduct a systematic review of presence within the interactive marketing literature, focusing on its conceptual development and empirical outcomes. This review revealed key components in a theoretical framework of presence, including its technological antecedents (e.g., sensory breadth), associated subdimensions (e.g., ecological validity), and cognitive processes (e.g., self-location and action possibilities). This review also suggests that the cognitive processes associated with presence are relatively understudied, including the impact of presence on consumers’ positive and negative affective responses toward the system, marketing content, and self-perception, as well as inconsistent findings concerning memory and the influence of presence on behavioral outcomes. These suggestions provide valuable insights given the importance of cognitive and affective responses in driving evaluations of marketing messages, facilitating future research investigating presence within interactive marketing.