Navigating the metaverse today: elevating your business beyond simple replication

Technologists and creatives are trying to envision what the metaverse will bring for businesses and consumers – what it could, should, or will be. Despite the differing opinions, one thing we all agree on is that it’s the future. But the question we are often asked at Magnopus is: how can my business successfully enter the metaverse today?

Credit: Magnopus

Our advice? The biggest opportunity for your business strategy right now is to create entirely new virtual expressions of brand and customer experience. 

Many businesses’ first forays into the metaverse have started with spatial and operational replication. They build a literal three dimensional version, or digital twin, of their store on a digital platform like Roblox, for example. Or they duplicate their products and sell them alongside real-world items, attempting to capitalise on NFTs. While it’s a start, it’s not enough. 

Creating experiences in the metaverse requires translation

We all know that when we use an online translator to communicate in another language, it can be inadequate at relaying the intent, meaning, and emotion of what we’re trying to say. Translating businesses into the metaverse is a bit like that. It’s a new interactive language your business should speak. It requires deeper levels of translation to not only support the functional elements of your business, but to express its meaning, values, and culture.

That’s why the metaverse is business as world-building. It’s not about developing literal, one-off virtual spaces, or the digital duplication of products or services. It’s about building experiences that change the way customers understand you, and themselves.

Here are three essential ways to think about translating your business into a world today.

1. Place your products and/or services in their proper context

Even though current development in the metaverse can look similar to the real world, displaying products or providing services inside traditional spaces will become a thing of the past. In the future, contextual translation removes the store or office from the equation, and places your business where it makes the most sense.

For example, trekking gear isn’t meant to be lined up on a sales rack, but worn by someone as they explore the Yukon. Don’t recreate the sales rack, create the trail. Choosing a destination for your next vacation can be a virtual adventure in and of itself. Don’t create lists of add-ons, allow customers to explore Canada before they even step foot off the plane. The promise of the metaverse is being able to create anything, so why just build a store?

Customers will encounter your business where and how it's meant to be experienced, seeing themselves in a completely different context in the process. By trekking across the Yukon, they’re already adventurers. They see themselves not just inside of your business, but inside your world.

Trekking gear isn’t meant to be lined up on a sales rack, but worn by someone as they explore the Yukon. Don’t recreate the sales rack, create the trail. Credit: Overland Yukon

2. Emote your business, literally

Emotional translation focuses on how your business feels. It’s all about vibe, or lifestyle. 

Whether your vision is safe, chaotic, revolutionary, or nostalgic, the metaverse has the potential to actually create feelings through space and interaction design, using many of the same tools that games have developed in the last few decades.

Lana Del Rey recreates a 60’s Americana town to promote her new album. A vacuum brand develops a mindful cleaning experience. A tea company invites you to a virtual cottage where you can center yourself at the end of your day. These translations tap into the experience or vision of the world that your business embodies. 

This type of translation is the most abstract. It necessitates developing virtual experiences that generate identity the same way commercials and traditional brand design have done in the past. Seeing oneself in the role of an adventure, for example, is only half of the equation. Imagine designing an experience that also makes a customer feel competent, fearless, and determined in their quest to trek across the world.

You’re not just building the trail, or environment, in the metaverse. You can give them the feeling of conquering it as well - becoming a part of how customers define themselves.

3. Translate for many, not few

How many times have you tried a new 3D virtual experience and thought, “Is this it?” 

Many of the early experiences built in the metaverse feel empty, or fail to get real traction outside of established platforms because they lack the one thing that makes a world feel alive: other people. While context and emotions can transform us on an individual level, ultimately it’s relationships that define us.

We understand platforms like Fortnite and Roblox as primarily social experiences. They can’t exist without the presence of others, and your brand shouldn’t either. Social experiences are the final piece of creating a world and defining your culture. 

Give your customers a reason to come together and stay together. Whether it’s competition, connection, or collaboration, there are interactions unique to groups that create space. Literally, businesses should consider any virtual space as a social space and seek to develop real-time interaction and presence. 

Figuratively, your business needs to consider how people relate to each other within the context of your brand. If they’re competitive, build competition. If they’re artistic, encourage creative collaboration. Ultimately, you’re responsible for building the world, but your users are responsible for defining it.

Give your customers a reason to come together and stay together. Credit: Magnopus

Start at the beginning 

Ideally, the world you start building encapsulates all three ways of thinking about translation, they are not mutually exclusive. But some brands will naturally gravitate towards some approaches over others. 

Music and entertainment have a more direct line to emotional and social experiences, while products and services might require higher prioritisation of functional and contextual thinking. Either way, if you build with these translations in mind your world will eventually be an indistinguishable component of your business. It will be a part of the cultural milieu of the metaverse. It will be a way of ‘life’. But this won’t happen overnight. Worlds take time. Start here, and remember: don’t replicate. Translate.