Customer behaviors toward Metaverse/ Metaverse as a stimulus for customer experience : implications for Marketing

Abstract

The concept of Metaverse has been developing crazily since the hit of Pandemic 2020. Metaverse is known as a network of 3D virtual worlds focused on social connection. As has been shown a lot in science fiction and futurism movies, Metaverse is often described as a hypothetical iteration of the internet as a universal virtual world that is facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality headsets. Some metaverses involve the integration between physical spaces and virtual economics. Since the pandemic, with the fact that a lot of companies change to remote working, consumers start to use more internet for shopping and interacting, people start to discover the huge advantages of the virtual world and eventually switch their behavior from face - to - face interaction to online interaction. Taking advantage of this fact, more and more companies have been starting to extend their business in the virtual world and MC Donald’s has been seen as the pioneer. This “world’s largest fast-food chain” wants to offer its customers a virtual restaurant in metaverse and will also do the delivery physically. Together with the development of virtual economics (non-fungible-tokens (NTFs) and crypto have been becoming popular to almost all platforms) the brand will sell its virtual food and beverage products as NTFs, thus, instead of eating a special Big Mac, in the very near future we will able to own one as a digital surrogate and avoid cholesterol together. The same concept was applied by Transmira in the Bitcoin space. It was setting the pace with its Omniscape XR platform which combines the best of virtual and augmented realities. During CES, the biggest consumer electronics show in the world, which took place in January, Omniscape was ranked among the top three innovations. This paper aims at finding the answer for the question “If Metaverse really will bring value for customers or is it a stimulus for customer experience in terms of marketing. Besides, it is anticipated that in response to the increasing use of Virtual Reality, will Metaverse be the perfect innovation in selling and marketing to customers or it will become forgotten in the near future to make room for other innovations? And what is the marketing trend in big brands applying Metaverse.