Managing the Meta-Verse Brand Experience: A Framework for Consumer Engagement, Digital Ownership, and Community Building in Immersive Environments

Abstract

While the nascent metaverse allows businesses to interact and engage with consumers in a fully immersive and persistent three-dimensional space as opposed to the traditional two-dimensional space, there is currently little guidance on how businesses should approach this unique environment. For this reason, this thesis develops the first strategic framework for managing metaverse brand experiences. In this framework, the three main pillars are defined as non-institutional social community formation, interactive consumer participation, and digitally verified ownership. The emotional imprinting model is constructed to emotionally hold the consumers' attention. To determine which immersive facilitative co-creation activities elicit emotions as compared to traditional media, a behaviour analytics approach is used. The primary data for this quantitative study is collected from the early adopters and users of Decentralized Web (Web3) social platforms such as the Decentralized World (Meta) and Roblox. The transformational properties of blockchain technology and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in providing digitally verified ownership are analyzed, especially regarding users' perceived values towards the brand and their loyalty towards the brand. The study describes ownership as the primary social motivator for the users to govern, sustain, and autonomously form social communities around their brand in the metaverse. The framework allows businesses to fully embrace the metaverse as a space for world-building rather than merely a set of tools for advertising. Most outcomes show that achieving success within the metaverse requires more than the mere mere duplication of assets in the real world, and instead concentrates on the construction of participative, user-created ecosystems with sustainable intrinsic value. This study builds on literature in marketing by combining models of consumer engagement within the real world with those in the virtual world and giving real-world managers useful tools to better manage the distribution of business resources and the capture of business value in virtual spaces.