Marketing on metaverse : An emerging trend in digital marketing

The contemporary global market has experienced a lot of innovations recently in the context of Digital Market and the business activities therein such as buying, selling, promoting the products etc. The same is manifested in the emergence of virtual worlds where number of users from different places can connect with each other in real time and do their job effectively. The virtual worlds may be described as a persistent online computer-generated environment that facilitates people's interactions, working, playing games, hanging out in a park etc. These virtual worlds are created by using a technology known as virtual reality (VR). Initially, the concept of 'Virtual Reality' (Lanier, 1988) was used by airlines, car manufacturers and military. Later on, this technology was used in movies, computer games also. In the recent past one such virtual world was launched by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and its name is 'Metaverse'. This term was first used by (Stephenson, 1992) in a sci-fi novel Snow Crash which later on influenced The Matrix Series and Ready Player One - a Steven Spielberg film. Metaverse is a much wider conceptualization which not only includes virtual worlds but also mirror world, augmented reality and internet (Smart, Cascio, Paffendorf 2007). The present paper is an effort towards understanding the emergence of Metaverse as a digital platform and its influence on the marketing activities.