Are Brands Ready to Dive Into the Metaverse?
Brands are looking to embrace the metaverse, but are they truly ready?
Web3 is here to stay.
Mass adoption of crypto is beginning to take shape, and while not without hurdles, we are finally seeing adoption within increasing orders of magnitude. As it currently stands, a high level of technical aptitude is needed in order for an individual to utilize crypto in their daily lives. It is also true that many people will only embrace blockchain once others they know decide to participate.
As individuals begin to envelop themselves in new Web3 opportunities, we are (as of now) yet to fully see how brands will develop their metaverse-based products. Brands must now make difficult decisions as they consider what direction they will choose in embracing Web3, and their choices will surely affect a wide range of stakeholders.
What are the major signals and which key indicators will businesses and major global brands ultimately decide to follow, as they begin to embrace Web3?
A new era of technological adoption
It is June 2022 and Apple has just retired the iPod, a product of a bygone era that defined how we think about and use new technology; iPods changed our culture and completely redefined what personalized digital experiences could be. Just as Steve Jobs took “a thousand songs” and put them in our pocket, we will likewise soon see world-changing blockchain innovations come to fruition, with major brands leading the way (and quite possibly funding all of it, too).
When major brands make moves, the ripples are felt instantly, around the world. That means once brands decide to take on the metaverse and put resources towards its development, there will undoubtedly be massive repercussions emanating from such Web3 speculation.
The decisive moves brands will need to make about their involvement in the metaverse will start as simple yet imaginative speculation, with metaverse experimentation supported by large financial funding, well-defined company structures, and well-established protocols — these elements are, in their totality, the key to hyper-charging everything these brands choose to put their hands on.
When customers feel like they’re part of a community or ‘tribe’, they’ll also be far more likely to talk positively to friends and family about you. They become a Brand Ambassador — and help bring more customers to your door as a result.
Tomango Agency (UK)
Big questions brands must answer
Brands must ask themselves a multitude of questions before they can properly decide what direction they will take in Web3, including:
How does a blockchain function? What do smart contracts allow companies to do? Is bitcoin the future world reserve currency and store of value? Will Ethereum stay on top as the go-to layer 1 for building on top of? Will Web3 completely transform how we use the internet and how we communicate? Will it eventually change how we transact?
Will Web3 forever shift how we trade (sell) our own labor (i.e. how we work)? Will the metaverse change how we reward behavior? Will it change how we convey thanks and gratitude? Will it change how we vote and how we govern? Will it change how we think of risk and how we conceive of “gambling”? Will it change how we shop, how we sell and how we support ourselves?
In order to answer these questions, brands must place themselves in an existential Web3 universe — they must imagine how their brand will be perceived in a metaverse that is not controlled by any one party or platform; a new blockchain-based habitat whose rules are defined by consensus rather than (dollar-based) market mechanisms.
Buy the ticket, take the ride…and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well…maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion.
Hunter S. Thompson
Brands must put themselves in the story, as they write their new Web3 novels for the masses — this is the new standard for achieving brand presence and for claiming intellectual property in the metaverse — that is, they must actually create something that has real value, in order to succeed; innovation wins here every time.
Novel markets & new followers
With an NFT, brands can offer their fans a “tangible” piece of their production and concurrently can give consumers a new line of products grounded in blockchain fundamentals.
Brands will surely embrace the metaverse in direct correlation with the benefits they perceive to their own cause — that cause being of course: to make money.
As global arbiters of power, brands are in prime position to experiment and test out novel ways to apply blockchain core fundamentals to their company and then see the effects of their efforts to bear fruit. Major brands bring with them massive budgets and financial apparatuses which are already finely tuned from innovating in web2 over the last 20 years.
With Web3, brands could quite likely lead the way in building the future metaverse.
Brands must constantly find new buyers; they must discover and secure a constant stream of new followers in order to grow in today’s global markets.
New roads for innovation, new definitions of property
So, who will brands look to for guidance and advice? What models will brands follow when it comes to ideation and brainstorming? What does a healthy roadmap look like for a brand’s journey into Web3? Who is the Web3 consumer they are targeting and what personas will these future customers possess?
Further — how do these metaverse buyers compare in total lifetime value (TLV) vs. the normal consumer? Where exactly will the most robust and most active blockchain ecosystems develop and what property is worth securing, prior to that development?
Brands must reconceive of what “property” means to them, and make decisions about how to plan to protect their creative endeavors. This is already beginning to happen (look at ENS domains), and crypto asset management platforms are innovating every day, offering new ways to safeguard and protect ownership.
Massive resources mean big opportunities
With these developments however, we are also encountering more subtle questions gravitating around things like intellectual property, inheritance, community and copyright.
The most exciting thing about major brands’ (forthcoming) embrace of the metaverse is that, because of the massive resources and well-oiled production engines these brands already possess, they are in a perfect position to design, produce, test, and refine a myriad of new methods for taking blockchain technology to new heights.
The power and resources behind a single brand — including their successful Web3 campaigns — will very likely stand to be the shift ultimately needed to finally drive mass adoption of blockchain tech.
So, what will brands decide to do and what will they ultimately say “yes” to within Web3? Most importantly, how will brands use Web3 to grow their businesses and change the course of crypto in the process?
If we wish to find out, we must first buy our ticket, as spectators and participants alike.
About LuxFi
LuxFi is the world’s first asset-backed NFT marketplace for luxury assets, where people can buy, sell and invest in luxury assets using cryptocurrencies and traditional payments. We eliminate counterfeiting while minting an NFT on a multi-chain blockchain network, with a focus on luxury assets that hold value well and have a high resale value. Leveraging our big data intelligence system and unique algorithm for automated data collecting and data processing, the value of each NFT on our platform is backed by real-world data.
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