There are two ways a marketing message can deal with a widely held negative conception about the product: ignore it, or try to convince people it's wrong. The f

There are two ways a marketing message can deal with a widely held negative conception about the product: ignore it, or try to convince people it's wrong. The former is usually the safer course. Trying to convince people they're wrong is really hard, but if you can pull it off, it can pay off big. Pepsi's "Pepsi Challenge" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Challenge) campaign from the 1970s and '80s is the canonical example of how to make an "actually, you're wrong" campaign work. Pepsi's market research found that the prevailing opinion of Pepsi was that it tasted too sweet, so people turned to Coke instead, just assuming that they wouldn't like Pepsi without ever really trying it. So Pepsi filmed commercials showing people taking a blind taste test of both Pepsi and Coke, and preferring Pepsi before being told which was which. The commercials worked -- they convinced people to give Pepsi a try, and enough of them found they liked it to drive up Pepsi sales for good. The "you'll look like a dork" fear strikes me as widely enough held to be one of the biggest challenges VR and AR have to overcome to break into the mass market, so it's not illogical that at least some marketers would decide they have to take it on directly.