Cathy Hackl is Chief Metaverse Officer & Co-founder of Journey, and founder of VerseLuxe. She was a keynote speaker at the Seamless Saudi Arabia show, in Riyadh, in September.
From banking to retail, the need for digital advancement has never been more important. As a visionary Chief Metaverse Officer & Co-founder of Journey, an innovation and design studio, Cathy Hackl spends a large chunk of her time helping the world’s biggest brands brands navigate the sometimes complex landscape of emerging technologies. Strategizing about how best to move forward in a world where virtual environments like Roblox and Fortnite, machine learning and AI are increasingly blurring the lines of human interaction. She is also the founder of the recently-launched VerseLuxe, a tech fashion label designed to bring luxury jewels closer to Web3 than ever before.
In the last 12 months, as brands have started to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual, few have been better positioned to observe this shift to the metaverse and how a host of new possibilities have opened up in the process. It is still early days. But, in many ways the future has never looked so exciting,
“We’re definitely moving away from just the consumption aspect of consumerism,” Hackl says. “It’s no longer about the exchange of money for goods and then we forget about it. Instead, it’s about building the relationship further and I think we’re definitely seeing that across many different companies and brands now.”
Engaging through experience
Source: Walmart
In 2022, for instance, Journey and Walmart came together with a brief to create two immersive experiences so the US retail giant could better engage with its next generation of fans. Walmart Land and Walmart’s Universe of play were launched in the metaverse mega-platform, Roblox with the aim to not just bring its products to life in a virtual world but to create new experiences from fun games to virtual music festivals to cosmetics obstacles courses, among others.
Walmart knew many of its future customers were already spending huge chunks of their leisure time on the platform and so decided it was time to engage in their environment and on their terms. So far, it has worked. Walmart Land’s electric music festival held on Roblox last year had nearly 2 million visits over the course of the three-day virtual concert with many of these customers viewing the brand more favourably as a result.
“You may ask why would Walmart go into Roblox. But they’re going into it because they want to be able to engage with Gen Z and in some other way, Gen Alpha too. They want to be able to engage with these younger generations in places where they live and inhabit,” Hackl says.
“Brands are starting to realise it’s no longer return on investment, it’s return on experience. They are starting to realise it’s about the quality of the experience that brands are giving their fans or the communities.”
Understanding the future
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
For brands, a key ingredient to achieving this is understanding the future. Gen Alpha, with birth dates between 2010 and 2024, is anticipated not only to be the largest generation yet, with roughly 2.5 billion people by next year, but is expected to have the greatest spending power in history. To understand the kind of experiences they are after means not only understanding who this audience is, but also how they are likely to interact with things they love, what their environment is likely to look like and how their behaviour is likely to be distinguished from previous generations.
“What I’ve noticed is that Gen Z tend to be content creators, in the sense that they want to be on TikTok and they post a video. But that content is a one-way street,” Hackl explains.
“I think with Gen Alpha, a lot of them are world builders. They have the tools to go in and engage with their friends in a world they have created. Or create games and go into these games with their friends and be more interactive with them in there.”
She adds: “The big difference with them is they are the first generation born where gaming, AI, streaming, AR, you name it, are ubiquitous. It’s all around them. They’re not going to know a world without Alexa or a world without Chat GPT. They’re not going to know a world without virtual try on for makeup and jewelelry using their phones. So they’re a very different generation.”
A Journey-commissioned study, carried out by Harvard Business Review earlier this year found that while the metaverse and gaming may be the focal point for Gen Alpha members, the social media platforms that have been so popular for their Millennial parents, such as Facebook and Instagram, are on the wane for this cohort. For many, it is because the virtual world simply offers an opportunity for more positive and less exhausting experiences.
The potential of gaming
Photo by Fredrick Tendong on Unsplash
Additionally, it noted that both Gen Alpha and Gen Z invest more of their leisure time per week on video games, compared to the total online population. In fact, the activity has become the top entertainment source for Gen Alpha despite only making the top three for Gen Z, following social networks and streaming.
“I think if people see the numbers, gaming as a sector is worth more than music and Hollywood put together.” Hackl explains.
“Then you start to see, especially in a fintech environment, the amount of payments that are going through that. This is where a lot of this money is flowing because e-commerce in general is changing. We all know how to do physical to physical commerce. You add the digital and then, on top of that, virtual commerce that has been happening in gaming spaces has been massive too.
“Next, comes the virtual to physical and physical to virtual commerce. We even see companies now such as Forever 21 where they launched something virtually, but it was so popular that they then created something physical.”
Entering the workforce
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash
Generation Alpha will begin to enter the workforce in the late 2020s and early 2030s, bringing with them their tech-savvy skills and a drive for inclusiveness and sustainability to the workplace. It makes recruitment an essential part of any long-term metaverse strategy and is why Hackl says companies need to begin by thinking do they engage with certain tools now.
“Just recently, I saw someone doing a Roblox career centre where they are starting to recruit some of these players that are in Roblox through Roblox. And we actually did that, too, at Journey when we were doing the Roblox build for Walmart,” she says.
“We needed more Roblox developers and to find them we actually used our Roblox offices. We used those to meet with our developers, even before we talked on Zoom. So I think you’re going to start to see more of this; gaming spaces and virtual worlds, being used not only for training but also for creating.”
Despite recent headlines that “metaverse-hype” is dying down, research by Bain & Company shows the metaverse could reach up to $900 billion dollars by 2030—though it may remain in the seed stage for at least another five to 10 years. It is because of such hype, however, that Hackl urges caution for business eager are eager to get that next step ahead in the virtual world.
“Just take it slow,” she says. “You really need to think about what you’re doing. Don’t feel the pressure of getting out the PR to say we’re the first ones to do X in the metaverse. And remember not everything has to be a headline. There’s plenty of things that brands or even banks can do to test assumptions in virtual worlds or in Web3 that can be done privately.
“We do a lot of that with some some of our companies. We do it for them and then we bring the learnings to them. This is really important. You don’t want to put something out too quick and get affected if it isn’t ready.”
