November 15th, 2007
Via Virtual Worlds News, an interesting new report from Gartner claiming that – in 10 years – the “… largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experience associated with them.” This new report doesn’t appear to limit Generation V, which includes a wide range of people involved in the online space, to virtual worlds, but it does focus on the idea that the online creation of identity will become more and more important.
As it continues:
“For Generation V, the virtual environment provides many aspects of a level playing field, where age, gender, class and income of individuals are less important and less rewarded than competence, motivation and effort,” said Adam Sarner, principal analyst at Gartner. “For example, an 11-year old individual can be the leading ‘go to’ person for advice on how to upgrade/hack a digital video recorder (DVR) for more recording space. An unpopular office worker can be a highly revered, accomplished 40th-level half-elf in World of Warcraft. The opportunity for reputation, prestige, influence and personal growth provides a powerful social draw for the masses to spend more time in a virtual world.”
“….While traditional wisdom has focused on customer identification for one-to-one targeted marketing campaigns, cross-selling and so on, the reality of people creating multiple anonymous personas (such as in Second Life or World of Warcraft), blogs, online communities (such as YouTube and Digg), and the sheer power of their influence means that every customer will have multiple online personas driving business relationships with companies,” said Sarner.
“…Companies will need to shift from collecting personal data about individual customers toward collecting more-complete and more-relevant data around online customer behavior and influence on others,” Sarner said. “Companies will need new processes, new skills and a restructuring of how data is collected and used as they shift from demographic to psychographic insight. If companies follow a truly persona-centric approach, they can use the highly relevant information the persona leaves. Although the real person may never be known, far more intimate information of the persona’s actions, personality, lifestyle habits and attitudes can be collected and exploited for business goals.”
The final list of recommendations:
- Companies should organize their products and services around multiple online personas.
- Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
- Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
- Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
- Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from Generation V and its virtual environment.
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