Recently rolled out on Roblox, sports company Nike has created a free-to-access digital HQ inspired by its real-life working environments to give its fans a more informative experience and understanding of its operations. This comes as global companies recognise the power and benefit of being more transparent in the digital realm, while giving a new-generation insight into the world of work through platforms that are familiar to them.
Indeed, Nikeland’s wider ambition is to democratise access to the world of sport and turn sport and play into a lifestyle. Through its metaverse setting, Nike shows how game play and experiences can inspire real-life physical activity. Roblox users, for example, can compete in various mini-games within Nikeland that they can also play offline, such as tag, the floor is lava and dodgeball, while their mobile devices can be used as accelerometers within game play to inspire physical movement as they play virtually.
As explored in Feedback Frontiers, two-way conversations and interactions between brands and their customers are helping to inform and improve not just customer service, but also product development and marketing campaigns. For Goat, a retailer of cult fashion, sneakers, jewellery and home furnishings, the creation of a proprietary digital space for Black Friday offered instant insight into which items, design cues or trends are resonating with shoppers.
Called Spaces, Goat encouraged Black Friday shoppers to curate digital moodboards of their favourite or most wanted items on the platform, within three purpose-built virtual realms – a Convenience Store, an Outlandish Garden and a Gothic Cathedral. Based on their curated digital spaces, Goat awarded a number of shoppers with their dream edit or credit to spend on the platform, but the curation provided by its own customers is likely to have been valuable to Goat buyers and merchandisers in understanding the motivations of its audience.
While we have previously profiled the potential of Gather as a virtual workspace, this metaverse is also being employed as a tool for brand education and recruitment. In South Korea, leading multi-brand retailer Lotte Department Store recently opened Lotte Town in Gather as a space to recruit new team members across its fashion, luxury goods and beauty departments.
Beginning with a contactless seminar in Gather to inform recruits about the company, Lotte’s metaverse recruitment drive is echoed by Samsung Electronics, which is hosting job consultation sessions in the metaverse as a conduit to engaging Millennial and Generation Z job-hunters. Other brands, such as Coca-Cola Korea, are using the metaverse for brand education; it recently built an island in Gather to engage people in its plastic recycling efforts.
Bricks-and-mortar store closures are normally forced by falling sales, the need to cut costs or economic impacts such as the global pandemic. For others, they could soon be a response of the environmental impacts of physical store operations, with Israeli company ByondXR positing that metaverse retail could be an eco-solution for conscious retail companies.
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