Success in the Metaverse?
Last month we noted that Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) has established a new and updated presence in the Metaverse during CES called “My House” where potential customers could create (sort of) their own digital home for “millennials and zoomers”, complete with avatars they designed, and stocked with a wide variety of Samsung products that they can interact with. This new interactive site, which is an upgrade to the “Galaxy House Experience” that Samsung introduced last year, where visitors could interact with some of the company’s smartphones and connect with members of the K-Pop group BTS, gives users the ability to customize their ‘house’ through the same Zepeto (035420.KS) platform. Samsung has indicated that the new iteration has reached a cumulative total of over 4m visitors since its release on January 5.
Samsung "My House" Splash page - Source: Samsung
The “My House” experience starts with the ‘front yard’ where visitors can speak to other visitors or walk to other houses that have been customized (colors, finishes, etc.), albeit with the same layout, where you can walk through the front door and enter the living room, kitchen, laundry room, office, bedroom, or bathroom. Each room has its requisite Samsung appliances that you can pick up, turn on, or see or feel the output, or even play games on the living room TV or office monitor, but surprisingly there is little information about the products, and most offer just short loops of images on the screens or allow your avatar to touch random keys on the game keyboard while the game loops on the TV. There are choices that can be made, such as selecting a particular type of Samsung TV to watch, but it is a far cry from visiting a real Samsung booth at CES (pre-COVID) where product information was first and foremost and booth ‘helpers’ were willing to show you how anything worked and point you toward senior staff if you looked like you had corporate buying power.
As the Zepeto platform is available for smartphones, it is visualized in 2D[1] and is essentially a relatively simple walk-through with a few interactive points, much like a simple game or social site, so calling this the Metaverse is like calling a house cat a ‘wild carnivore’ because it eats meat based processed canned cat food. So we place little credence in this Samsung attempt to step into the bold new world of the Metaverse. If one looks at the evolution of selling on the internet, one of the most innovative advertising tools was the ability to spin an image in any direction to see parts of the item that were not visible in the static image, and most product channels still do not have that capability, with most using multiple clickable image views, so a cartoonish avatar that can hold a descriptionless vacuum cleaner while listening to a radio does little other than act as a curiosity that Samsung marketing feels obligated to present. If Samsun were willing to offer up the real data on site visitors, such as age, lead generation, sale completions, and return visits, it might offer some insight into the characteristics needed to actually sell items in the Metaverse, as opposed to just promoting the idea that the company is a hip and happening Metaverse participant.
[1] We thank The Verge for providing My House screen shots.
As the Zepeto platform is available for smartphones, it is visualized in 2D[1] and is essentially a relatively simple walk-through with a few interactive points, much like a simple game or social site, so calling this the Metaverse is like calling a house cat a ‘wild carnivore’ because it eats meat based processed canned cat food. So we place little credence in this Samsung attempt to step into the bold new world of the Metaverse. If one looks at the evolution of selling on the internet, one of the most innovative advertising tools was the ability to spin an image in any direction to see parts of the item that were not visible in the static image, and most product channels still do not have that capability, with most using multiple clickable image views, so a cartoonish avatar that can hold a descriptionless vacuum cleaner while listening to a radio does little other than act as a curiosity that Samsung marketing feels obligated to present. If Samsun were willing to offer up the real data on site visitors, such as age, lead generation, sale completions, and return visits, it might offer some insight into the characteristics needed to actually sell items in the Metaverse, as opposed to just promoting the idea that the company is a hip and happening Metaverse participant.
[1] We thank The Verge for providing My House screen shots.
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