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June 2006
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Avatar-Based Marketing | |
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| | If you'd like to hear a Podcast about marketing to avatars, click here and listen to episode 3 of the HBR IdeaCast™. | |
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| | Companies spend large sums
trying to segment, reach, and influence potential customers. They
should think about targeting those customers’ online alter egos, as
well. | |
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| | by Paul Hemp | |
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| | Take a minute—go ahead, don’t be timid—to step into the strange but compelling virtual world of Second Life.
The landscape of brown hills is dotted with often-fantastic
buildings—some homes, some businesses—and a tantalizing array of
information kiosks, drivable vehicles, and fanciful interactive objects
just waiting to be investigated.
Birdsong and a gentle breeze enliven the scene at dawn, and as you
walk by a house later in the day you may hear music emanating from an
open window. When people approach you to chat—their hands typing on an
invisible keyboard to indicate that a line of dialogue will soon appear
on your screen—their movements are slightly awkward. But these folks
aren’t android-like in appearance or in action: Their outfits are
elaborate, and most of their gestures—a nod, a shrug, a beckoning
arm—are quite realistic.
Some things in this virtual world may seem bizarre at first. Many
residents wear sexually provocative clothing, and some inhabit an
animal or other nonhuman body. The truly odd thing about this place,
though? You’re not you. In Second Life, you live in a new body
and take on the identity of your “avatar”—that is, a being you’ve
created as a representation of yourself in this online environment.
Avatars aren’t the only personal creations in Second Life.
Nearly everything in this world—which encompasses 50 virtual square
miles and would take days to walk across, although you can save time by
flying or by instantly teleporting yourself from one place to
another—has been made by Second Life residents. Along with the
thousands of eye-catching structures, physical landmarks, and
interactive objects, these creations include less tangible things:
virtual businesses, interest-based social groups, and scheduled events
that range from dance parties to celebrity book signings to boxing
matches to yard sales.
Clearly, many of Second Life’s 100,000 or so residents are
highly involved with this place. And that makes it potentially a dream
marketing venue. Instead of targeting passive eyeballs, marketers here
have the opportunity to interact with engaged minds. Commerce is
already an integral part of Second Life. Residents spend—in
Linden dollars, the local currency, available at in-world ATMs—the
equivalent of $5 million a month on resident-to-resident transactions
for in-world products and services. Certainly, introducing real-world
brands, in some form or another, is a logical next step.
But wait. Whom do your marketing efforts target? The flesh-and-blood Second Life members who gave their credit card numbers to register for the game—or their Second Life
avatars residing in the virtual world? Sure, the real-world human
controls the real-world wallet. The avatar, though, arguably represents
a distinctly different “shadow” consumer, one able to influence its
creator’s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own
real-world purchases in the virtual world. At the least, it may offer
insights into its creator’s hidden tastes.
Such questions aren’t academic. Second Life is just one of a
growing number of three-dimensional virtual worlds, accessible via the
Internet, in which users, through an avatar, are able to play games or
simply interact socially with thousands of people simultaneously. By
some estimates, more than 10 million people spend $10 to $15 a month to
subscribe to online role-playing environments, with the number of
subscribers doubling every year. Millions more enter free sites, some
of them sponsored by companies as brand-building initiatives. Many
users spend upward of 40 hours a week in these worlds. And as the
technology improves over the next decade, virtual worlds may well
eclipse film, TV, and non–role-playing computer games as a form of
entertainment. That’s because, instead of watching someone else’s story
unfold in front of them on a screen, users in these worlds create and
live out their own stories.
When marketing online, “you want sustained engagement with the
brand rather than just a click-through” to a purchase or product
information, says Bonita Stewart, responsible for interactive marketing
for DaimlerChrysler’s Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge brands. “Avatars create
an opportunity for just this type of engagement.”
Given the potential, marketers need to acquaint themselves with the
phenomenon of avatars and to consider whether it requires a rethinking
of marketing messages and channels. They can draw on the experiences of
the handful of pathfinding companies that have begun to explore this
realm.
What Is an Avatar?
People have long taken on alternative identities, from authors’ sly
noms de plume to CB radio operators’ evocative handles to chat-room
visitors’ sexually suggestive user names. But in the last few years,
technology has expanded the possibilities. Today, a teenager will
communicate in the voice of two personae—one transmitted over cell
phone and the other via instant messaging—to the same friend at the
same time. An unattractive, shy man will transform himself into the
sexiest and most aggressive guy—or, not uncommonly, girl—on the virtual
block. A Web surfer may change her persona every time she enters one of
the hundreds of three-dimensional chat rooms. Like the ancient rite of
the bal masqué, modern technology helps people realize a
deep-seated desire to experience what it would feel like to be someone
else. In the words of a famous New Yorker cartoon showing man’s best friend sitting at a computer screen: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The avatar is the most conspicuous online manifestation of people’s
desire to try out alternative identities or project some private aspect
of themselves. (The word, which originally described the worldly
incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, was popularized in its cybersense
by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 cult novel Snow Crash.) Broadly
defined, “avatar” encompasses not only complex beings created for use
in a shared virtual reality but any visual representation of a user in
an online community. For example, more than 7 million people have
created Yahoo avatars,
simple but personalized cartoon-like characters used as pictorial
signatures in activities ranging from instant messaging to fantasy
sports.
The experience of living through an alternative self is the most
powerful, though, in virtual worlds, sometimes called—take a
breath—massively multiplayer online role-playing games. In these
environments, someone’s avatar, or “av,” can evolve from a being
created using standard character and appearance options initially
offered to new users into a unique and richly developed individual.
Avatars are endowed with mannerisms, skills, and wardrobes that their
users create (employing a variety of software tools), purchase (from
in-world shops), receive as gifts (from other avatars), or earn
(through in-game achievements). Indeed, while avatars’ anonymity is
part of their appeal, many people take considerable pride in their
creations as public expressions of hidden aspects of their identities.
Those who don’t have the time or desire to enhance their avatars on
their own spend a combined total of more than $100 million a year on
Internet auction sites for skills and accessories—digital weapons
earned or crafted by others, for example—that can improve their
avatars’ presence and performance in a particular world.
Movies are even made in these worlds, using computer game technology, a form of filmmaking dubbed “machinima.”
Avatars take on scripted roles, thus creating in these plays within
plays characters that are two steps removed from their real-life
creators. You might call them avatars’ avatars.
The online worlds populated by avatars come in many forms but can
basically be divided into two types. The most popular by far are
combat-focused games, such as EverQuest, Lineage, and World of Warcraft:
The latter alone claims more than 6 million paying subscribers. Other
virtual worlds, even if they include game-like elements, primarily
offer the opportunity for social interaction. In these worlds—places
like Second Life and Entropia Universe, aimed at adults, and the more teen-oriented There, the Sims Online, and Habbo Hotel—users
customize not only themselves but also their environments and
experiences, decorating personal living spaces or running their own
events. The settings are more realistic than those in the typical
sci-fi or fantasy combat game. Though you often need to pay a monthly
subscription to get the full experience—to buy your own land in Second Life, for instance, or to sell virtual items you’ve made in There—the
operators of many of these social virtual worlds recently have allowed
people to join and explore the worlds for free. This approach has
boosted the sites’ membership numbers. Second Life currently
has around 65,000 paying subscribers and another 100,000 nonpaying
members with fewer in-world privileges, according to Linden Lab, the company that developed and runs that world.
In such worlds, people often have more than one avatar. And these
can differ substantially from one another and from the creator’s public
self. Gender switching is common, as is the exaggeration of sexual
characteristics. Some of these worlds have communities of nonhuman
avatars—for example, “furries,” animal-like beings that often reflect
their real-life creators’ strong psychological associations with
certain animal types. One Second Life avatar, a well-muscled
and spiky-haired male named wilde Cunningham, represents a group of
people who are severely physically disabled in real life. And avatars
can take on lives of their own: Because of real-world news reports
about their virtual-world activities as community gadflies or wealthy
entrepreneurs, avatars sometimes become better known than their
creators.
Living in the skin of an avatar—looking out through its eyes and
engaging with other beings, themselves avatars of flesh-and-blood
individuals—can be an intense experience. Though in most worlds avatars
don’t eat, sleep, or use the bathroom, serious relationships are
formed—avatars adopt avatar children, numerous virtual-world
relationships lead to real-world marriages—and land ownership sparks
sometimes nasty disputes over property rights. Put it all together and
you have an avatar that is “not a puppet but a projection” of some
aspect of the creator’s self, says Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of
Linden Lab.
Marketing in Virtual Worlds
The real-world marketing potential of online worlds is suggested by
the active virtual commerce that already takes place within them. In Second Life,
for instance, you find services you might expect—virtual clothing and
furniture design, event planning, real estate brokering. But the
avatar-run businesses also include detective agencies, which keep an
eye on virtual infidelity; a notary public, who guarantees the
legitimacy of avatar contracts (and offers mediation services if
problems arise); and an advertising agency, which designs and places
ads for other avatar-operated businesses. There are in addition the
inevitable sex shops, which sell not only racy garb and paraphernalia
but also computer code that allows two avatars to enter into a
passionate embrace and beyond.
 Selling to Avatars—and to Their Creators
Second Life residents pay for these products and services in
local Linden dollars. Merchants can then exchange them, at fluctuating
rates, for real-world cash on various Internet exchanges. Some avatar
entrepreneurs, most notably fashion designers and land speculators,
have been so successful that their creators have quit real-life jobs to
focus on their virtual-world businesses. Linden Lab says that more than
3,000 people earn real-world money from their Second Life
businesses, averaging $20,000 a year—a number skewed upward by the
handful of residents who generate six-figure incomes in real-world
dollars.
The line between virtual and real worlds is blurring in other ways. In Second Life, perhaps the most technologically advanced of these environments, the BBC recently broadcast a segment of its Newsnight program
from within the world. Internet intellectual property expert Lawrence
Lessig gave a speech to a full house and electronically signed virtual
copies of his latest book. A proliferation of “Impeach Bush” signs—that
were installed by an avatar on tiny plots of land he had purchased,
blocking many people’s views—created an uproar.
Furthermore, many residents import real-world company logos as
props or decorations. Coke machines are common. You can buy a Corona
beer at a Second Life bar while listening to the hum of a neon
Budweiser sign from the wall. Evian was advertised at the concession
stand of a recent U2 tribute concert. An iPod store sells virtual
players loaded with tunes audible when your avatar wears one of the
devices, and a store called Pear sells a laptop that sends e-mails to
the real world and bears a fruit-shaped logo reminiscent of Apple
Computer’s.
The combination of robust virtual-world commerce and the growing
overlap of virtual worlds and the real world suggests opportunities for
creative real-world marketers. So far, there have been few instances of
real-world products being sold in virtual worlds to real-world users
for delivery to their real-world addresses. But there have been some
interesting brand-building experiments. In the Sims Online,
McDonald’s installed virtual fast-food kiosks, complete with automated
employees working at the counter and able to serve up (free) virtual
burgers and fries to residents who made their selections from a
clickable menu. Intel incorporated its logo into the screens of virtual
computers that, when purchased by Sims Online residents (using “simoleans,” the in-world currency), helped them improve their game skills. In the virtual world There,
Levi Strauss promoted a new style of jeans by offering virtual versions
for sale to avatars, pricing them (in “ThereBucks”) at a premium to the
generic virtual jeans that avatars otherwise could purchase. Nike sold
virtual shoes that allowed wearers to run faster than other avatars.
Organizations have also sponsored branded events in virtual worlds.
For example, Kellogg’s sponsored a competition, in the teen-oriented
world of Habbo Hotel, in which residents were asked to decorate
their personal rooms in various Pop-Tart–related themes. (The winner
received a room filled with rare in-game Habbo items, such as a DJ deck
and a beehive-shaped lamp, that couldn’t be purchased by users in the
Habbo furnishings catalog.) In a noncommercial sponsorship, the
American Cancer Society staged its “Relay for Life” event in Second Life.
Resident avatars walked a virtual course, lighted virtual luminaries,
and raised virtual cash, which was converted into more than $5,000 in
real cash and donated to the organization.
There obviously is a real danger that product placement in virtual
worlds will feel to residents like three-dimensional spam. To be
effective, marketing in these worlds needs to be consistent with the
virtual environment and enhance participants’ experience. “You don’t
want to simply shove a billboard in people’s face,” says Betsy Book,
editor of the Virtual Worlds Review
Web site and director of product management for There. “You want a
brand to be integrated into the daily routines of potential customers
so that they can, if they choose, interact with it in a meaningful
way.” In that sense, campaigns like those for Levi’s and Nike
represented successful virtual-world placements, she says. Moreover,
the Nike initiative, by helping in-world wearers to run faster, had the
added benefit of heightening the user’s virtual-world experience.
Companies have also created entirely branded virtual worlds—“adverworlds,” Book calls them. Wells Fargo bank recently launched Stagecoach Island,
which is designed to educate teens about money matters through games
and social activities. The branding is low-key: The Wells Fargo name is
almost absent, appearing most conspicuously at the ATMs where players
take a financial quiz in order to withdraw virtual cash for activities
such as skydiving and paintball games. However, subtle brand building
through education rather than the peddling of financial services is the
intention, says Tim Collins, the bank’s senior vice president for
experience marketing. “An educated consumer is our best customer,” he
says. For that reason, the company may tinker with the ratio between
fun and financial education—“currently about 99 to 1,” jokes Collins—in
the next version of the game. In a similar vein, DaimlerChrysler has a
site for preteens called Mokitown,
a cartoonlike world designed to educate players—called “mokis,” short
for “mobile kids”—about road and traffic safety through a shared social
experience.
Coca-Cola’s Coke Studios
is another teen-oriented world in which nearly everything from the
furniture to the vending machines that dispense miniature Cokes are
branded or bear the company’s red and white colors. Avatars—known as
“v-egos,” which stands for virtual egos—accumulate points (“decibels”)
in public studios through various music-related activities. For
example, you get five decibels when a fellow avatar likes the mix of
music you have selected as a virtual DJ. (You get ten points when you
drink a virtual Coke.) V-egos use these points to buy furniture for
their studios, where they can hold events for avatar friends. “Teens
desire not only to experience things but also to express themselves,”
says Doug Rollins, the Coke brand manager who oversees Coke Studios,
which claims 8 million registered users. These players spend an average
of 40 minutes at the free site when they visit, he says—the kind of
engagement that is invaluable in building a brand.
So far, real-world marketing initiatives in virtual worlds are rare. The customer base is still small—visitors to the Coke Studios
site at a given time typically number only in the hundreds—and
marketers are still unfamiliar with the new medium and skeptical about
what it can offer. Patrice Varni, head of Internet marketing for
Levi’s, says the 2003 campaign in which residents of There
outfitted themselves in the company’s virtual jeans was an interesting
experiment but one she had hoped would yield more data—how many people
were willing to pay extra for Levi’s versus generic jeans, for example,
or what avatars did when they were wearing Levi’s. Technology is
improving, though, and she can envision placements in which users
could, by making an in-world purchase of an appealing style of jeans,
effect a real-world online purchase.
In the meantime, there may be little to lose from experimenting. A company called Massive Incorporated,
which sells real-world advertising in a network of computer games,
recently signed a deal to place ads in the online virtual world Entropia Universe. In Second Life,
where the world is a creation of the users, marketers can simply become
residents and have their avatars try out marketing initiatives for
free—something a number of companies are already quietly doing,
according to David Fleck, vice president for marketing at Linden Lab.
“People think they need to create a partnership with us, but all they
have to do is join, go and buy a chunk of land, and then do what they
want to do,” says Fleck, pointing out that the company’s business model
is based on subscriptions and the sale of land and Linden dollars.
“Making us an intermediary only creates friction in the process.”
Marketing to Avatars
Advertising has always targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that
hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with
the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self. Now
that, in virtual worlds, consumers are taking the initiative and
adopting alter egos that are anything but under wraps, marketers can
segment, reach, and influence them directly. Indeed, it’s important for
companies to think about more than the potentially rich market of the
virtual world and consider the potential customer—the avatar.
Advertising has always
targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that hip, attractive,
incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the
advertised product) from an all-too-normal self.
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For starters, avatars are certainly useful subjects for market
research. “Marketing depends on soliciting people’s dreams,” says Henry
Jenkins, head of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies
program. “And here those dreams are on overt display.” For instance, a
company could track how inhabitants of a virtual world use or otherwise
interact with a particular type of product, noting choices they make
about product features, wardrobe mix, or even virtual vacation
destinations.
It could then use those choices to create profiles of potential
customer segments. For instance, in creating a Yahoo avatar, people
choose from an array of elements, including physical features,
accessories such as pets, and the setting in which the avatar appears.
Some of these elements include branded items: Adidas shoes, say, or a
Jeep Commander parked in the background. While encouraging avatars to
wear real-world products is mainly aimed at enhancing the brand, even
at this rudimentary level one could learn that avatars who choose
golden retrievers as pets prefer Jeep Grand Cherokees over Jeep
Commanders. As the options presumably multiply in the future, and the
avatars become more complex, one could assemble detailed profiles of
those who might be likely buyers of either kind of model.
Avatars might also be enlisted to play a marketing role. They could
use their virtual-world sensibility to design products with real-world
potential. Several Second Life clothing designers have been approached by real-world fashion houses, and at least one business makes real-world versions of furniture based on virtual “furni” designed by Second Life
residents. Avatar brokers could link up real-world companies with
virtual landowners willing to rent space for the companies’ marketing
initiatives. Avatars ultimately could run virtual-world stores selling
real-world products or become what Internet culture blogger Tony Walsh calls “advertars,” paid to publicize, overtly or not, those same products.
But will avatars actually buy real-world products that are marketed
in virtual worlds, in effect purchasing real-world goods for their
creators, just as those creators buy virtual-world paraphernalia for
them? Could an avatar who currently spends Linden dollars to buy a
virtual skirt from another avatar’s designer clothing store in Second Life
be enticed, while visiting an in-world Gap retail outlet, to click on a
cash register and use his or her creator’s credit card to buy a
real-world Gap sweater that would be shipped to the creator’s doorstep?
At the least, avatars are likely to window shop. Michael K. Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies, which runs There,
says that e-commerce sites, while they have reduced retailers’
brick-and-mortar costs, don’t address the inherently social nature of
shopping, especially for women. But in the mall of a virtual world, an
avatar could try on—and try out in front of virtual friends—real-world
clothing brands or styles her creator typically couldn’t afford or
wouldn’t dare to wear. If she got rave reviews from her pals and became
(along with her creator) comfortable with the idea of wearing a
particular outfit, a purchase in the real world might follow. “It
doesn’t cost anything for someone to create an individualized outfit,
even mixing several brands,” says Dave Kopp, head of community
applications at Yahoo and manager of the company’s avatar program. “And
it doesn’t cost anything for companies to supply the products that
become part of this act of self-expression and personal brand
endorsement.”
The amount of marketing and purchasing data that could be mined is
staggering. An avatar’s digital nature means that every one of its
moves—for example, perusing products in a store and discussing them
with a friend—can be tracked and logged in a database. This behavioral
information, organized by individual avatar, aside from being priceless
to marketers in the long term, could be processed immediately. An
avatar clerk might appear from behind the counter and offer to answer
an avatar customer’s questions—questions the clerk would already know
because they would have been gathered and recorded in the database.
Furthermore, the avatar clerk might automatically adjust his or her
behavior to become more appealing to the avatar customer. Research
conducted at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab
has found that users are more strongly influenced by avatars who mimic
their own avatars’ body movements and mirror their own appearance. This
virtual manifestation of an old sales trick makes avatars potentially,
if insidiously, powerful salespeople. Using a simple computer script,
the selling avatar clerk is able to subtly and automatically tailor its
behavior—its gait, the way it turns its head, its facial features—to
the avatar buyer’s, thus making the clerk seem more friendly,
interesting, honest, and persuasive.
Even more astonishing, digital technology allows avatar sellers to
modify their behavior and appearance so that they simultaneously mimic
the different gestures and look of hundreds of avatars in the same
room—at least in the virtual eyes of each of those potential buyers.
“If I want a group of virtual people to buy a product, I can morph my
avatar to subtly act like every one of them,” says Jeremy Bailenson, an
assistant professor of communications at Stanford and the lab director.
So what is an avatar’s perspective on buying real-world goods with real-world currency in virtual worlds? One afternoon in Second Life,
Minxy Moe and her boyfriend Ben Stravinsky sit next to a rushing
waterfall in the yard of their friend LadyLizzie Charming and talk with
a visiting journalist (or rather, his avatar) about commercial
incursions into their world. Minxy and Ben are skeptical about
real-world marketing in Second Life, saying that people
generally like to keep the two worlds separate. LadyLizzie echoes these
sentiments. “I would not be caught dead in real life wearing the
clothes I wear here,” she says, glancing down at her revealing halter
top, scanty shorts—and branded Adidas high-tops, which she purchased in
Second Life.
“Maybe subliminal advertising might work,” muses Minxy.
“It would be a large advertising budget wasted, in my opinion,” says Ben.
LadyLizzie starts to warm to the idea of a Gap outlet in Second Life, before Ben interjects: “Without sounding harsh, clothes from the Gap are so boring,” compared with Second Life attire.
Such anticommercial sentiments among avatars may be on the wane. Wagner James Au, one of a number of “embedded” journalists whose avatars post on the Internet regular dispatches from Second Life, says that, as Second Life
has grown, purists fighting outside commercial influences have lost
some of their clout. Two years ago, he wrote about an island in Second Life
that was purchased by a British marketing company. The next day,
sign-waving protesters picketed the island. Today, “a Starbucks—or
whatever—isn’t likely to generate that kind of acrimony,” he says.
The potential of marketing directly to avatars doesn’t disappear
after they accompany their creators—tucked in their creators’
psyches—back to the real world. A company might, for instance, create a
real-world advertising campaign aimed at a particular avatar
“segment”—wizards, say, or furries. Or you might offer in real-world
stores a distinctive clothing line available only to people whose
avatars had, through achievements in an online world, earned their
creators the right to wear the gear, thus giving people credibility in
the real world based on their avatars’ virtual-world status. Marketers
could thus “tie products to the game without busting the fantasy of the
game itself,” which is always a risk when marketing in virtual worlds,
says Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and the author of the 2005 book Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.
(By contrast, Walt Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom site,
instead of bestowing real-world credibility for what an avatar does
online, grants virtual-world credibility for real-world activities. The
site is designed to encourage visits to the company’s real-world
theme-park attractions. Avatars created at computer terminals in
Disney’s real-world amusement parks get to sport an exclusive “Born in
Park” icon in the Virtual Magic Kingdom, giving them “Main Street cred,” according to the Disney site.)
As the barriers between virtual worlds and real life blur, so do
the barriers between virtual worlds and the rest of cyberspace. New
technology allows a group of avatars, a “Web mob,”
to roam the Internet. Appearing as superimposed images on a Web page,
they can check it out, make purchases if they feel like it, then zoom
off as a group to other Web sites. Instead of having to seek out
avatars in virtual worlds, savvy marketers may instead find ways to
attract avatars to their e-commerce sites.
Real Challenges, Real Risks
This new marketing landscape and audience come with all kinds of pitfalls. There are technology constraints. Stagecoach Island moved from the technology platform on which Second Life is built to the platform underlying Active Worlds, another virtual world. The Second Life platform required too much computer hardware capability of users, according to Collins, the Wells Fargo marketer.
Strong resistance to real-world commercial encroachment still
exists in many virtual worlds, where users primarily seek an escape
from real life. In-world billboards, like those calling for Bush’s
impeachment, are occasionally defaced. And there was a mild though
short-lived protest when MTV recently recruited avatars as models and
sponsored a fashion show in Second Life, which was then aired on the network’s broadband Internet channel, Overdrive.
It’s also crucially important to realize that each virtual world
has a different culture and people come to these worlds for a variety
of reasons, so a single marketing approach won’t work. Marketers should
get to know a world they are thinking about entering. In the vast
expanse of Second Life, there are nooks and crannies that may
be viewed as a bit dicey by mainstream marketers—for instance, an
island populated by Goreans, adherents of a series of fantasy novels by
John Norman in which slavery and male domination of women are themes.
Each virtual world has
a different culture and people come to these worlds for a variety of
reasons, so a single marketing approach won’t work.
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Consumers’ privacy concerns about the detailed tracking of avatar
data pose obvious challenges. So does the attempt to balance viral
brand enhancement—many avatars on teenage sites incorporate real-world
brands into their user names—against the loss of brand control.
Operators of virtual worlds make sporadic attempts to limit the
unauthorized use of real-world brands, but even a company’s intentional
introduction of a brand into a virtual world can be risky: The
McDonald’s kiosks in the Sims Online, while popular, generated sniggering among residents about how fat the patrons would become, says Book, of Virtual Worlds Review.
Clearly, this is virtually unexplored marketing territory. But
conceiving of avatars and other online personae as a new set of
potential customers, one that can be analyzed and segmented, provides a
useful way to think about new marketing opportunities. Indeed, the day
may not be far off when someone in a store—either virtual-world or
real-world—says to a clerk, “Wait a minute. Let me have one of those as
well. After all,” the customer will add, in a near-echo of pregnant
women’s perennial refrain, “I’m buying for two.”
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Reprint Number R0606B |
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Paul Hemp (phemp@hbsp.harvard.edu)
is a senior editor at HBR and the author of “Presenteeism: At Work—But
Out of It” (HBR October 2004) and “My Week as a Room-Service Waiter at
the Ritz” (HBR June 2002). |
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