Paul Hemp

Take a minute—go ahead, don’t be timid—to step into the strange but compelling virtual world of Second Life. The landscape of brown hills is dotted with often-fantastic buildings—some homes, some businesses—and a tantalizing array of information kiosks, drivable vehicles, and fanciful interactive objects just waiting to be investigated.

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Reprint: R0606B
Advertising has always targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self. Now, in cyberspace, consumers are taking the initiative and adopting alter egos that are anything but under wraps. These online personae, called avatars, range from simple but personalized cartoonlike characters used as pictorial signatures in instant messaging to fully developed characters in virtual worlds. And they represent a huge population of &#8220;shadow&#8221; customers who can be analyzed, segmented, and targeted.
The experience of living through another self is most powerful in so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, which enable thousands of people to interact simultaneously within the same three-dimensional virtual world. In such settings, participants effectively become the avatars they&#8217;ve created, looking out through their eyes and engaging with other such beings.
In this article, which expands upon an item in &#8220;The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2006&#8221; (HBR February 2006), the author examines early efforts to market real-world products in virtual worlds. He argues that companies need to quickly look 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&#8217;s psyche, can influence its creator&#8217;s purchasing behavior and even make its own purchases of real-world products in the virtual world, deliverable to the user&#8217;s real-world door. At the least, avatars offer a window into people&#8217;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.

Avatar-Based Marketing

Reprint: R0606B Advertising has always targeted a powerful consumer alter ego: that hip, attractive, incredibly popular person just waiting to emerge (with the help of the advertised product) from an all-too-normal self. Now, in cyberspace, consumers are taking the initiative and adopting alter egos that are anything but under wraps. These online personae, called avatars, range from simple but personalized cartoonlike characters used as pictorial signatures in instant messaging to fully developed characters in virtual worlds. And they represent a huge population of “shadow” customers who can be analyzed, segmented, and targeted. The experience of living through another self is most powerful in so-called massively multiplayer online role-playing games, which enable thousands of people to interact simultaneously within the same three-dimensional virtual world. In such settings, participants effectively become the avatars they’ve created, looking out through their eyes and engaging with other such beings. In this article, which expands upon an item in “The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas for 2006” (HBR February 2006), the author examines early efforts to market real-world products in virtual worlds. He argues that companies need to quickly look 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.

Avatar-Based Marketing

Summary.

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