8/14/2019 Brands in Second Life | Patrick Collings

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00 Brands & Branding

Patrick Collings

Brands in Second Life

Istarted at the Adidas store, but

no one was there amid the

perfect racks and in-store

displays, I then headed over to

the larger Reebok store. One person

 was there, but they were leaving.

 American Apparel had a nicely laid-

out store with its merchandise well

presented and unobscured, thanks to

the absence of shoppers.

 Where was everyone? These are

global brands with extensive retail

experience and their stores were

empty in prime shopping time. The

consumers were around, they were

 just in home-grown stores buying

brands with names like VektorWear,

Shiny Things and Cytranized Designs.

 And the consumers weren’t walking

the high street of a bricks-and-mortar

city, they were shopping in Second

Life, the digital social networking and

co-creation phenomenon that many 

brands around the world are try ing to

 figure out how to get involved in and

benefit from.

Started in June 2003 by San

Francisco company Linden Labs,

Second Life is the current poster chi ld

 for a digital marketplace that many 

believe will become i ncreasingly 

important for brands. By mid-June

2007 Second Life had over seven

million members, about 90 percent of 

 whom had signed on in the preceding

nine months, and investors that

included eBay founder Pierre Omidyarand Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

It is, however, not all plain sailing

 for Second Life, or to refer to it by its

popular acronym SL. The average

30,000 + people on SL at any one time

(June 2007 average) has put its

infrastructure under pressure with

resultant sluggishness, crashes and

key functions like search often not

 working. Despite these problems,industry insiders remain positive

about the future of SL and

compare its problems to the

teething pains the Internet

experienced in the early 

1990s.

Getting started in SL is

not difficult and involves

downloading a browser-

type interface and then

 following simple instructions

to create a 3D digital

persona, or avatar, that you move

around SL using keyboard and mouse

controls. Communication with other

SL members is currently via text but

 voice communication is coming.

 Although it has the look and feel of 

a video game, SL differs f rom other

online multiplayer games in two keys

areas. Firstly, instead of traveling in a

digital landscape constructed by the

game’s programmers the inhabitants

of SL design and construct their own

 worlds which are connected by a

Star Trek-type teleporting function.

Secondly, inhabitants own the digital

creations they build or acquire and

can sell these to others in SL.

 Transactions within SL are done

using Linden dollars, a vir tual

currency that is purchased with

and convertible into US dollars at a

 fluctuating exchange rate which in

mid-June 2007 saw USD 1 buy 265

Linden dollars. This i n-world trading,

including virtual land rentals paid to

Linden Labs, resulted in a daily flow of 

transactions worth about USD 1.6

million.

SL says about 40,000 individuals are

making a profit doing business on SL

and the most successful handful are

earning in the hundreds of thousands

of US dollars annually. Whilst the

profits may be attract ive for

individuals, they are currently not the

reason that brands are making their

 way into the virtual world.

Creating brand awareness is a

primary objective for brands like

 Adidas, Reebok, American Apparel,

Sony BMG, Toyota, Nike, Reuters,

Coke and Sony Ericsson. But their

 virtual stores are largely empty as SL

inhabitants favour brands created and

sold within SL.

 A 2007 survey by Komjuniti, anagency that develops and manages

brand communities, found that many 

real-world brands were failing in their

SL efforts with 72 percent of 

respondents saying they were

disappointed with the activities of 

global brands in SL. A third of 

respondents were unaware of the

brand’s presence in SL and 42 percent

said it was nothing more than ashort-term trend.

Brands & Branding

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Like many in Second Life, Patrick Collings’s avatar

is an improvement over the real-life version. In his

case, better looking, fitter and a decade younger

Major brands like American Apparel go to great lengths to build

a presence in Second Life, only to find that after an initial interest

their stores are largely empty

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