Marketing in the metaverse era: toward an integrative channel approach

The development pace of digital socialization has accelerated drastically in the past decade, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic. Through that continuing digital shift, the idea of the metaverse, a virtual parallel world that can digitally replicate people's lives, is developing fast through Meta's (previously known as Facebook) announcement in October 2021 that it will dedicate sizeable investments in it. While the metaverse provides immense opportunities to brands, the primary concern will be on how integrate it with current media and retail channels, whether they are offline or online. Accordingly, using an exploratory qualitative approach, this study examined the potential strategic channel-based marketing routes that companies would face in the presence of the metaverse. The findings show that the route to market will become much more complex given the metaverse's own platform setup. Strategic multichannel and omnichannel routes are examined through a proposed framework that takes into consideration the expected evolution of the metaverse platform.