Marketing in the Immersivity Era

This entry explores the changing scope and characteristics of marketing in light of the emergence of the immersive economy, a conceptual extension of Pine and Gilmore’s progression of economic value in which the progressive coupling of computational systems with consumer perception and cognition represents a qualitative shift in the logic of value creation. The proliferation of immersive technologies, from smartphones to smartglasses and head-mounted displays, has generated a spectrum of human-computer integration modes that act both with continuity and change on the marketing framework. Drawing on the HCInt continuum, the entry formalizes immersivity as a multidimensional condition encompassing sensory, cognitive, emotional, narrative, spatial, and digital dimensions and maps its implications across three consumer ecosystems. The central theoretical contribution is the formalization of the immersive economy as a fifth stage in the progression of economic value, characterized by a shift from staging to coupling as the primary economic function and from sensations to experiential coupling as the primary value driver. Strategic opportunities are examined alongside the risks of AI-mediated disintermediation, consumer agency erosion, and technology-induced dependency.