gameshogun™

Here’s an interesting article by Paul Hemp of Harvard Business Review discussing about the booming Avatar-Based Marketing.

Clearly, many of Second Life’s 100,000 or so residents are highly involved with this place. And that makes it potentially a dream marketing venue. Instead of targeting passive eyeballs, marketers here have the opportunity to interact with engaged minds. Commerce is already an integral part of Second Life. Residents spend—in Linden dollars, the local currency, available at in-world ATMs—the equivalent of $5 million a month on resident-to-resident transactions for in-world products and services. Certainly, introducing real-world brands, in some form or another, is a logical next step.

But wait. Whom do your marketing efforts target? The flesh-and-blood Second Life members who gave their credit card numbers to register for the game—or their Second Life avatars residing in the virtual world? Sure, the real-world human controls the real-world wallet. The avatar, though, arguably represents a distinctly different “shadow” consumer, one able to influence its creator’s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own real-world purchases in the virtual world. At the least, it may offer insights into its creator’s hidden tastes.

This is the new marketing world. Enough of the old. Embrace it.

Read the whole article here: Avatar-Based Marketing.