ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand how brands can effectively exploit virtual spaces. Brands help consumers to recognise the maker of a product and assign responsibility for its quality and performance. The chapter investigates the opportunities offered by virtual spaces for creating and managing successful brands, exploring the meanings of virtual spaces, brands and branding in the real and virtual environments. Although the use of augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality in marketing remains limited and has received little attention from academics, in-store or at-home applications are becoming commonplace for branding. The development of digital and virtual technologies has been accompanied by shift of emphasis in the marketing and branding literature from the company to the consumer perspective and from the functional to the intangible, emotional and psychosocial value of brands. From both the academic and the managerial perspectives, understanding how consumers experience a brand is critical for developing branding and marketing strategies.
