Marketing on the metaverse: Research opportunities and challenges

Abstract

The metaverse offers marketers the greatest potential to engage with customers and develop competitive advantages on a new medium since the advent of social media. Yet, immense uncertainty exists on what the metaverse is, how it will ultimately develop, and how firms and consumers will use it. This research aims to reduce this uncertainty by offering guidance on metaverse marketing from a firm’s perspective. We first provide background on the metaverse and summarize existing metaverse marketing research. Then, we describe how marketers can use the metaverse to differentiate their firms through the 4 P’s and 5 C’s. Subsequently, we expand on Reibstein and Iyengar’s (2023) seven potential marketing roles for the metaverse by providing additional rationales, potential opportunities, challenges, and future research directions for each role. Finally, we conclude the research by summarizing potential challenges firms face/will face while conducting metaverse marketing.