KAMIST

Virtual Reality Marketing: Ironically Down to Earth

Hello, OptiMIST People!

Back at it again with KaMIST! Your weekly dose of insights into the latest marketing trends. In this week’s KaMIST we’ll dive into how brands have started to connect with Gen Z through the virtual world!

Traditional advertising has not proven to be a very effective way to exploit the special characteristics of virtual worlds. There is substantial potential in virtual worlds for new and innovative marketing methods that are highly engaging and take advantage of users’ active role in virtual worlds. From the marketing point of view, virtual worlds can be especially used for connecting with customers, contributing to customer learning, and getting customer input.

Nowadays, metaverse has become a popular technology that attracts people’s attention, especially for Gen Z. Thus, most marketers used it as a way to engage with the customers. Many marketers started to join metaverse to build a brand, teach, and connect with younger consumers. The large number of users in the metaverse become one of the reasons for people to believe that eventually the metaverse will become a revenue generator as consumers buy virtual goods and property to personalize their online presence. In addition, according to Wunderman Thompson Intelligence survey data, he said that Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Gen Zers believe Metaverse will be the future e-commerce. 

Within the metaverse, collaborating with video games is one of the effective ways to reach younger audiences. Many younger people started to join metaverse only to play some video games. This statement is reinforced by the fact that Roblox can succesfully command 52 million daily active users. In addition, the younger audience is more able to stumble upon a brand within that game rather than any other online channels. 

However, marketers should see the metaverse as an immersive channel rather than just a place to distribute collectibles and create engaging mini-games. Based on the fact, tens of millions of people would attend gaming platform shows, which is an idea that continues to wager on for brands.

Also, marketers shouldn’t see metaverse as a one-off play. A sense of camaraderie is one of the key factors that keeps Gen Z addicted to gaming, yet marketers frequently don’t enhance their campaign to drive outside discussion. Brands should be more aware about one of the characteristics of Gen Z. Most of them tend to value a sense of self-expression. According to a survey, more than half (57%) of the group’s respondents indicated that they can express themselves more freely in games than in real life. Thus, brands should consider more to launch a metaverse experience that will become a safe place for people to hang out and communicate freely.

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The idea of delivering the most value for the consumer has evolved over the years. As we know, the best marketing strategy is cetera desunt for adaptive future-leader mindset that uncertainly evolved over decades. Companies began to use various promises in effort to persuade and attract customers. The fiercely increasing conditions of competition added the popularity of the concept of “brand” and “advertisement” by adopting the concept of neo-marketing and elaborate them with psychological terms. Albeit, all emotion influences consumers personal relationships, business choices, and buying decisions. The emotion itself has situational and reactive qualities, as well as satisfaction and expectations formed over lifetimes of experiences and interactions.

When a boy goes to an ice cream parlor or restaurant, he will feel befuddled. Choosing what he is going to get, that’s the thing that he despises. Would chocolate chip or strawberry ice cream please him better? Cheeseburger or fried chicken? He feared that what he selected will not give him as much pleasure as the other option would give. What he doesn’t choose could provide a higher sense of pleasure than the one he chose. One interesting finding utilized by neuromarketing is that people really don’t want to lose out. People are just as worried about what they might lose as to what they might gain.
In the meantime, one of the biggest challenges that marketers deal with is customers’ expectations in the pre-purchase phenomenon where the consumers haven’t fixed their buying decision yet. To tackle the challenge, many companies are competing to build relationships with their customers, with the expectations that they will be able to provide the best customer experience for specific individuals. Therefore, the company must be customer-centric to carry out a successful marketing strategy in order to be noticed by consumers and to forge a brand identity.

According to McKinsey (2019), by making a fundamental change of mindset of focusing on the customers, companies gained significant enhancement on several aspects. Along with operational and IT improvements, companies generate 20 to 30 percent uplift in customer satisfaction, a 10 to 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20 to 50 percent of the cost base addressed in the various journeys.

To overcome these challenges, companies have to understand consumers’ behavior and expectations. Hence, companies should put a bigger concern towards consumers’ buying-cycle from awareness to its advocacy. By implementing the concept of Neuromarketing, stereotypes of the communication matters of the marketing basis will be integrated with taste of individual market itself. The more personalized the promotion, the higher the probability that the advertisement will work. It could be done by using big data to allow the company for this huge aggregation of all consumers personal information that they’ve ever revealed to build a precise representation of who they are, now, more than ever before. Data and insight are not delivered to consumers as a whole but individually by delivering the most value to the customers with a very specific scope based on how they think.

In order to win in today’s marketplace, companies must be customer-centered, to the point that ideally, each individual customer’s values are taken into an account to derive the value that they are truly seeking. In essence, by generating consumer reactions, and treating them not as reactionary receptacles of marketing strategies, but as each their own person with differing individual values. Therefore, reinforcing belief is a very important matter for marketers that influences consumers experience. They must deliver superior value to their target customers traditionally and digitally with knowledge of neuroscience marketing strategies combined. Neuromarketing will surely strengthen customer’s contentment of a product itself.