Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior

Natalie T. Wood, Michael R. Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780765623959
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317452560
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The creation and expression of identity (or of multiple identities) in immersive computer-mediated environments (CMEs) is rapidly transforming consumer behavior. The various social networking and gaming sites have millions of registered users worldwide, and major corporations are beginning to attempt to reach and entice the growing flood of consumers occupying these virtual worlds. Despite this huge potential, however, experts know very little about the best way to talk to consumers in these online environments. How will well-established research findings from the offline world transfer to CMEs? That's where "Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior" comes in. Written by two of the leading experts in the field, it presents cutting-edge academic research on virtual social identity, explores consumer behavior in virtual worlds, and offers important implications for marketers interested in working in these environments. The book provides special insight into the largest and fastest growing group of users - kids and teens. There is no better source for understanding the impact of virtual social identities on consumers, consumer behavior, and electronic commerce.

Part I The Virtual Experience

Chapter 1 I, Avatar Auto-Netnographic Research in Virtual Worlds

Robert V. Kozinets Richard Kedzior

DOI: 10.4324/9781315698342-1

A recent article in that paragon of buttoned-down professional journals, the Harvard Business Review, contained the following description in its opening: “Birdsong and a gentle breeze enliven the scene at dawn, and as you walk by a house later in the day you may hear music emanating from an open window” (Hemp 2006, p. 1). Birdsong and emanating music? Hemp’s poetic prose is put to good use describing the embodied experience of being in Second Life, a virtual world where, as he aptly puts it, “You’re not you.”

As Hemp’s article, and a raft of cover stories in top business magazines like Business Week attest, the growing popularity of virtual worlds has attracted tremendous media and marketing attention from industry, marketers, and marketing and consumer researchers lately. Hemp (2006) adroitly recognized that consumption and marketing turned, in the virtual world experience, to a large extent on how marketers would now relate to the consumers’ avatar, or avatars.

The emphasis on the avatar, and the re-embodiment of the consumer into new and perhaps multiple online “bodies,” is enough to make many marketers’ and marketing researchers’ heads spin. “Consumption” and even “marketing” changes in these contexts because of the re-embodied (rather than disembodied) nature of the virtual world experience.

Addressing the need for new and rigorous research methodologies suitable for virtual worlds, this chapter briefly overviews the cornerstones of the netnographic method before extending and developing them into this pervasive and important new context. Although netnography has many elements and facets (see, e.g., Kozinets 2002, 2006, 2007), this chapter will focus on and extend one element identified in Kozinets (2006). In that methodological chapter, Kozinets examined variations in the application of netnographic technique and speculated about the notion of “auto-netnographies,” where individuals use in-depth field noting and observations to “reflect on their own online experiences and then use these field notes and observations to provide insights into online consumer practices and meanings” (p. 133).

We extend this line of speculation by further advocating for and developing auto-netnography as a technique ideally suited to some of the contingencies of netnography conducted within virtual worlds. By adopting an auto-netnographic approach, we present various sites of avatars’ identity work in a virtual world. The presentation follows a trajectory of our virtual social enculturation, from creating a vivid existence and embodying ourselves in avatars, to fully participating in a social life of a virtual world.

Our chapter proceeds by first providing an overview and examination of some of the most important elements of cultural research in virtual worlds. It then introduces and explains auto-ethnography, outlining some of the strengths and limitations of the method, and then adapting these elements to the conduct of netnography. Along the way, the chapter explores some of the issues specific to virtual worlds. These issues include such unprecedented elements as the exploration of and situation within an entirely new sense of world, the researcher’s embodiment (i.e., recreating a body and establishing a sense of social presence), and the researcher and residents’ more general plural existence (i.e., possibility of being represented by more than one avatar). We provide a number of examples drawn from our own research and that of others. The result is an outline of auto-netnography for avatar-driven inquiries in three-dimensional virtual environments. In the chapter’s conclusion, we describe and briefly demonstrate some of the burgeoning opportunities for auto-netnographic research in online virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds and Cultural Inquiry

Virtual worlds, the topic of this volume, are persistent, three-dimensional, networked computer represented spaces consisting of digital code and represented to people through a human-computer interface, most usually a keyboard for human input and a screen for computer output. In virtual worlds, people appear to have different bodies and to experience their lives through animated representations called avatars. The worlds are persistent, meaning that, unlike standalone or console-driven video games, the worlds continue on even after the player has exited them. In virtual worlds such as Second Life, Entropia Universe, The World of Warcraft, Lineage, The Sims Online, or Star Wars Galaxies, human-controlled avatars engage in a variety of social practices, some dictated by game-like rules, others purely explorational and relational. Oftentimes, avatars communicate in a chat-like manner, using voice or text-based instant messengers for private discussions. Aesthetically, virtual worlds can “feel” like an animated computer game. Indeed, all virtual worlds developed from “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (abbreviated at MMORPG and pronounced “more pig”). However, some of the more heralded recent virtual worlds like Second Life and Entropia Universe differ from games because they lack rules, character maintenance requirements, and explicit goals.

We identify three key characteristics of virtual worlds, and relate these to the conduct of cultural research. The first unique characteristic of virtual worlds is the notion of re-worlding and the related idea of plastic worldrules. This element is ontological in a new sense. Whereas ontology refers more generally to the nature of reality, previously considered mainly from a philosophical point of view, this element refers to the experiential dimensions of virtual worlds in which (1) an apparently new world is experienced—which we term re-worlding, and (2) that this world has malleable rules—which we term plastic worldrules. So, as an example of the latter, people can fly in many virtual worlds, or experience places where gravity is radically altered.

The second key characteristic to consider is the notion of re-embodiment, in which the consumer or researcher (or consumer researcher) is both required and able to choose a new bodily form to represent him or herself in the virtual world. This element has been much considered and written about in popular and even many academic accounts of virtual world experiences (e.g., Taylor 2002; Cooper, Dibbell, and Spaight 2007). However, we consider that this crucial facet has been mentioned frequently but not accommodated or even acknowledged methodologically.

The third characteristic, related to the prior one but also quite distinct from it, is the notion of multiperspectivality, or multiple perspectives. In this contingency, consumers have the option of occupying not only one new world, but many. A consumer can, for instance, occupy virtual worlds in many of the same games simultaneously, having different avatars operating in open windows on Second Life, Project Entropia, and the Habbo Hotel. The consumer also has the option of occupying more than one body at a time, duplicating bodies, or programming autonomous bodies to acts as its virtual agents. Each of these elements lends a literally multiphrenic nature to the usually individualized point of view, a tangible sense of the multiple personalities explored by many postmodern writers, from Gergen (1991) to Firat and Venkatesh (1995).

Each of these three elements—re-worlding, re-embodiment, and multiperspectivality—entails perspective changes as well as alterations in learning. In many cases, these changes are personal transformations of the relationships between the individual and their own perceptions of reality, of body, of self, of world. They familiarize the consumer with elements of the new virtual world (such as its rules, representations, and persona) and defamiliarize elements of physical reality (partly by making explicit its previously naturalized rules and representations). Because of this, at least some of the important effects of virtual worlding (as a verb) take place on an interior dimension of perspectival change and experience. Thus we suggest here that these particular elements may not be as tractable to researchers employing traditional methods of data gathering.

Let us very briefly consider three different methods for gaining insight into virtual worlds—surveys, experiments, and observational techniques—and consider how they would handle these unique contingencies. First, consider the survey. Although survey-bots are one answer to researching in virtual worlds, the notions of re-worlding and re-embodiment lead us to wonder about certain areas of this research enterprise. Do the rules about questionnaire answering in the “real world” of everyday life also translate to these new virtual world contexts, where motivations for answering might be different, and the idea of answering “in character” or out of character might become relevant? Indeed, the very notion of multiperpectivality draws us to wonder who or what exactly we may be surveying.

Experimental testing labs that bring in avatars as subjects and expose them to particular stimuli might conceivably tell us some interesting things about in-world consumption patterns and responses. However, we would need to ensure that the rules of the experiment were aligned with the rules of the virtual world. We would also need to ensure that the identity fluxes of multiperspectivality were attuned to the particular subjects we were hoping to test (i.e., that gender, age, and even human/bot differences were somehow either irrelevant or built into the test itself).

Observational recordings of avatar behavior are possible; in fact, they are practically built into the nature of these environments. Data recording and storage all but guarantee that the owners of virtual worlds are awash in data that portray avatar activity at aggregate levels. Massive modeling of this data can be extremely interesting, producing a cloud of avatar activity that can be mined for insights into traffic motion, popular locations, and popular activities in the same way that satellite telemetry and best-seller lists can. But like surveys and experiments, this aggregate level of analysis must of necessity leave open critical questions of meaning that matter on the level of language, culture, and basic human understanding. In fact, these key areas, where self and community interact with various types of material and nonmaterial “consumption,” are largely impervious to the modes of study in our usual methodological toolkit. They need some other approach.

This intriguing naturalistic blind spot has been noted and explored more generally by many in the field of consumer research (e.g., Belk 1987; McCracken 1997; Sherry 1991; Sunderland and Denny 2007). The simple truth is that, even after over quarter of a century of lamentation, we still actually know very little about the best way to approach and talk to consumers while they are busy living their lives. This is true whether we are talking about consumers shopping in malls, cooking in their kitchens, or relating to one another in online environments. We have only recently begun to consider how online lives link to the actual real world or “RL” (Real Life) of consumers. We have but scratched the surface of considering how to test our given knowledge about communities, cultures, and selves among the e-tribes of virtual worlds, or to consider what lessons these explorations might hold for our greater understanding of all naturalistically situated consumption. In the next section, we begin to explore the relationship between an online offshoot of the naturalistic, anthropological approach of ethnographic research and our central topic of research in virtual worlds.

From Ethnography to Netnography to Auto-Netnography

There is little doubt that a role for almost every marketing and consumer research method exists to be played out in cyberspace generally and in virtual worlds more specifically. These roles would be driven by various res...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction. Virtual Social Identity: Welcome to the Metaverse—Michael R. Solomon and Natalie T. Wood
• Part I. The Virtual Experience
• Part II. Consumer Behavior in Virtual Worlds
• Part III. Avatar Creation and Appearance
• Part IV. Person Perceptions in Virtual Worlds
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editors and Contributors