What Happens When A Car Enters The Metaverse?
To establish any technology, it’s important to build focus and link its use cases with the proper KPIs, emphasising driving long-term value. However, given the evolving nature of technology and user behavior, there has to be a willingness to experiment and a business imperative to drive innovation.
In this context, Metaverse holds a promising position for the transformation of the auto industry. As per Matthew Ball, one of the biggest proponents of Metaverse, it is the fourth wave of networking and computing; and is already here.
How Auto OEMs Blend With the Metaverse
From the consumer’s perspective, the journey of car buying is an aspirational product. It comes with a high cost and low frequency. Here, the purchase journey entails multiple stages, touchpoints, and stakeholders.
From the standpoint of automotive OEMs, it's about rejuvenating this aspiration with a newer approach to marketing and continuous investment in modern technologies. From the introduction of highly advanced safety mechanisms to the unparalleled human-machine interface—the automotive sector, since its inception, has proven to be an early adopter of the technologies of tomorrow.
Discussing futuristic technologies, how can we miss the big picture of the Metaverse? With big automotive brands such as Tesla and Mercedes showing signs of direct-to-customer (DTC), the Metaverse holds the most significant opportunity for the industry. The scope of growth is enormous, and it's time to focus on the actual assets of the auto industry—its customers. The customer experience is the most vital area to invest in and bring a competitive advantage. With Metaverse, customers can visualise, experience, and interact in newer and more effective ways—making the car buying a truly immersive journey and DTC a clear winner. It's a decision to make before it's too late.
Auto-Metaverse: Turning it into a Reality
It's crucial to understand the nuances of brands and consumers. There is a need to address this to enable tech adoption at a mass scale. For automotive OEMs, it demands thinking about their identity and how Metaverse-led content will upscale it. For one, photorealism is a must-have since the realism of graphics directly affects the consumer's perception of the vehicle, and brands cannot afford to compromise here.
Likewise, the aspects of user privacy seek attention and compliance with the evolving landscape of data rights globally. Brands must focus on devising their marketing spend and dedicating a portion to their Metaverse investments. It helps in integrating the brand identity and value proposition into the Metaverse experiences.
With the evolution in consumer behavior, it becomes important to invest in initiatives built upon user insights and take a guided approach toward product and design, enabling the adoption of the Metaverse and increase in user engagement. It is imperative since most virtual world experiences were focused on the gaming community using desktops and game consoles.
In contrast, with the Metaverse adoption, the experiences have to provide a smooth learning curve to the audience and take care of widely used form factors such as smartphones. Failing to do this would result in a flawed investment and loss of opportunity for the brands to turn the Metaverse tide in their favor. Furthermore, the success of the Metaverse would also depend on providing users with a personalised, socialised, and gamified experience.
Present-day customers, especially GenZ, seek a powerful, best-of-industry virtual experience throughout the buying journey and across all touch points. Metaverse brings a new and immersive way of car promotion and sales.
Auto Brands in the Metaverse and the Right Approach
Augmented Reality (AR) in the Metaverse is solving present-day problems, say, whether the car will fit in the parking space and how elevated the vehicle is from the ground. Simultaneously, the immersive 3D assets bring the vehicle's authentic look and feel, and the configurator-led customisation makes user personalisation a reality. While the association with 3D/XR campaigns raise product awareness and builds aspiration.
Our user research data shows consumers are already buying cars online using the Metaverse experiences. The more digital savvy, like the GenZ, are looking for better ways to engage with their choice of brand virtually, like via participating in launch events or purchasing virtual assets in the Metaverse.
The amalgamation of a car and the brand in the Metaverse is limitless. With richer digital ecosystems in the Metaverse, Auto OEMs can start to introduce a more fluid and seamless post-sales experience.
The aspiration with Metaverse revolves around the ability to personalise, socialise, and gamify the overall consumer experience. It can get more immersive by incorporating virtual test drives (VTD) and technological capability to compare multiple vehicles within the virtual showroom in 3D and AR.
Along with solving today’s problems of the industry, Metaverse is also opening new frontiers for automobiles with the advent of virtual assets in the form of NFTs, driving brand loyalty to an all-new level, and presenting a new source of revenue. There are further unexplored possibilities in the form of hardware compatibility of Metaverse experiences with VR headsets, AR lens, haptics, and other wearables.
Wrapping Up!
The recent reports on Metaverse are helping key marketers in the auto industry to assimilate a strong need to emphasize brand awareness, positioning, differentiation, and build consumer loyalty. Major Auto OEMs are willing to adopt Metaverse and plan to dedicate a significant share of their digital investment budgets. Although sales are still the most vital element for any industry but in today’s world, it isn’t the only significant concern, and marketing initiatives and campaigns are among the more adopted use-cases in the metaverse today.
Besides the KPIs, brands should also focus on 3Dfying their products for ready use in the Metaverse, creating experiences that tie with their objectives, integrating them within their offline/online ecosystem to seek maximum benefit, and having the right data intelligence to focus on continuous iterations and improvements.
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