What We Can Do In Metaverse, Inspired By Alo Sanctuary
On February 10th, Alo Yoga announced that they would collaborate with Roblox and create “Alo Sanctuary,” which is an immersive virtual wellness experience for mindfulness exercises such as yoga and meditation. Besides focusing on our wellness, Alo also introduced several free items such as Alo logo pieces, sweatshirts, hats, etc., that your avatar can unlock after daily tasks on Alo Sanctuary. More interestingly, Alo also brings those virtual experiences into real life. During New York Fashion Week, Alo held an in-person wellness sanctuary at their Spring Studios in NYC.
For the past few months, everyone has been discussing Metaverse. The retailer opening a store at Metaverse is a thing now. Last Halloween, Chipotle hosted a virtual restaurant on Roblox. You can have Chipotle-designed Halloween costumes for your avatar and visit their virtual restaurant. What caught my attention is the first 30,000 customers who enter their virtual restaurant will have a promo code that you can redeem via the Chipotle website or app for a real free burrito!!!
Metaverse is so trendy right now, and everyone wants a piece of the action. However, in my opinion, it is still a long way to achieve Zuckerberg’s final vision of the Metaverse. It needs vast technical improvement and also the change of people’s mindset. MAYBE in the future, Metaverse will become mainstream. Nevertheless, according to a survey conducted by Forrester, most consumers aren’t ready for the Metaverse yet. Therefore, as marketers, we need to design events that touch both the virtual and physical worlds. In this way, on the one hand, we are not running behind the metaverse game and testing customers’ reactions toward this new digital marketing method, and on the other hand, we are still hosting the “classic” campaigns as most of the brands do.
Here are some thoughts about what we can do in Metaverse:
We need to parallel the online experience with the offline experience
That is what Alo and Chipolet did in their former collaboration with Roblox. For Alo, many press articles covered this exciting virtual event when they unveiled Alo Sanctuary. The Alo Sanctuary is kind of like a preheat for their in-person event during New York Fashion Week. What you can experience online can be experienced in person as well. For Chipotle, although you cannot consume burritos in the Metaverse, distributing the free item in the virtual restaurant can drive customers to their physical store and create a conversation around the brand.
Other brands can find inspiration from those two events. For example, you are a luxury high fashion brand, and you are about to hold a pop-up event. You are thinking about how to preheat the event. Should I post on social media or have an announcement on the official website? Well, those options are fine, but using Roblox to create a simulated event isn’t a refreshing and creative way to reveal?
So, first, you can create a virtual store at Roblox that should be as similar and realistic as the actual pop-up store to let customers have a peek at what is about to happen. Then, we can distribute virtual gifts in the pop-up store, and if you can go to the in-person event, you will be able to redeem a physical one. Moreover, if the brand has celebrity endorsement, they can also create their avatar and interact with their customers. Isn’t it fascinating?
Create your virtual store
I think this is an excellent opportunity, especially for the fashion industry. Considering the problems of inventory and space limits of the store, most of the products cannot be displayed. However, if you create a virtual store on Roblox, you can display all the items you want, and your customers can shop in the store all day and try on whatever they like. Furthermore, we need to ensure that most of the products sold virtually can also be purchased offline or shipped to their house (except the online limited edition for avatar). It is about dressing up for the avatar and driving the sales in real life simultaneously. It can become the new way of online shopping. Isn’t it better than just browsing on the internet? You can see the cloth or accessories and try them on in this beautiful virtual store. We can even add the shop assistants’ avatar to solve customers’ questions.
While the idea is terrific, the design is vital to achieving this seamless and immersive online shopping experience. The look of the store and goods have to be as realistic as possible, so it still has a huge technical gap to solve.
Even though I am looking forward to seeing how the metaverse will develop in the future, I think it needs enormous time and effect. Even if it finally succeeds, I still hope I can meet my friends in person, and just let the Metaverse become the place for entertainments.
