Creating value and markets: An exploration with virtual reality technology

Digital technology has significantly impacted modern marketing and the consumer journey. In this digital environment, it has become crucial to understand how marketing technology influences the wider network. Actor-network theory is applied to extend service-dominant logic in essay 1. This inductive study explores how a technology (i.e., VR-tours) becomes an actor with the potential to create value in the context of the residential real estate market. Data collection includes semi-structured interviews, archival documents, and online comments. What emerged from the analysis is a model of how a technology-actor gains agency and participates in a value cocreation network through others’ reliance on and diffusion of the technology. The technology’s unexpected value potential influences other actors to renegotiate their roles and practices, creating value destabilization with implications for the larger market. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. Furthermore, new media technology must build its network into multiple verticals to sustain survival. In essay 2, drawing upon imagination theories from philosophy and sociology, this study reveals how a novel media technology market emerges and expands into multiple verticals or industries. This study follows the early mobilization of an artificial intelligence enabled virtual reality technology among multiple actors within the market. Data collection includes semi-structured interviews with firm-actors and customers, as well as archival documents and online records. Employing a multi-step analysis guided by extended case method, the findings reveal that culturally constrained forms of imagination processes among multiple actors drive the creation and growth of the VR-content market. Developers use recreative imagination, envisioning a world beyond their own experience, to establish the initial market emergence. Non-firm-actors, inspired by consumption experiences, participate in creative imagination to build the market unexpectedly. Further, the findings highlight potential market futures envisioned by actors’ recreative imagination. Although diverse on the surface, the imagination processes are constrained into the socio-historical roots of Silicon Valley, and its sociotechnical imaginary. This reveals the opportunity for the content and its data derivatives to be used for further market expansion. The existence of both positive and negative implications demonstrates the need for additional stakeholders to be involved in future market decisions.