If you’re wondering what all the hype is around the Metaverse is and you don’t seem to get it, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Instead, you’ll find yourself in the company of 49% of Americans who were recently surveyed & were equally clueless.
Last year, Facebook made headlines when Mark Zuckerberg launched the company to start building his vision of metaverse. Following this move, a host of global known names, from those in fashion to sportswear industry, entered into the Metaverse & unveiled plans on how they plan to grow their brands in this digital world. Last month, JP Morgan Chase became the first bank in the Metaverse as it seeks to capitalize on the $1 trillion market opportunity.
Mark Metaverse
Although Zuckerberg wasn’t the first to coin term “metaverse,” Facebook’s decision to enter largely un-known territory during uncertain times has raised a lot of attention. The world was yet to come to terms with a potentially new COVID variant when Zuckerberg decided to reveal how he saw metaverse.
In his key note speech, while announcing the company’s name change, Zuckerberg said 3D spaces in metaverse will allow people to socialize, learn, play & collaborate in ways, we never seen before. The company unveiled one of its virtual reality worlds to all those who had access to its proprietary headset at the end of the year.
Recently, Zuckerberg added to widened Meta’s task list, when he said that over the next 5 to 10 years, the company would develop immersive virtual environments that allow users to interact with sounds, scents, and even touch in their virtual worlds to interact.
Other tech companies like Microsoft or Baidu in China haven’t been very open about their long-term plans for their versions of metaverse, but they see themselves as part of this new world that is evolving every day.
In their grand plans to build a new digital kingdom vastly different from what we are used to today, are these companies losing sight of who their customers are & what they want?
Alongside the Metaverse, there are terms like NFTs, cryptocurrencies that have popped up and are also included in the Metaverse plans that companies are creating. So one marketing platform, Klaviyo, decided to conduct a survey to see how much the customer really knew about all of this and how interested they were in participating.
Survey results
The survey of 1,000 citizens in the United States, conducted in February this year, found that a whopping 49% of the participants did not know what the Metaverse was.
Interestingly, the survey included the youngest group, the 18 to 24-year-olds, who are otherwise interested in adopting new technologies. However, as the survey found, this age group responded that they were not interested in shopping in the Metaverse, with about 65% of respondents saying that they were simply not interested.
It wasn’t just the metaverse that respondents were against. Similar responses were received regarding NFTs & cryptocurrencies, with nearly 60% saying that they would not invest in an NFT and 30% also strongly avoiding cryptocurrencies.
Even among the other half of respondents who had actually heard of the Metaverse, most were skeptical of how it would continue, with 78% calling it hype.
It’s not just the U.S that isn’t really interested in metaverse. Klaviyo conducted a similar survey in the United Kingdom a month earlier. The responses they received from across the pond were even more astounding. Among 1,000 UK respondents, 58% did not know what Metaverse was about, while approximately 96% of 25 to 54 year olds said they would not shop in Metaverse.
I guess there’s a lot of groundwork to be done in the real world before the Metaverse really becomes into something meaningful.
