Branding in the Metaverse

The reality has something virtual and the virtuality has something real, the challenge is how could we benefit humanity.

Experiential Design: People don’t consume branding, they participate on it. We need to change our sectorized mindset to understand the consumers, the customers, the gamers, the gen Z, the millennials as what we are: people.

As the responsive human nature, the new branding nature needs to follow the human behaviors in order to understand how to thrill people.

The infinity technology growing in the era where we are living at, prepares us to adapt, faster than ever, to new realities understandings. But never forget: “The only truth is reality”

“The world is so open and embraces so many different types of people. We have in our hands the capabilities to create many possible universes.

Etymology

The “metaverse” concept has its origins in the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash as a conjuction of “metaphor” and “universe.” Various metaverses have been developed for popular use such as virtual world platforms. Some metaverse iterations involve integration between virtual and physical spaces and virtual economies. Demand for increased immersion means metaverse development is often linked to advancing virtual reality technology.

The term has been used as a buzzword to exaggerate development progress of various related technologies and projects for public relations purposes.

Information privacy, user addiction, and user safety are concerns within metaverses, stemming from challenges facing the social media and video game industries as a whole.

The branding after the branding

What we brand, how we brand it, and why we brand it has changed. But branding in the twenty-first century is still about taking ownership, and not just for property and products. It’s about owning what your company values and represents, owning up to your shortcomings, and earning customer trust and loyalty through your words, your actions, and your stories.

These days, consumers have more information and more choices than ever. Unless companies can offer far superior products or far lower prices than the competition, it’s hard to stand out in the crowded marketplace. Success is no longer determined by who has the biggest advertising budget or the most recognizable logo. It’s determined by who makes the greatest emotional connections.

As marketing leaders continue to wrap their heads around how branding works in the digital age, many brands are in trouble. But it’s not the first time. More than once, experts have declared branding dead. Still, like superheroes and soap opera villains, it never stays dead for long. If anything, branding might be more important today than ever. That’s what we called the Post-Branding.

A couple of centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, another type of branding was born-mass branding-this time to solve a new business challenge. Consumers were accustomed to buying local products from local merchants. Generic products created en masse didn’t have the same appeal. So factories borrowed a tactic from winemakers and began branding logos onto the barrels used to transport their goods. Soon, they also began marking individual products, giving birth to such popular American brands as Campbell’s Soup, Coca-Cola, Juicy Fruit, and Aunt Jemima.

Try to imagine the Metaverse as a white canvas, We could imagine an exponential curve of many metaverses possible. Now we could imagine a virtual decentralized worlds with “N” possibilities to generate never ending experiences. The quality of this experiences depends on the creative and the design knowledge.

All this new paradigms coming from the VR, web3.0, blockchain technology and new technology experiences forces us, as a designers, to think more than ever outside the box, I.e.: creating the “liquid brand concept”, new execution techniques, gamification, etc.

The devaluation of branding as an engine for the evolution of brand experiences. We live in the era of the selfie, of individualism, of hyper-diversity and the breakdown of the collectivist concept. Created formulas or fashion trends are the main discipline vice but on the other hand an uncomfortable indicator for the obligation to think of new possible scenarios.

If design has the power to be the creative vehicle of the new, in this scenario of infinite possible worlds, the new door that opens is the opportunity and responsibility of designers to think of new worlds, where brands and their experiences can be experienced in infinite ways.

The economic decentralization achieved by cryptography is raising in people many questions of a disruptive and plural nature. But no longer from an established order of power, but from the most democratic and open power. Cryptocurrencies and the advent of blockchain as a logic for the disappearance of intermediaries ask us to create more genuine and true relationships between people and brands. In this conversation there are those who will be able to understand the change and adapt to survive and the new ones that appear from this meta-generation of new paradigms. Those that fail to understand the web3.0, metaverse, and blockchain phenomenon will disappear, will be extinct, as it has always been, but faster and faster, and those that can understand that the gap between the physical and virtual worlds will increasingly survive. more diffuse, until both realities converge in a new paradigm of seeing the universe.

With the arrival of Helvetica we could know the death of typography.

We have already experienced the death of graphic design, a matter of project thinking that, unlike other designs, operates directly on the final piece and does so in real time.

We are facing the definition of a new design, a new communication, and therefore a new dialectic, which due to our nature as cultural operators, we have the power to design as we please.

Already the logo, the graphic systems, the typographic notions per se, are nothing, this is the most palpable moment of the concepts that the avant-garde left us. Here more than ever we must cling to the idea that the whole is more than the sum of the parts, there is no ceiling, the limit is no longer even the sky.

But as our discipline is constantly seeking a balance between thinking and doing, the answer to all these questions is very simple, we are only going to know what the future of the metaverse and our realities is by critically intervening against them.

The bubble

We are facing a boom moment, the so-called bubble. Just as at the time were the companies that created personal computers, or the dot com frenzy, all those experiments and opportunism were dying and the sifting of time kept the protagonists more solid and genuine. Something similar happens in the case of metaverses, virtual economies and NFTs. What appears and pollutes the environment has an effervescent and ephemeral smell, therefore ugly and often meaningless. There is a strong link with video games and that will begin to fade as long as metaverses are not only designed for the niche of gamers.

Brand as Nike, adidas, Gucci, and more popular ones. Also influential artists as Snoop Dog, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande has their space in the Metaverse as performers.

In short, as designers and communicators we have the power to think of these new worlds in such a way that they not only respond to the demands of the moment, but also that our approach generates a new paradigm. Not long ago there weren’t even disciplines such as UXUI and today they are ubiquitous in LinkedIn profiles. We don’t know for sure if LinkedIn will even exist in the future, but we certainly need to be prepared and aware of this paradigm shift and approach it critically.