Four P’s Remastered
The metaverse is years away. But that doesn’t mean you should wait to figure out your brand’s place in it. To make it manageable follow these four P’s of metaverse marketing: Product, People, Performance and Protection.
Don’t worry, you won’t have to toss out the other marketing P’s you’ve learned over the years. In fact, you definitely need those too. If you don’t know what those are there are way better places to learn about them than here.
Miss parts one and two? Today is the last time you’ll be able to say that.
Six Years
The metaverse is six years from being truly mainstream. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Six years goes fast when it comes to emerging technology.
If you’re wondering where all this certainty about the future is coming from the answer is Gartner. The Gartner Hype Cycle is useful for tracking the tools that are going to make the metaverse possible. In this case we’re interested in foundational technology for the metaverse: web3, NFTs, decentralized identity & generative design AI. These pieces of tech are all on the 2–5 year track in the Hype Cycle. The metaverse itself is “more than 10 years out” by their reasoning. But taken together it is my opinion that a “mature metaverse” is six years out. A mature metaverse is one with ad products to buy, systems to integrate with and most of all a strong creator economy in place. The metaverse in 10-plus years will be well into its mature phase and the opportunity for innovation will be on the downswing.
So with 6 years on the clock, how do you start getting your business ready for the metaverse?
Product
There are myriad ways to get your product into the metaverse. But ultimately it comes down to two ways of looking at it:
Direct Representation and Abstract Representation of the product.
Direct Representation
If you make a real world product you’ve probably figured this out. Real world products — especially clothes, shoes and accessories — are already in the metaverse. It’s not always cool, it doesn’t always make sense, but most real products exist digitally anyway. Cars, toasters, lamps, bookcases; all of these are manufactured using tools that unfurl the complicated matter of matter and render them in reality. So moving them to a digital world means getting the format right and choosing a platform partner.
But before these products throw off their two-dimensional existence for the exciting new three-dimensional ones consider the following:
What purpose does this product serve in a digital world?
My friend Martine Lavoie likes to use a water bottle as example for this problem, and it’s a great one. In the real world a water bottle holds liquid to be consumed by its owner. It keeps you hydrated. But in the digital world we don’t need water. So a direct representation of a water bottle won’t be that interesting. Without a purpose it becomes a cosmetic accessory. Not all bad. A large portion of what made Fortnite successful was understanding the value of cosmetic items in virtual worlds.
In order for this to work we have to give the water bottle a purpose in a digital world. Our water bottle needs to in some way alter the way we experience a digital world.
In the world of Fortnite “being hydrated” might simply mean having a full health for your in-game avatar. So our water bottle could have some interaction with restoring your avatar’s health. A character animation that shows our avatar chugging from the bottle as their health rises could be one form of Direct Representation. Another way could be arranging a sponsorship or creating a mod where health improving items on the map resemble our humble water bottle.
But what if you don’t have a real-world product to begin with. If you’re a bank, insurance company, law firm or consultancy your services have no physical analog in a digital world. Instead you need to think about how your product or service exists through Abstract Representation.
Abstract Representation
Abstract Representation tells people something about the product or service by changing their digital identity or the world in which it exists. It is what you sell as an idea rather than a literal representation of the prduct.
Good news: your ad agency already knows how to think this way. The best agencies in the world have built their whole business on stripping down a product to its base idea and then showing how that idea changes the customer’s life for the better.
Let’s say we’re a big bank known for having locations just about everywhere people go™. The products we offer like loans; savings & chequing accounts; or overdraft protection have no analong outside the real world. Sure, you can use them to buy digital currency that is used in metaverse platforms. But that doesn’t tell us a thing about your bank. It doesn’t say that our services are available everywhere people go™. Instead we need to figure how the promise of being our customer extends into unreal worlds:
How does being our customer add value to the way they experience a digital world?
The answer to this comes from our differentiator: everywhere people go™. Differentiators make brands recognizable in a new context. In this case that new context is 3D worlds.
One way we could accomplish this is to simply extend the interfaces of our services to these new worlds. That would be “everywhere people go™” through Direct Representation.
But another way might be having agents in popular virtual worlds. Today these agents would be creators. In a few years virtual people might be a viable way to do this as well. Agents are exclusively available to customers and teach you the ins-and-outs of the virtual world they’re in.
However, understanding your product in this way means you need to understand your customers first. Without knowing them well it’s hard (impossible?) to figure out if having virtual water bottles on their avatar or being everywhere people go™ is something they care about at all.
People
No metaverse will be successful without people. Lots of people. If you’ve ever played an massively multiplayer online (MMO) game that hasn’t taken off yet you know how hollow digital worlds can feel.
So lets assume that all the metaverse platforms understand this and succeed in getting us together in virtual worlds. Is it the same as when we all joined Twitter in 2006? There are similarities, but old-guard social networks like Twitter had a different purpose in that time. They were almost exclusively about connecting people. In 2022 it’s expected that platforms connect people. So now platforms promise more than connections. Metaverse platforms promise the most. They promise to connect us in natural ways, they promise to let us own our identities and evolve them and most importantly they promise to let us create new things together in digital worlds.
It is this intersection of individuality and togetherness that we need to understand in order to make the metaverse useful to our customers (and therefore to our businesses).
Individuality is a promise of metaverse experiences. This is a direct rip from the world of gaming. Building a “character” to play a game is a concept that goes all the way back to tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. “Character creation” is a common feature of modern games of all types. Some are so intricate they’re almost as interesting as the game itself.
This focus on hyper-individuality is what makes metaverse experiences appealing to creators. In their current world distinctiveness is elusive. It’s elusive because the algorithms that decide what is popular shape how we behave as we seek that popularity. The result is homogeny, and the cycle starts over.
Togetherness is on the other side of the equation. Since a metaverse with no one else in it is purgatory we need to create a lot for people to do.
What people do together in the metaverse matters a lot. The metaverse is real time fun. It’s not leaving a quip for others to laugh at on a wall, or a recorded video showing how to make a perfect Caesar.
While metaverse experiences look a lot like games they aren’t strictly games. Games have competitive objectives. Most metaverse platforms have creative objectives. Minecraft and Roblox have gaming elements in them: bad guys to fight, power ups to collect, but they’re not successful because of this, they’re successful because of what they let you create in them.
Like our Product exercise we can get to the heart of the matter by answering a couple of questions:
How will they express themselves? & What will they do when they’re together?
Luckily we’ve proven to be pretty good at finding ways to express ourselves. Profile pictures, a simple image to show people who you are, carry a tremendous amount of information with them. This isn’t a feature of the platforms, it’s a hack. A sanctioned hack, but a hack nonetheless.
As for what they’ll do together? Well that really depends a lot on the platform, certainly. But people are ingenious. Look no further than the world of memes. Memes are one of the largest (the largest?) collective art project people have ever undertaken. Memes show us that when people get together they can make something clever, entertaining and meaningful. But most importantly memes are a highly efficient way of communicating. They work on any screen and creating them requires just a web browser and they scale to the size of any community.
In the metaverse we should be watching for the equivalent creations that:
- Don’t rely exclusively on language to convey information
- Can be produced and consumed by any participant
- It improves the value of an experience for everyone
Strong hints you’ve found the creative activity people can get behind look like this: It can be understood without much analysis (more than language); anyone can join in and make it (produced by any participant); and it’s entertaining for people to be part of (improves the experience).
Fornite dances fit this model. When you dance in Fortnite you’re communicating without language (1). Today it’s possible to make your own dances, although it’s a little cumbersome (2). And… Well, dances were a real phenomenon for a while (3).
Of course, all of this is for nothing if we don’t know how well it’s working. Certainly we can see people dancing. But are they having fun? This is where Performance comes in.
Performance
Modern digital systems are remarkably quantifiable. Every action we take online can be measured. What’s more is every time we use these measurements to make a decision about what to do next we find even more data to collect. This never ending loop of measurement and new measures is the magic that lets us build on ideas so fast today. We are always only a click or two away from spotting the next big trend.
But the metaverse is a little different. In the metaverse people are acting in real time. Anything “real time” requires heavy duty computing. Sorting, filtering, formatting, aggregation — all of these techniques in data science have to happen in the moment when it’s handled in real time. This is 180º to the asynchronous web where there’s plenty of time to get data ready before it’s displayed as information.
That means the things we can measure in the metaverse are going to be everything we measure today, plus. Data from the asynchronous web will be valuable for setting preferences, determining what worlds we might be interested in exploring or what advertising exists in our view in a virtual world.
The “plus” is what real time opens up. The plus might be adding how we say something to what is being said. It can track what we’re looking at, for how long and where our attention is taken next.
These are all new opportunities to change what we communicate.
If you know that your latest digital twin doodad is more interesting if people see someone else with one first it makes signing on a star creator a lot less risky.
Actionable data in real time leads us to a single question to ask about how our measurement strategy needs to change:
What will you do when you can track behaviour in the moment?
After all we don’t collect data to put it on a shelf and admire it. Our job is to make decisions based on the data. And in a real time world that means making decisions before the data is in. Developers are intimately familiar with this kind of prediction. They make them all the time and they call them conditionals or “if-thens.”
First imagine what might happen (if) and determine the action taken in that circumstance (then).
Thinking this way isn’t new. It’s called “scenario planning” and you can find it in places as broad reaching as the endeavours of a military force or as specific the conditions of your auto-insurance policy. What is important is to understand what you can know, and that’s evolving quickly. The previous Oculus VR headset — Oculus Quest 2 — had four external black and white cameras. The new Oculus Pro has ten sensors.
So, find out what you can know, then think about what you’d do with the outcomes of that knowledge. This is likely a new kind of reporting you’ll need to figure out. This new type of reporting anticipates behaviour instead of exclusively analyzing it. So our understanding of how things are going shifts from hitting numbers (monthly active users, clicks, time spent) to how accurately we figure out what changes behaviour in a way that benefits customers and our brand.
The computational requirements of collecting and processing data like this are enormous. So like all of our planning for the metaverse, we have time to get it right. And that’s good because this capability is a scary one. Big platforms don’t have a great track record in how they’ve used data and it’s harmed people in the real world.
Which brings us to the last P: Protection.
Protection
The process of ensuring our experiences in the metaverse are inclusive, safe and rewarding relies on our understanding of the other three Ps. We need accessible products and services (product) that our customers want to experience (people) and a way to figure out how to improve that experience in the future (performance).
Protection fits in the mix in a few ways. One of them is simply data security. Keeping people’s data is a big responsibility. Even more so when that data is recording what they say and look at. This is a promise of web3: data you own and can take with you easily. The latter part isn’t there yet, but the former is well developed. NFTs are one example, and also a technology that defines the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” on the Hype Cycle.
But the metaverse is a creator’s space. And that means that there will be more value in these worlds as people spend time in them. Where there’s value increased by human interest there’s the potential for fraud, harassment and exploitation.
Fraud is rampant in the nascent web3 world. As this is being written FTX has crumbled and erased a few billion dollars from people’s pockets. There are plenty of crypto heists to link to as well. These have been caused by both technical flaws and human ones. It’s reasonable to think the technical will get sorted out in time. The kind of fraud we (as marketers) should think about is the latter kind. Setting up clear policies around ownership has to be coupled with technical means of enforcing those policies.
Harassment has been a severe issue online since well before the social web. Each iteration of our online existence makes harassment all the more potent. The metaverse is no exception. But, with real-time measurment comes the possibility to provide real-time enforcement of anti-harassment policies. There are rudimentary systems like this in online games today. Meta has committed to offering similar tools in their platform. It is up to us to understand these tools and to work with platform providers to improve them.
Exploitation is not unique to the metaverse, but the metaverse might be a more fertile place for exploitation to flourish. It can flourish because the nature of a metaverse experience is one where you (the user) add value to the world by being in it. Mostly this is from what we create there. This is why the metaverse is a creator’s space. To protect these creations a balance needs to be struck between creators and the platform as to how each benefits from the activities of the other.
Remastered
So. Here comes the metaverse, just six short years away. Like all technology it creates fabulous new opportunities along with scary levels of change and the risk of unforseen consequences.
But, if we spend this time planning for the metaverse we can be ready to operate there as it becomes more and more mainstream.
And it’s not all that scary. A lot of what we’ll do is familiar to us: working closely with the creator community, finding new ideas buried in the data, good old fashioned customer research and content strategy. All of it with new twists: a focus on what creators make instead of who they are; encouraging customers to do things together; knowing those customers more intimately and figuring out how to best make use of what they’ve created for us.
The metaverse is a big topic I couldn’t hope to explore in three articles. And as I was writing this the bottom appeared to be falling out of it.
Personally, I think this tech is too intriguing an idea to die just because an early mover overpromised. Every time we’re given the chance to connect with each other in some fantastic new way — chat rooms, blogs, instant messaging, social websites, social apps — there is an explosion of creativity. The metaverse is proving to be no different so far. The technical hangups always end up solved (6 years! Say it with me!) and the cultural impact is huge. As marketers we have to be close to culture. Culture is where attention is and our jobs are to capture attention.
Thanks for reading.
