Beyond Visual Realism: How the Reality–Virtuality Paradox Drives Haptic Compensatory Behaviors in AR Marketing

While Augmented Reality (AR) places a product visually and spatially inside the consumer’s own environment, it cannot deliver touch. The more faithfully AR renders an object, the more conspicuous its missing tactile channel becomes. We term this the reality–virtuality paradox, and it sits outside the prevailing account in interactive marketing, which has largely equated richer immersion with more favorable consumer response. In this study, we develop and test a chain mediation model explaining how AR, relative to 2D, 3D, or VR interfaces, elicits compensatory behaviors sequentially through perceived haptic gap and haptic craving. Study 1 (N = 80, AR vs. 2D), together with a same-device replication (Study 1b, N = 60), confirms the main effect of AR on compensatory behaviors. Study 2 (N = 228, AR vs. 3D) documents the chain mediation and the moderating effect of need for touch (NFT). Study 3 (N = 160, AR vs. VR × low vs. high haptic accessibility) establishes the moderating effect of haptic accessibility and extends the effect to a cross-context tactile-relevant choice. AR elicits stronger compensatory behaviors than 2D, 3D, and VR; the effect is sequentially mediated by perceived haptic gap and haptic craving; and it is stronger for high-NFT consumers and under low-haptic-accessibility conditions. We identify a perceptual cost that rises with visual fidelity, extend compensatory consumption from resource scarcity to sensory scarcity, and specify the individual and situational conditions under which the paradox binds most tightly.