Brands are entering the metaverse in droves this year there are a lot of new ways to effectively market and reach the core community of NFT lovers. We’ve been working with dozens of brands every week on strategies that are catered to their business for entering the meta economy. This has put us in a unique position to collect data on what is working and more importantly what is NOT working for brands to enter the space.
After meeting with handfuls of large brands and agencies at SXSW 2022 this year, we coined the phrase METAMORPH to represent a new strategy brands are taking to enter web3. The concept behind metamorph for brands is that just because you sell shampoo in the physical world doesn’t mean you need to make virtual shampoo in the metaverse, you can morph your brand into whatever you want for the metaverse. Joining the community to learn the culture and find out what would work best for your brand before releasing anything is the most effective way to enter the metaverse. This is a very smart and active community so 100% of brands need to approach the launch of their virtual goods and services in a new web3 way.
There are many different levels to this but a great example we refer back to regularly is Snoop Dogg’s metamorph approach to web3. Snoop’s team created an alter ego on Twitter called Cozomo de’ Medici to get into NFT collecting, share with the community as others do, grow an audience of NFT degens, join active NFT communities, and most importantly learn about the overall culture. After garnishing over 200,000 followers of die-hard NFT collecting fans his team has consistently and beautifully rolled out powerful metaverse focused NFT projects leveraging that account. The Doggies are his Avatar collection most recently released that was extremely well received by the community because Snoop’s team understood what was important before the launch. The sequence of their Sandbox land experiences with concerts leading to an Avatar release was intentional and well executed.
When our team showcased at SXSW this year there were dozens of well-known brands sharing with us that they had already experimented with the metaverse at multiple levels through similar strategies. The most important component here is to be the first movers to stake a claim on their experiences in the metaverse in preparation for GenZ and GenAlpha’s buying power.
At this point, GenZ and GenAlpha are spending more than 8 hours per day online with friends all over the world. Brands have begun to understand that moving to where the attention is, will determine their success with future generations. As GenZ and GenAlpha enter the workforce and their buying power increases we’ll see a flood of brands entering the metaverse as quickly as possible similar to what happened with social media.
The second example and a different level of a brand using the METAMORPH strategy is GUCCI. They launched Garden Archetypes, an immersive multimedia experience where they teamed up with Roblox (a centralized virtual world) to release Gucci Garden, a unique and fully interactive virtual exhibit. As visitors entered the Gucci Garden, their avatars became neutral mannequins. Wandering through the different rooms, each visitor’s mannequin absorbs elements of the exhibition. With each person experiencing the rooms of the Garden in a different order and retaining fragments of the spaces, they came out at the end of their journey as one-of-a-kind creations.
This level of metamorph as you can tell is much less “trojan horse” compared to the Snoop Dogg approach as it was branded GUCCI upfront, however, this is a dramatically different approach than just making fashionable wearables in the metaverse. Just because GUCCI sells luxury fashion in the physical world doesn’t mean they can’t have dinosaurs in the metaverse. This shows an understanding from GUCCI of who they are trying to connect with, within the virtual world.
There are hundreds of other examples with brands using this approach to enter the metaverse to attract GenZ and GenAlpha effectively. Our goal at SandStorm is to help be the sherpa for brands navigating this new digital society.
We’re able to take a whole new approach through our web3 platform that’s live on Polygon/MATIC (where decentralized virtual worlds are moving) alongside Ethereum to connect brands with hundreds of the best metaverse builders. If self-service isn’t something a brand is interested in we’ve helped many with our “turn-key” into the metaverse service.
If you work at a brand trying to navigate the essential entry into the metaverse contact us here!
