Wondering how to position your brand in the age of Metaverse? Keep these ABCs in action.
With Facebook rebranding itself as Meta, the term “Metaverse” started to buzz around the world as the anticipated future technology. As the world transitioned from physical to digital, we experienced disruptions in our business models. We too witnessed our brand encounters evolving from billboards, broadcast media, print and tele conversations to Facebook, Instagram, Gmail and TikTok.
As the world migrated from personal computers to smartphones, industry dominance shifted from Microsoft & Oracle to Google & Facebook on the software side while from LG & Sony to Apple & Samsung on the hardware side.
Every Technological Shift has also been accompanied by widespread hardware adoptions enabling the evolving technology. As a result, the industry's players have changed as well. As the world migrated from personal computers to smartphones, industry dominance shifted from Microsoft & Oracle to Google & Facebook on the software side while from LG & Sony to Apple & Samsung on the hardware side. With such alters in Consumer Behavior, social media platforms became our primary means of communication, commerce and entertainment. Now that we're moving towards wearables, blockchain, augmented reality and virtual reality, Metaverses will have infrastructures to back up its mass adoption.
Professionals all over the world have only recently begun to standardize their business models by aligning business activities towards digital technology, and with Metaverse pounding on our door, it may make us revisit our business strategies all over again. Professionals like us have been left in awe of the next great shift as big tech races to develop a virtual world through enormous R&D and acquisitions.
Virtual showrooms, fashion shows, and customer service centers have the potential to move beyond a utopian brand dream into reality.
When the world shifts from Social Networks to Metaverses, a new window of opportunity might be open to brands of different size and scope. Metaverse will offer us with more possibilities to leverage immersive digital experiences offered by virtual reality headsets and augmented reality to enhance customer interactions. A brand can develop its own meta, which can be used to showcase products and services as well as convey the brand's message in a more personal way. Virtual showrooms, fashion shows, and customer service centers have the potential to move beyond a utopian brand dream into reality.
Since metaverses have the potential to transform how consumers connect, communicate, and commerce, we have designed an ABC model (Analyze, Balance, Collaborate) for brands to help them discover their potential within Metaverse are as:
Analyze: As a brand, you must be able to determine what proportion of your target market is enthusiastic about metaverses. You need to find out if your customers are already participating in virtual world games like PUBG and Fortnite, and if they are likely to switch to metaverses as innovator. After analyzing these datasets, you will be able to draw conclusions on how strongly and early your brand will be impacted by the widespread application of the metaverses.
Balance: Balance is the key to success in any of the business endeavors. You need to have the balance between opportunity & fads, risks & rewards and profit & losses in the world of meta too. To explore your brand representation in the metaverse, you must move cautiously and strategically in order to keep up with the latest trend and advancement while balancing your metaverse marketing with real life marketing in smaller scaler. Also, best practices are still being defined and platforms are still being developed from scratch which makes it essential for you to balance your meta-activities strategically.
Collaborate: Collaboration with existing Virtual Games and Metaverse platform is a must in experimenting with and validating your approaches, that can help you kickstart your own meta projects for your brand when your customers demand them. Such collaborations will provide you with cost friendly options to experiment your customer's reaction in the metaverse. The finest example right now is Balenciaga, a prominent clothing brand that has collaborated with Fortnite to offer their own set of virtual apparel skins to be used in the game by the users.
Balenciaga Collaboration With Fortnite
One of the key approaches of this ABC model is to enable you in exploring and educating about the metaverse, as well as to assist you in developing a perspective and forecasting how the adoption of metaverse will affect your consumer's behavior. Since this 3 step model will assist you in establishing strong business goals and objectives surrounding Metaverse, which will accelerate your brand's Metaverse adoption once the entire digital world transitions to virtual.
ABCs of Executing a Metaverse Strategy
We have really no clue on how the metaverse will disrupt our entire digital experience, or what forms of metaverses may emerge over time. We do not have any idea on what the business model and structure of these metaverse platforms going to be. Will they be Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) or just a Corporate Entity? These puzzles are still to be unraveled, and it will take time. But with shifting technology comes big opportunities for small scale to global brands. In conclusion, as a brand, you must be prepared to mark strong footprints in the age of metaverses by implementing the ABC as outlined above.