The business of avatars
Avatars are having an increasing impact on our lives. It seems we can hardly go anywhere without being involved with an avatar. When we bought a Wii for Christmas last year the first part of setting up the Wii is to create an avatar (Mii). Now Microsoft is working to expand the Xbox 360 from an audience of shooter fans and hard core games to more casual game play. Perhaps enabling people to build custom avatars will help them feel more comfortable with the technology. Avatars are cropping up with increasing frequency in games, virtual worlds, social networks and other areas of the Web as businesses experiment with them as a tool to drive sales.
“Although there is no exact count of avatars, the industry expects their ranks to explode as the number of participants in 3D virtual worlds is projected to grow nearly fivefold to 33 million by 2013,” according to Parks Associates analyst Michael Cai. “And this doesn’t even take into consideration all the kids and tweens playing in places like Club Penguin and Webkinz or mingling on social networking hybrids like Meez and Gaia Online.”
What are your thoughts? Would you be comfortable interacting with avatars while banking? How should a bank leverage the popularity of avatars to improve the customer experience?
While Microsoft and Nintendo are looking to avatars to help sell more consoles, social networks and Web sites hope avatars will help attract more users, and get users to stay on their sites longer. And more users spending more time on sites could boost advertising revenues and sales of real and virtual goods.
Do avatars benefit “traditional” businesses? How can we leverage the social benefits of attracting new customers, retaining existing customers, and perhaps creating greater levels of trust and literacy with financial matters through avatars?
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January 21st, 2009 at 6:10 am
David, as real and virtual worlds get more and more interconnected, avatars will become part of our lifes for sure. From the perspective of business, I had the opportunity to experiment with a customized implementation of the Sun Wonderland virtual world, and the experience is incredibly realistic and satisfactory as a substitute of face-to-face relationship among people.
Nevertheless, in my opinion the degree of satisfaction in any interaction mostly depends on the degree of emotional involvement with your interlocutor. I mean, when you are doing traditional online banking with those textual and graphic screens, you only expect non-emotional attributes from the interaction, such as simplicity, security, response time and accuracy. But when you are interacting with an avatar, you also expect understanding, kindness, proactivity, empathy… kind of affective engagement, at the end of the day.
Once avatars become able to generate trustworthiness in their interaction with the customers, I’m sure greater levels of trust and literacy with financial matters will come effortlessly.
PS While talking with colleagues from the financial sector, I had to hear somebody comparing avatars with “blow-up dolls”, as fakes of real human interaction. Hopefully our customers’ judgment is different!