We define VR marketing as the application of virtual reality technology to any aspect of marketing. Throughout practice and literature, VR is employed to improve either or both the utility and experientiality of aspects of the marketing value chain.

With the advent of the internet in the 1990s, marketing was revolutionized in terms of its information propagation efficiency. Today, pervasively across the entire value chain, marketing is facing yet another revolution: Virtual Reality (VR). While in the 1990s, the internet made marketing hugely efficient, and it reduced the experiential nature of marketing that exists, e.g., in bricks-and-mortar marketing. The potential of the current wave of virtual reality in marketing is seen to stem from combining the efficiency of digital platforms with the immersiveness, experientiality and multisensory nature of " physical” marketing environments. However, while the narrative of the potential of VR in marketing may seem as intuitively appealing, there is still a lack of coherent understanding as to whether these benefits have been realized in VR marketing. Therefore, we firstly seek to define VR marketing, and secondly, to review the expanding literature related to it. In particular, we review in which areas of marketing VR has been researched, how it has been researched, which kinds of technologies have been used, and which theories this corpus of literature draws from and contributes to. Moreover, we review the effects of VR marketing on consumer experience and behavior that the extant literature has been able to tease out.

Next, we examine VR marketing in four different marketing domains, namely marketing research, product innovation, advertising and retailing, which represent aspects of value determination, value creation, value communication and value delivery during the marketing value chain. Virtual reality marketing is used to improve both the utility and experientiality of aspects of the marketing value chain.

Furthermore, we examine the trends of related theories in the relevant research, and find that virtual reality is viewed either as a kind of media that highlights products’ attributes and improves the consumer learning process or as a way to reshape shopping environments in the computer-based virtual world which can influence consumer affection. We can also realize that researchers have recently begun to integrate more values realized by VR marketing into their research frameworks. Based on this, we propose a generally conceptual framework for future VR marketing research.

According to the current body of literature, virtual reality technology shows considerable promise for the areas of marketing. However, current research still lacks in-depth insights as to how virtual reality works in marketing, and which factors can influence its marketing success. Given these findings, we offer a detailed discussion of the future agenda for VR marketing research.