Kellogg on Marketing, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 16Marketing in the Metaverse

Mohan Sawhney

The metaverse began to generate a lot of excitement in 2021. The hype surrounding it reached a crescendo with Facebook's November 2021 name change to Meta. Announcing the change, CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed, “Our overarching goal … is to help bring the metaverse to life.”¹ Not to be outdone, Microsoft announced plans to buy Activision Blizzard for $69 billion in early 2022—a move the company said will accelerate its growth in gaming across “mobile, PC, console, and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse.”² While gaming will continue to be a major entry point to the metaverse, conjuring the now‐familiar images of gamers using augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets, the metaverse is much more than a next‐generation gaming platform. For marketers, the metaverse presents a wide array of opportunities, from immersive commerce to brand building and promoting thought leadership.

This potential was highlighted by Zuckerberg, who envisioned “a billion people in the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars of commerce, each buying digital goods, digital content, different things to express themselves, so whether that's clothing for their avatar or different digital goods for their virtual home or things to decorate their virtual conference room, utilities to be able to be more productive in virtual and augmented reality and across the metaverse overall.”³ Despite this optimistic vision, the metaverse ...