Marketing in the metaverse era

What is it about?

The development pace of digital socialization has accelerated drastically in the past decade, especially with the COVID19 pandemic. Through that continuing digital shift, the idea of the metaverse, a virtual parallel world that can digitally replicate people’s lives, is developing fast through Meta’s (previously known as Facebook) announcement in October 2021 that it will dedicate sizeable investments in it. While the metaverse provides immense opportunities to brands, the primary concern will be on how integrate it with current media and retail channels, whether they are offline or online. Accordingly, using an exploratory qualitative approach, this study examined the potential strategic channel-based marketing routes that companies would face in the presence of the metaverse.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The findings show that the route to market will become much more complex given the metaverse’s own platform setup. Strategic multichannel and omnichannel routes are examined through a proposed framework that takes into consideration the expected evolution of the metaverse platform. This is the first study of its kind that explores consumers’ experiences through a channel/application lens within the VR platform itself. This research area is fundamental to be understood in preparation for the expected fast development of the metaverse in the near future. The presence of brands in virtual worlds will be a key factor to reach customers and deliver the same value communicated in the real life. On that basis, marketers should employ a participative and integrative approach in order to provide users with an optimal shopping experience (Gadalla et al., 2013) while having the right channel approach as per this study’s findings.