Merriam-Webster has yet to coin an apt definition of ‘The Metaverse’, but it looks like no one - creators, businesses, corporate leaders or brands can contain themselves with excitement or can wait for the perfect definition. The Metaverse is not only beaming with possibilities that will re-engineer how we engage with our everyday life and/or luxury products/services but also signaling a huge potential to introduce new business functions or nudge to rewire the existing ones.

Let’s take a step back to acknowledge that just before the COVID-19 pandemic businesses, leaders and executives saw emerging tech and automation as the new wave of change. The one that could replace a number of jobs, streamline business functions, enable predictability through AI and ML models, elevate the analytics game altogether, and most importantly make the access of data almost mandatory across sectors and departments so as to enhance the end user’s or customer’s experience. 

The Metaverse only extends these aspirations with a digital-first future glaring at us. Think of yours and multiple digital avatars thriving in a virtual world running a parallel economy that entices purchases enhances experiences and may even solve some of the pressing industry problems. Amidst all these developments, one question that might puzzle you as a business leader is what really shifts when it comes to your customer’s experience with your brand. 

Well, let’s get as close as we can to an answer. 

Brands are better off if they prepare themselves with a nascent Metaverse strategy. Make a dedicated attempt to map your transformation. It’s critical for brands to pre-empt their future. Brands need to identify the areas in which they can add value. Some of the brands would become a natural fit into the Metaverse and some brands might have to offer a creative spin like recreating services for a virtual environment, gamifying, or building branded avatars to spark collaboration. All of this is nothing short of creating a brand’s own digital universe, style, currency, and possessions that digital avatars can own.

You’ll need to file for trademark applications then, invest in the latest smart contracts and another emerging tech to gradually build a platform that allows your brand to create unique products and foster experiences. It’s more about building up your resources to deliver a greater promise. 

If it all unfolds as we anticipate, it’ll lead the business and the creator’s world to a new model, strategy, or even a business unit which is Direct-to-Avatar (D2A). D2A thus will shape the decisions, functions, and end-user experiences for the most part of the coming decade in interesting ways.

In order to re-imagine customer experience in the Metaverse, brands can look at their audiences and step in their shoes as customers. They are the stars of the virtual realm. Just like how Web 1 and Web 2 were fairly experimentative for a good time in their beginning with some brands eventually adding value and becoming successful, then the web fostering competition and now becoming a norm of most of our everyday communication - the Metaverse will play out in a similar fashion for individuals and businesses alike. The key lies in brands being able to see through the clutter and know where the growth will come from. However, while it took almost a decade for the internet to become mainstream, Metaverse will be faster as it’s the derivative of it. 

The Metaverse experiences will be consumed on the web and in-app. While that goes without saying, a key challenge for brands to consider is personalization, especially as giants like Google and Apple’s iOS 14 are working towards removing third-party cookies. This calls for messaging that’s fiercely customer-centric to become more relevant in 2 important ways:

-    Not just for one customer, but for multitudes of them who share a different reason for their product journey
-    To the nuances of how and where the customers enter, remain, and exit the funnel

Here’s where marketers and business leaders need to blend automation with expertise to deliver real-time and omnichannel experiences while keeping in mind that the fence of stringent privacy regulations and limiting third-party data only gets thicker which in turn makes performance marketing a flawed function. Hence, what resultantly rises to the brim of business plans or an important marketing function, is retention marketing because acquiring customers comes at a cost. The Metaverse, therefore, becomes an all-in-all experience economy running parallel to our raw and real world. 

The Metaverse is a unique imaginative opportunity for corporations for brand building and storytelling. Businesses must draw parallels from the real world to not go overboard when designing virtual services, products or experiences. Further, while largely most brands are thinking about playing and creating in the Metaverse, they need to flex their muscle more to identify a larger role to play in contributing and making a difference in the overall human experience. 

The one promise that arrives and will stay with the Metaverse is social interaction and community building. Here’s where brands need to build connectors and not limit their resonance to customers as mere participants. The digital avatars are uniquely placed to play several roles - from fitness coaches to academic instructors, corporate representatives to even meta or giga influencers. Think of these avatars as humanized versions of chatbots with much more aura and personality around them to facilitate tailored experiences for users.