Connecting Brands to Metaverse
Nike is quietly preparing for the metaverse
Coca-Cola makes metaverse play with new innovation platform
Balenciaga Steps Into the Metaverse With New Business Unit
While Metaverse is evolving, brands are trying to figure out their strategies to enter Metaverse. It is important for brands to understand their objectives and strategize their initiatives in Metaverse. Several brands such as Gucci, Nike, Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga have started embracing Metaverse hoping to make an early entry. This article serves as a guideline for brands to create and execute their Metaverse initiatives.
Define the Objective
While the space is hot at the moment, It is important for brand to find out why they wanted to enter Metaverse. There are various opportunities for brands in Meta such as
Deliver Immersive Product Experiences
Embrace younger demographics with more intuitive and real time product experiences. Brands have experimented with virtual Tryon features embracing AR/VR for long time and can be extended to create a more collaborative environments to connect with communities, friends and brands to understand and experience product.
Sell Digital Goods
Brands are flexing in to metaverse with selling accessories to customer avatars as NFT’s. Nike has acquired a company RTFKT Studio that sells virtual Sneakers as NFT.
Advertising
Brands can analyze and create additional experiences by tapping into Spatial behavior in Metaverse. With Third party cookies getting extinct, brands need to look at augmenting their existing cookie less solutions with Spatial Analytics to create more personalized experiences in Metaverse.
Product Design and collaboration
Designing personalized products is not new. Automotive companies have been trying to create customize their offering for customers with digital tools. Metaverse can bring in customers, product designers and engineers to collaborate and create personalized products reducing operation overheads
Virtual Walkthrough and customer support
Virtual walkthrough of their stores/spaces to discover about their products and provide real time interactive customer experience in immersive spaces with either AI powered Virtual beings or with real humans
It is imperative for brands to define their business objectives, calculate ROI before venturing in to Metaverse
Identify Use cases and Development Platforms
Evaluate the feasibility, traction of the Tech platforms before developing use cases
Brands should identify use cases, analyze tech platform that can be leverages to create these use cases.
Some of the platforms that can be used to evaluate use cases are
Test, Iterate and Learn
Follow iterative process to test, watch for customer behaviors, evaluate and learn in this space and plan next steps.
As Metaverse spacing is still evolving, there will be lot of technical glitches, challenges. Also XR headsets are not in to mass market yet. So brands need to craft their strategy to target platforms that are gaining more traction and suited to their demographics. I would recommend web, mobile and Oculus devices to start with.
Areas of Concerns
Brand safety and Data protection are critical concerns that needs to be evaluated. While work on these areas ( weforum)are in progress, brands need to create secure their experiences by defining necessary access control on interactions in metaverse environments. Brands also need to lookout for data protection regulations.
Brands need to quickly enter in to Metaverse space to tap on early opportunities and position better.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
