Mark Zuckerberg, recently changed the name of Facebook to ‘Meta’, indicating that metaverse will be one of the key future directions of the Internet. It is estimated that in 2026, 25% of people worldwide will spend at least 1 h a day in the metaverse for digital activities, including shopping, social interaction and entertainment (Johnson, 2022). The growing enthusiasm for the metaverse suggests that consumers will increasingly accept a dematerialization of their extended-self, leading them to ascribe greater value to virtual objects (Belk, 2013; Velasco et al., 2021b). However, will these possessions necessarily be similar to those that exist in the physical world? Is the dematerialization of our extended-self in the metaverse not likely to affect the way in which we make decisions? It is clearly going to be important for forward-thinking brands to question the impact of the metaverse on consumer behaviour.

In the metaverse, consumers will likely be able to live and share their experiences in a way that will more-or-less closely resemble their experiences in real-life (albeit with a much-reduced sensory bandwidth, catering primarily to the visual and auditory senses). AR, VR and other visual-enabling technologies already allow the users to navigate and interact with people and objects virtually (Flavián et al., 2019) and stimulate the senses in real-time (Ueda et al., 2020; Barbosa Escobar et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2021). These technologies have been used extensively during the COVID-19 outbreak, helping people overcome the isolation, and currently continue to develop (Kerdvibulvech and Chen, 2020; Kerdvibulvech and Dong, 2021). In addition, the latest (multi-)sensory-enabling technologies (SETs, e.g. mid-air haptics and smell interfaces) will certainly be integrated in the metaverse to stimulate the consumer’s senses directly (Petit et al., 2019; Velasco and Obrist, 2020). These technologies will thus provide sensory immersive experiences close to consumers’ everyday offline experiences (Spence and Gallace, 2011; Petit et al., 2019). However, in the metaverse, these sensory inputs can be limited, amplified, made congruent or incongruent with the digital and/or physical environment in which the user finds themselves. Since the way we become conscious of our surroundings and our bodies depends largely on our senses (Ionta et al., 2011; Nani et al., 2019), the question is, how can their stimulation in the metaverse affect the way we make decisions? Thus, it becomes essential to understand how people make predictions on the basis of sensory inputs when engaged in impression formation, when they involve both virtual and physical objects and environments.

Consciousness can be understood as ‘a controlled hallucination based on predictions about the current sensory inputs’ Metzinger (2018, p. 4). Many researchers working in the neurosciences have highlighted the key role of sensory inputs, and recurrent feedback, in the establishment/maintenance of consciousness (Dehaene and Naccache, 2001; Baars, 2002; Gallace and Spence, 2008). Conscious visual experience is thought to emerge from the processing and transmission of information from sensory areas up to higher-order cortical and motor regions (Nani et al., 2019; Sikkens et al., 2019). In turn, the temporo-parietal occipital workspace is continuously scanned and accessed by the attention network. While bottom-up subcortical mechanisms support wakefulness, top-down cortical mechanisms are important as far as delivering the contents of consciousness is concerned (Mashour and Hudetz, 2017). Thus, consciousness depends on whether a stimulus is perceptible and how, exactly, attention is deployed.

In the context of consumer behaviour, consciousness also plays a crucial role (Plassmann and Mormann, 2017; Williams and Poehlman, 2017). According to Baumeister et al. (2017), consumer consciousness contributes to choices and wellbeing notably by aligning consumer behaviour with the self. Consumer consciousness can take various forms with different impacts on consumer behaviour. For example, consumer health consciousness has been shown to have a positive effect on the intention to purchase organic food products (Nagaraj, 2021). Body consciousness has also been shown to impact how women imagine they can control their physical appearance, leading them to invest time in creating self-portraits to express their identity in social media (Boursier et al., 2020).

It is important to note that highlighting consumer consciousness does not diminish the role of unconscious processes and the impact of sensory inputs on them. Our experience of the sensory world is delayed (see, Libet, 1999), which raises the possibility that all conscious mental functions are initiated unconsciously. Unconscious processes have been recognised as one of the primary causes of consumer behaviour (Williams and Poehlman, 2017; García-Madariaga et al., 2020; Ozkara and Bagozzi, 2021). The key point to discuss here is how a decrease and/or alteration of consciousness generated by a change in which sensory inputs are transmitted to consumers can strongly impact the way(s) in which they are persuaded, control themselves and make decisions (Baumeister et al., 2017; Plassmann and Mormann, 2017).

Not being able to smell perfume or touch clothes online prior to purchasing can be frustrating for consumers (Petit et al., 2019; Løkke-Andersen et al., 2021), which could also impact the extent to which they are conscious of their online experiences. Limiting sensory inputs online, at least relative to experiences in the physical world, could make the contents of online experience somehow less vivid for consumers, who would also be less alert (Nani et al., 2019). For example, Schlosser (2003) showed that when consumers interact with a product online (vs. passively view it), they engaged in greater mental imagery and had increased cognitive elaboration. Even if consumers do not have access to all of the sensory stimuli that are desirable for their decision-making, mental simulation can nevertheless still facilitate multisensory perceptual re-enactments (Petit et al., 2019; Elder and Krishna, 2021). For example, the visual exposure to appetising pictures of food not only activates regions of the visual cortex that represent object shape, it also activates gustatory areas in order to produce conceptual inferences about taste (Simmons et al., 2005). Thus, top-down visual imagery can affect information processing in the online environment in a way that is similar to bottom-up perceptual inputs, and thus help the consumer to be more conscious of their experiences (Spence et al., 2016).

It has been suggested that the richer the visual stimuli, the more vivid the resulting visual imagery (Marks, 1999; Basso et al., 2018). By including 3D-interactive views and virtual try-ons in online environments, marketers can facilitate the consumers’ visual imagery, in turn potentially filling-in some of the missing sensory inputs (Ho et al., 2013; Heller et al., 2019b). For example, Petit et al. (2021) highlighted how AR can facilitate the purchase intention for served (as compared to packaged) food by stimulating mental simulation of the eating process. These effects of visual-enabling technologies can now be reinforced by SETs (Velasco et al., 2018; Petit et al., 2019; Velasco and Obrist, 2020; Cornelio et al., 2021). For example, Heller et al. (2019a) reported that including touch control in an AR experience increased the consumer’s willingness to pay. By stimulating several of the senses during online experiences, consumer consciousness might thus be enhanced. However, the reality-virtuality continuum (Milgram and Kishino, 1994) integrates different experiences, merging real and virtual objects, which could confuse the consumer and thus adversely impact their consciousness.

The reality-virtuality continuum ranges from real environments, through those that involve both real and digital elements (as in AR and augmented virtuality), to fully virtual ones (see Flavián et al., 2019). In this continuum, if the virtual elements were only visual, the SETs make it possible to expand them to other senses. Marketers could therefore potentially manipulate sensory stimuli from the real environment and/or use SETs to digitally stimulate the senses. They could also choose to stimulate only certain senses and choose whether the stimuli would be congruent with either the consumer’s physical environment (e.g. noise of the coffee machine in the consumer’s kitchen), the virtual environment (e.g. the noise of the sea on the beach), both (e.g. the smell of fruit juice) or completely incongruent (e.g. the sound of a cow mooing; see Figure 1). These differences in congruency can make mental simulation more-or-less difficult by affecting the ability to make predictions about the expected consumption experience based on the incoming sensory inputs. Future research is needed to understand the impact of these different multisensory extended reality (XR) experiences on consumer behaviour.

Our brain’s capacity to create a conscious representation of our bodily experience results from the complex interplay of perceptual streams involving, in particular, vision, touch and interoception (Maselli and Slater, 2013). Through the stimulation of the senses in XR, it is possible to provide consumers with the illusion of ownership over an artificial body (Maselli and Slater, 2013). This virtual body can potentially affect consumer consciousness and may exert a significant influence over their physiology and behaviour.

The way in which marketers stimulate the consumer’s senses undoubtedly plays an essential role in determining how sensory information will be consciously perceived by the latter. Consciousness is important for consumers to make those decisions that best fit their enlightened self-interest (Baumeister et al., 2017). However, the lack of varied sensory inputs, relative to the physical world, in our online experiences has long been a limitation to consumer consciousness. SETs provide different ways of stimulating the consumer’s senses, whether by integrating sensory stimuli from the physical world into a virtual one, by integrating digital sensory stimuli into the physical world, or else by combining them. Marketers can also choose which senses to stimulate, and if they want to make these stimulations congruent with the consumer’s physical and/or digital environment, or even to make them completely incongruent.

Future research is needed in order to understand how best to stimulate the consumer’s senses to adapt to different contexts and make them more conscious of their experiences. XR via external physiological sensors (e.g. heart rate) might also help to improve this understanding (Siriborvornratanakul, 2016). Beyond technical challenges, stimulating multiple senses in XR also bring about ethical questions (Gallace et al., 2012). They may increase the problem of addiction to social media and have long-term impact on consumer’s mental and physical health (Madary and Metzinger, 2016; Winn, 2021). Using photo filters on Instagram or Snapchat has been shown to impact self-acceptance and wellbeing (Javornik et al., 2022), leading some people to turn to plastic surgery (Murphy-Kelly, 2020). Furthermore, a woman reported having been sexually harassed on Meta’s platform (Basu, 2021). There is a distinction between realism in the physical (appearance of the virtual features) versus psychological (sensation that what happens virtually) realm (Slater et al., 2020), and marketers need to ensure that both are positive for consumers.

To conclude, the multiple ways of stimulating the consumer’s senses in XR are potentially disruptive for the latter in terms of impacting their consciousness. The metaverse will provide marketers with the possibility of creating virtual products and imagining impossible experiences for the avatars of consumers. How, exactly, the senses will be stimulated will depend on how consumers will be conscious of their body and of their surroundings that will certainly affect the success of their marketing experiences. It is therefore fundamental that marketers wonder about the type of multisensory mixed reality they wish to create.

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material; further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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