Are fashion brand consumers intending to use the Metaverse?

The goal of this study is to unfold factors which influence the intention of international fashion brand consumers to interact with fashion brands through the metaverse. Increasingly more fashion brands evolve themselves, their business model and their consumers into the new digital space of the metaverse and thus it is of high relevance for marketeers to gain deeper insights into the predicting factors which form consumers behavioral intention of using the metaverse for fashion brand interaction. Survey results of 189 internationals between the age of 19-54 were obtained. All the respondents interacted with at least one of the eleven examined fashion brands through social media platforms. The results of the study suggest that attitudes towards using the metaverse for fashion brand interaction, subjective norms towards using the metaverse for fashion brand interaction and perceived behavioral control when using the metaverse for fashion brand interaction, play a significant influential role in constructing a behavioral intention of using the metaverse in order to interact with fashion brands. Furthermore, attitude was found to be a multidimensional factor which consists of a cognitive, affective and conative component. Further deconstruction of the components provided insight into a significant relation between the two factors of the cognitive component, namely perceived usefulness and perceived difficulty, and attitudes towards interacting with fashion brands through the metaverse. No significant relation was found between the two factors of the affective component, namely technophilia and technophobia, and the respondent’s attitude towards interacting with fashion brands through the metaverse. Lastly, a partial significant relation between the conative component and attitudes towards fashion brand interaction through the metaverse was found, as the factor of manifest barriers was found to be not significantly influential while the factor of latent barriers was found to have significance in influence. Further analysis revealed that attitude provides a significant mediation effect between the three components of attitude and the intention of using the metaverse for fashion brand interaction.