Gartner Says Generation V Will Shift Business to Virtual Experience

"In 10 years, the largest influence on all purchases will be the virtual experience associated with them," reports Gartner, Inc. Gartner is famous in the virtual worlds space for making the claim earlier this year that by 2011, 80% of all Internet users will be involved with avatar interaction. Expanding on those ideas, Gartner is putting Generation V at the center of a culture shift. "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."

In this new report, it doesn't sound like Gartner is limiting Generation V, which includes a wide range of people involved in the online space, to virtual worlds. Instead, it's focusing on the idea that the online creation of identity will become more and more important.

"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.

Interestingly, one of the main lessons Gartner says companies need to learn is to "Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated." That certainly adds a sense of reality to the virtual environment, though it also flies in the face of the more common reminder to marketers that it's the person at the keyboard that eventually has to pull out their wallet.  It's not necessarily a contradiction, just a different way of understanding the total person.

"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

Comments

[len]

Nope. VR will be/is important. Does it flatten the opportunities for everyone? In the beginning, yes but only for a short period of pioneering. Then the monied interests enter the field and take the lion's share going forward. See Prok's protests about realtor organizations.

Unless the pioneers get patents and a defensible income, this is a pure bigger fish eating little fish system. The web isn't designed technically nor has it evolved culturally to defend 'the little guy'. The truth is exactly the opposite. It is designed to be an a-lister's culling paradise. It is a true democracy: Only Money Matters.

Same as it ever was.

[Robert Brackenridge]

As the web becomes more and more prevalent as tool to use to research and discover our past engagements, history, and potentially our behavior, the tendency will be to use our personas to act as we desire without the potential repercussions that come with our choices.

Should our choices as children / teenagers persist into the decision making process for college entrance, employment, security rating? Perhaps, but personally I don't believe so...

The internet has developed many uses which follow us over an extended amount of time. Our virtual selves (personas) might be the way we escape this continued persistence and ultimately the preferred way in which we engage with the web.

[len]

Which means the web becomes an ever increasingly irrelevant morass of engagements that provide temporary amusement but no persistent improvements.

Without consequence, there is no true act. See The Masque of the Red Death.

"Her keyser euch hilft nicht das swert
Czeptir vnd crone sint hy nicht wert
Ich habe euch bey der hand genomen
Ir must an meynen reyen komen"