MARKETING INTELLIGENCE: The World of Metarverse

Aaditya Jain | 9910029327 | The 15 A Chronicles'Desk

There is an upcoming trend in the marketing world – Metaverse. Most of the brands are looking forward to joining the bandwagon. But, what is metaverse? Imagine that you are present on the Internet, but only in 3D format. This means that your virtual form is present in a virtual (imaginative) world that is always active and consistent in real-time. Isn’t it exciting? You can interact with the digital (and sometimes, funny) avatars of your friends while shopping for digital products.

A good example of this would be the movie – Avatar. It shows how a person transits into a different world – the only difference between Avatar and the metaverse would be that this “different” world would be virtual.

Now, what does it hold in for marketers? Do not underestimate the potential of the metaverse. In the initial stage itself, the market of virtual goods in the metaverse has grown to $54 billion. A good idea of the weightage that the brands are giving to the metaverse can be taken from the fact that Gucci launched a virtual version of the Gucci Garden on one of the metaverse platforms, drawing 19.9 million visitors in just a time span of 2 weeks. What’s more? It sold the digital version of its Dionysus bag for $4,115, more than the physical form of the bag.

Brands, now, have an opportunity to advertise their products in the virtual world, just as they do in the real one. What does it mean? More advertising space. But what’s in it for the companies that are developing these metaverse platforms, or the so-called “owners”? Similar to the concept of cryptocurrency, whenever users pour in their real-world money into the metaverse to buy virtual currency (using which they can buy the digital collectables for their virtual avatar), the money goes to these owners, who co-incidentally, issue the said virtual currency as well. Moreover, for every transaction against any digital collectable, these owners get their cut.

That’s not it. Even the users can earn a profit by selling their digital goods in the virtual world and cashing out their virtual money.

Brands that leverage this virtual platform, on the other hand, can cash out the revenue that they earn from the sale of their digital products. Moreover, via the virtual-to-real-world phenomenon, they can make conversions in the real world (online/offline) by virtue of advertising in the virtual 3D space. Brands can also offer vouchers to the consumers (to be used in the real world) against any of their interactions with the brand in the metaverse, thus, boosting their real-world engagements as well.

However, the metaverse needs to be adopted with a pinch of salt. There is a great deal of caveat that one needs to heed to in order to make a peaceful use of this platform. Developers need to follow extreme caution in maintaining the thin line between the virtual and the real worlds. For example, the banking information and transactions taking place in the virtual world should be kept completely discrete from those in the real world.

One of the various repercussions that metaverse would have on the real-world economy is on the advertising industry, wherein the rates of the advertising space would fluctuate to a great deal by virtue of an increased, and ever-growing, virtual advertising space. A fun fact - these rates would also depend on how attentive consumers are towards the virtual advertisements, as opposed to those in the real world (and ostensibly, what mind share the brands achieve to capture in the metaverse. This inevitably would require to a different type of innovation). It would be one more tedious task for the brands to find out new KPIs, and measure them as well, for this whole new world.

One other major concern would be that brands, now, would have multitude of information about everyone (by virtue of being present in 3D form, even if in virtual form), as opposed to the 2D form of information present on the internet. Hence, protecting this new big data would require even more advanced data security regulations and methods of ensuring it.

Metaverse has indeed opened up a new exciting world full of opportunities for the marketers, developers or owners, and consumers. But greater than that, it has also put forth unprecedented challenges which have augmented the already present data privacy breaches and the fluctuating world economy.