Part 4: Avatars for Retail Marketing? Help Me Find More…

Previous postings have focused on avatars being used to:

•  visualize the fashion product itself on a 360 degree rotation as with the 360 promo product.

• cater to the mass customization trend by enabling individual customer fashion garment fitting using MVM.

• “push” market new products and services as with the MVM i-mail product.

• create social and game communities that directly connect to the online retail products as with Sears e-Mes.

• initiate retail/game brand merging to create a retail familiarity and brand identification for the target market as with H&M and the Sims.

• market fashion products simultaneously in the global virtual world and in the real world as the House of Nyla is currently doing.
   

This article titled, “Avatars Give Retail Websites That Important “Personal” Touch,” by Associate Marketing Professor Julie Baker is interesting. She states that the results of research concludes that “avatars to be potentially powerful marketing tools” for retailers and I tend to strongly agree with her. Can you help me find more examples of avatars that are directly being used to market products?

This example is from a company called Gizmoz has an interesting use of personalized avatars. Did anyone watch the 2007 MTV VMA awards 9/9/07? In addition to the Brittney meltdown they played a commercial ‘AVATARSMENT’ sponsored by Taco Bell. It represents a partnership between a company called Gizmoz, MTV and TacoBell®.

 
This note is from the Taco Bell® site:“Taco Bell® has chosen three lucky fans to star as virtual actors in an ad for Fourthmeal. The winners were chosen as part of Taco Bell’s TV Me! contest, in partnership with Gizmoz and MTV. In less than two weeks, consumers created more than 17,000 Gizmoz clips, which were viewed more than 920,000 times.”Here is a link to the final commercial ‘AVATARSMENT’ that was created from the winning entries.