McKinsey: 60% of Second Life Users Unaware of Co-Creating with Brands; 60% Interested, Though

In a recently released McKinsey report, on brands' use of open co-creation throughout the Web is hailed as the next wave of innovation. It seems like virtual worlds, with the possibility of collaborative design and emphasis on user-generated content, would be an ideal space to work. Indeed, Dassault Systemes is interested in harnessing the crowd for direct product design, though not necessarily in a virtual world. Part of the issue is that there aren't that many examples in virtual worlds to cite, but there is increasing interest.

Surprisingly (sort of), Second Life is the only world mentioned in the article, even though the article acknowledges that "At present, Second Life has few brands (virtual destinations, within the site, created by companies well known in the offline world), and participants generally don’t know how to interact with them." 

There's light action, but lots of interest: McKinsey found that only 40% of Second Life users are aware of the possibilities of co-creating with brands, but, when informed, 60% are interested. As it is, one in ten users are actively co-creating with brands.

That might in part be due to the environment of Second Life. One draw of the world has always been that users retain ownership of their creations. That's not the case with other brands.

"Research that we and others have conducted on consumers participating in online communities demonstrates that most cocreators recognize that the brand—not they—will own the resulting intellectual property," explains the report. "Why then do they get involved? Rewards and fame were certainly motivators, but participants are largely interested in making a contribution and seeing it become a reality."

There have been plenty of contests centered around content  creation in Second Life. There are usually rewards, though McKinsey says that only 1/3 of Second Life collaborators work for monetary rewards. It seems that, even more important to the brand's success than the effort to publicize the work or reward creators, though, is the quality to begin with.

In the backlash against Second Life, it was popular to point out the empty American Apparel and Reebok stores, but for some, typically unexplored reason, Coca Cola was taking off in Second Life. Likely, it's because the brand opened itself up to the users, not to create future products, but to create virtual experiences.

"An important factor we’ve found in our Second Life study is the extent to which participants are willing to trust brands," explains McKInsey. "In choosing between competing ones, brand affinity is the most important factor for users willing to cocreate, and 40 percent of would-be cocreators will refuse to cocreate with companies they don’t like or trust."

The Coke example is aimed at promotion rather than innvoation, but I think the lesson of openness is still one to take into Second Life efforts. I'd be more interested, though, to see if innovation through cocreation could take off in other, more brand-friendly virtual worlds.

For example, Scion's campaign in There.com, while promotional, revolved around letting users decorating custom Scions to drive as well as the large Scions that had been turned into dance clubs. That's a fairly popular approach for marketing cars in youth-oriented worlds.  Kids love the control that customization affords them. I bet they'd love even more to see the designs re-created in the real world.

 

What are your thoughts? There's lots of talk about virtual worlds eventually being used in the enterprise for internal collaboration and product design. Is it feasible to take that out from behind the firewall? What's the best way to approach virtual worlds users for collaboration?

[Read the full article]

Comments

[nic mitham]

60% of this, 80% of that - yet another 'research' company trying to pull a few headlines with some 'informed' analysis, or maybe it should be called Research Bingo.

'McKinsey found that only 40% of Second Life users are aware of the possibilities of co-creating with brands'.

Hang on a second. Is co-creating with brands a well-known concept in any environment (real or virtual)? What does co-creating with brands actually mean? 40% sounds pretty good to me - but I'd really love to see how McKinsey define this metric.

'As it is, one in ten users are actively co-creating with brands.'. I'd love to see the numbers too. What they probably mean is 1 in 10 residents have visited a branded island. Actually creating something new in conjunction with a brand? Try about 1 in 1000.

'"In choosing between competing ones, brand affinity is the most important factor for users willing to cocreate, and 40 percent of would-be cocreators will refuse to cocreate with companies they don’t like or trust."'

Lucky I'm sitting down when reading that one. Shouldn't it be closer to 100%?!

Here's a headline:

K Zero: 94.567% of traditional research companies and consultancies have no idea about virtual worlds.

Next.

[Tele3dworld]

The rest don't want to know.