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The theme of the conference is Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior.  We encourage participation from a broad range of academic researchers and practitioners in such fields as marketing and consumer psychology, computer science, sociology, economics, and communications. 
 

Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior
 

The creation and expression of identity (or of multiple identities) in immersive environments is rapidly transforming consumer behavior – even though at this point in time many mainstream consumers have not even heard of this phenomenon! The largest social networking, Second Life, currently has over 9 million registered users worldwide, while the gaming-oriented site World of Warcraft has close to 10 million users.

 
Consumers enter CME’s in digital form, as avatars.  A user can design his or her avatar by choosing facial features, body types, clothing styles – and even nonhuman forms.  These digital representations are socializing with one another in real time, taking virtual university courses, participating in corporate training programs, sharing reactions to new products, and of course shopping.

 
To date more than 40 RL (real life) companies including GM, Dell, Sony, IBM and Wells Fargo are staking their claim to online real estate in computer-mediated environments (CME’s) such as Second Life, There.com and Entropia Universe.  In April 2007 alone, residents of the online “world” Second Life spent approximately $10 million (in real money) on virtual land, products and services. Corporate ’s transition to the virtual world is an attempt to reach and entice the growing flood of consumers occupying these virtual worlds.
 

Clearly this expanding space will be pivotal in fueling new consumer trends over the next decade. In addition, the parallel growth in spending on advergaming continues to transfigure the online C2C world. Forecasts suggest that sales of branded messages embedded in videogames will reach $733 million by 2010.  Eventually, these CME forums may rival traditional, marketer-sponsored E-commerce sites in terms of their influence on consumer decision-making and product adoption.
 

Despite this huge potential, we 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?  For example, can we be sure that our received wisdom regarding the impact of source credibility upon persuasion will readily apply to a situation where a “source” espousing adoption of a new product takes the form of an animated supermodel with exaggerated “attributes” or a bright green demon with fearsome horns? These new online platforms generate many fascinating research questions for the advertising and consumer psychology community.
 

Submissions

 

Submissions may be in one of two categories: 1) complete papers or 2) abstracts.  Preference for acceptance will be given to papers that provide extensive integration of existing work and/or provide details of a relevant program of research that takes a psychological perspective.  Authors of the best papers will be invited to prepare a manuscript for a book to be published by the Society for Consumer Psychology. Complete papers that will be published in the book must be submitted in camera-ready format within 30 days of presentation at the conference. Publication of full papers based upon submitted abstracts is contingent upon satisfactory review of the full paper.
 

Submissions must be received by December 15, 2007.  Papers should be sent to
Natalie Wood
(nwood@sju.edu) electronically as an attached Word file. All papers will be blind-reviewed, so please submit your manuscript with authors’ names and contact information on a separate cover page.
 

For more information about The Society for Consumer Psychology or the Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference, please see our website at