I’ve had an eye on SecondLife since early spring, trying to look past the hype and forumlate my own views on branded experiences in virtual worlds. How do they relate to innovation and the iterative design process? Virtual communities quickly becoming online destinations of choice for companies looking to test new product concepts and model new brand experiences. From service and retail environments to new product development experiments, SecondLife (recently past the millionth customer mark) is now attracting large, established Fortune 500 brands to dive in and figure it out. BusinessWeek has been beating this drum pretty consistently this year, and has a nice story and visuals on this trend: Breathing SecondLife into Business.
From Toyota to Adidas to Sun Microsystems, adventurous, trend-conscious companies are starting to see the 3D, computer-generated world as a virtual community where they can test-market future product lines or host events to foster brand loyalty and generate buzz among avatars and, more important, their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
Playgrounds for new product prototypes and environments have long been sought after by design practitioners. We involve stakeholders and end-users in our design process, and model experiences and test possible alternatives. It’s exciting to see product and experience designers using SecondLife as a virtual playground for early feedback and low(er) cost experimentation.
High profile moves by companies like Reuters and Starwood Hotels, Toyota and Adidas have taken the plunge. BusinessWeek has been all over the trend, with a cover story and lots of pieces since. In June even the Harvard Business Review makes a case for Avatar Marketing (membership required).
…the author examines early efforts to market real-world products in virtual worlds. He argues that companies need to look quickly beyond the market itself and think about the potential customer, which may be the avatar rather than its creator. Of course, the human behind the avatar controls the money in the real-world wallet. But the avatar, as a distinct creation of the user’s psyche, can influence its creator’s purchasing behavior and even make its own purchases of real-world products in the virtual world, deliverable to the user’s real-world door. At the least, avatars offer a window into people’s hidden preferences and a means for achieving sustained consumer engagement with a brand. The marketing initiatives of the few pathfinding companies working in this area point toward some methods that might be used in the future.
It’s early days for experimentation, but the way you improve an experience is by learning what works (and doesn’t) in tighter, iterative cycles. If they can avoid the technical problems of scaling quickly, making sense of it all is part of the fun. The only way to understand a customer-generated world is to, well, do some customer-generating in it yourself, SecondLife is emerging a viable new frontier for doing so.
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