Product Line Ties in Virtual Worlds
The Second Life business directory lists more than 1,200 presently in Second Life- but what are the real benefits for these businesses? Some research has shown that virtual world users tend to spend less money on real items that are sold in VW’s, and more money on virtual items instead (clothing for avatar, etc.). Interesting…
Many virtual worlds are tied to product lines, for example: BarbieGirls (Mattel), Club Penguin (Disney), and Virtual MTV (MTV)…just to name a few. As an example, vMTV allows the player to visit the Pepsi lounge or decorate their own “crib” or even meet favorite stars… To throw out some numbers, Club Penguin has 28 million users (all mostly under the age of 15)!
So to go further in-depth on this subject let’s examine why progressive companies enter virtual worlds for marketing and branding purposes?
-To gain an understanding of virtual world culture
-Technology
-To establish a ‘virtual’ brand name
-Presence
-Product innovation
-Closely couple market research with customers
-Communicate with decision-makers/ collaboration
Many companies continue to venture into (and out of) Second Life, for example Dell, Unilever, Wells Fargo, Nike, and BMW are all companies that have given Second Life a whirl. Perhaps the more talked about company in the last month or so has been Amazon due to their recent Second Life job fair. A handful of companies are utilizing Second Life for recruitment purposes, Amazon’s recent job fair in Second Life is a prime example of a virtual world business use case success. We are now beginning to see more Fortune 1000’s jumping on the SL bandwagon (along with other virtual world platform providers’ bandwagons). Here’s to the future of virtual world corporate success!
A few months back I touched on specific brand presence in Second Life, click here to review the blog entry.
