Should Your Brand Enter the Metaverse?

Businesses can leverage the immersive virtual reality environment for HR applications, ESG and more.

January 05, 2022

Digital Branding

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Facebook’s announced name change to Meta last year introduced many Americans to the concept of metaverse, a 3D “virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. Businesses are trying to figure out how to enter the space.

Entertainment and gaming companies have been breaking ground in this digital experience space, and there are practical applications for businesses in other sectors to use it from HR training to manufacturing to social commerce, as Harvard Business Review points out.

“Metaverse experiences offer us the opportunity to play, work, connect or buy (and just to make things extra fun, the things we buy can be real or virtual),” writes Janet Balis in HBR. Balis leads Ernst & Young’s consulting professionals in the Americas focused on the customer agenda and revenue growth, including commercial excellence, customer experience and product innovation and also leads EY’s CMO practice. 

Balis advises brands to pick their targets to align with customer demographics and behaviors, watch to see what their competitors are doing, look for test-and-learn opportunities to advance goals like sustainability and carefully plan their entrance.

She advises marketing pros to “start thinking about how to unleash their creativity and their storytelling. If the creative palette expands dimensions in the metaverse, we should be excited to create experiences at any point in the customer journey, from acquisition, to engagement, to transaction, to customer support, which have the potential to be both spectacular and stickier than before.”

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