Analysis of Overcoming the Uncanny Valley Theory about Virtual Influencers in Digital Environments

Virtual influencers have been widely adopted in virtual environments, and the metaverse has emerged as a prominent trend in the marketing field. To enhance consumers' purchase intention, marketers and scholars are committed to exploring the application of virtual influencers. Currently, humanized virtual influencers are so humanized that they are indistinguishable from real people. However, due to the uncanny valley effect, high-level humanized virtual influencers fail to gain complete acceptance. Previous solutions have focused on optimizing the authentic appearance of virtual influencers. But virtual influencers cannot fully replace human influencers, as their high degree of humanization tends to evoke discomfort among audiences. Current studies have indicated that the integration of social cues can alleviate individuals' uncomfortable feelings toward non-living digital entities. Therefore, this paper proposes the utilization of both synthetic and human voices to improve the performance of virtual influencers. Meanwhile, the future study could explore which combination (human-like vs cartoon-like virtual influencers and synthetic voices vs human voices) is the most suitable for optimizations.