Immerse in metaverse – The Economic Times

Talk of the metaverse has been ubiquitous over the past several months. In 2021, internet searches for the term increased by 7,200%. Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared his ambition to ‘help bring the metaverse to life’. A month later, Microsoft said that its proposed acquisition of gaming giant Activision provided ‘building blocks for the metaverse’…. In 2021, metaverse-related companies reportedly raised upward of $10 billion, more than twice as much as they did in the previous year….

What, exactly, is the metaverse? Right now, the interested parties cannot agree on any one definition…. We believe that the metaverse is best characterised as an evolution of today’s internet – it is something we are immersed in instead of something we look at. It may realise the promise of vast digital worlds to parallel our physical one. For marketers, the metaverse represents an opportunity to engage consumers in entirely new ways while pushing internal capabilities and brand innovation in new directions.

We do continue to see a healthy amount of scepticism about the metaverse, and companies may wish to exercise caution, since the promise may take some time catching up to the hype. But we believe we’re at the cusp of a fundamental shift in how people use the internet. Marketers would be remiss if they didn’t start exploring what the metaverse can offer. Now is the right time to adopt a test-and-learn mindset, to be open to experiments and to move on quickly from failure and capitalise on success….

From ‘Marketing in the Metaverse: An Opportunity for Innovation and Experimentation’, McKinsey & Co