Virtual Fashion Technology

What happened? I know that iVillage ran Virtual Fashion Week in Second Life last February designed to coincide with Fashion Week but the overloading of avatars attempting to attend caused extreme “chaos” and ‘delay” as one blogger put it. Currently there are limitations of about 40 avatars per sim for live events in Second Life. I see the iVillage event used 4 sims so that would expand avatar limit to 150-160 for the event.

The in-world show can be viewed here and at the Girls Night Out at the i-village in Second Life site. It looks like they had great plans in the beginning but the limitation of virtual worlds are for major events are still a major obstacle. Some bloggers that attended expressed their frustrations. The concept was really great but it was ahead of it’s time - technology needs to catch up with it. The dilemma is that as the technology advances and the capabilities increase – users need to also upgrade to keep up.  I spoke to some members of the iVillage group to ask if they had any communication from iVillage about events and happenings since the Girls Night Out Show in SL last Feb. No one has heard a thing – including myself. I did teleport over to the i-village Loft on Sheep Island (39,156,25) but it looks very vacant there – the HUD Tour was not working. One of my contacts stated that repeated attempts were made to contact iVillage regarding in-world events but there was no reply. 

iVillage was ahead of their time planning for too large an event in Second Life but they started out with the key to building a successful virtual marketing strategy. They promoted well in the real world, started a group in-world and they created an on-line Girls Night Out blog in the real world – but it seems that they did not follow up. The last entry in the iVillage blog was Feb 2007 and no in-world events that I am aware of occurred since the Girls Night Out show . If I missed something or If anyone knows what is going on there – please let me know.

You can see from reading my previous posts that retailers like H&M and Sears are discovering that the secret to virtual marketing is by first embedding and integrating the brand and/or product into a social networking and/or game virtual environment.  iVillage seems to have had the ball early on but dropped it after experiencing a setback based on large mega in world events that experienced technology constraints and perhaps too large of a learning curve for users new to virtual environments. Maybe they should have shifted their focus to regularly scheduled smaller in-world social events and worked to build on the social connection of the real world blog with lots of interconnectivity to the main iVillage site (especially the avatar related links). There is the “virtual hair stylest at iVillage, that is powered by the Hairstyler.com. iVillage also has the MVM and the Makeover O-Matic: Virtual Makover on their site. The virtual makeover lets the users customize hairstyles, make-up and accessories.

 Makes one wonder if their media strategy and marketing company bit off more then they could chew with this start with a bang end with a fizzle virtual promotion campaign.

Perhaps the article from Communication Overtones titled” How to Successfully Promote Your Company in Second Life,” sums it up well. They concluded that to build a successful brand, companies need to create experiences vs. destination. I will add to that by suggesting that building social communities in controlled self-contained virtual environment like the H&M and Sears marketing strategies are currently doing will enhance and strengthen the brand identity as well as serve to provide a smooth transition (learning curve) for the target market to move seamlessly into a larger virtual environment in the near future.