The future of metaverse adoption: A behavioral reasoning perspective with a text-mining approach

Metaverse is portrayed as the next significant technology innovation with an estimated market opportunity of US $800 billion. Metaverse offers numerous opportunities and an unmatchable user experience, yet its acceptance among the masses is still a long way off. Moreover, within 2 years of its existence and grandiose hype about a huge market potential, the current business sentiments are not so hopeful. Despite the positive and encouraging feedback, the reasons behind the limited success of the metaverse need scientific exploration. This study uses netnography to collect online data from 751 articles (news articles, expert opinions, perspectives, and blogs). Further, we use the text-mining method of structural topic modeling to generate insights from the text data and perform a sentiment analysis. The identified topics are mapped and explained using the behavioral reasoning theory to highlight “reasons for” and “reasons against” metaverse adoption. The study's findings identify flexibility, brand experience, human centricity, and virtual retail experience as enablers of acceptance of the metaverse, while regulatory issues, usage barriers, financial investment, and skepticism act as barriers to adopting the metaverse. Further, social adventure and social influence were identified as enablers categorized under subjective norms. This study contributes to the scarce literature on metaverse adoption and offers actionable insights to marketers to craft marketing strategies to benefit from the metaverse.